Roots Music

Mark F. DeWitt was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2010 and is the inaugural holder of the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music. Prior to that, he was an independent scholar and won the Society for Ethnomusicology's 2004 Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize for "innovative methods in the study of musical instruments", specifically for an article on the Cajun accordion. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley and has also taught at Ohio State University.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Roots, Deconstructed: The popular marketing of 'old ballads': the ballad revival and 18th-century antiquarianism reconsidered, Dianne Dugaw; Another history of bluegrass: the segregation of popular music in the United States, 1820-1900, Allen Farmelo; Analogies and differences in African-American musical cultures across the hemisphere: interpretive models and research strategies, Gerhard Kubik; Love and theft: the racial unconscious of blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott; 'That wild Mercury sound': Bob Dylan and the illusion of American culture, Barry Shank. Part II Roots, Experienced: Zydeco/zarico: beans, blues and beyond, Barry Jean Ancelet; Sounding out the city: music and the sensuous production of place, Sara Cohen; Techniques of blues composition among Black folksingers, David Evans; Changing contexts for traditional dance music in Ireland: the rise of group performance practice, Hazel Fairbairn; 'A special kind of courtesy': action at a bluegrass festival jam session, Michelle Kisliuk; Composition, authorship, and ownership in flamenco, past and present, Peter Manuel; 'Funky drummer': New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music, Alex Stewart; Afro-American gospel music: a crystallization of the Black aesthetic, Pearl Williams-Jones; The significance of the relationship between Afro-American music and West African music, Olly Wilson. Part III Offshoots: Metaphors of power, metaphors of truth: the politics of music professionalism in Bulgarian folk orchestras, Donna A. Buchanan; Native American contemporary music: the women, Beverley Diamond; The jukebox of history: narratives of loss and desire in the discourse of country music, Aaron A. Fox; Searching for rockordion: the changing image of the accordion in America, Marion S. Jacobson; From ranchero to jaiton: ethnicity and class in Texas-Mexican music (two styles in the form of a pair), Manuel Peña; Encounter with 'the others from within': t