The Ballad in American Popular Music

The Ballad in American Popular Music PDF Author: David Metzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509746
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
While ballads have been a cornerstone of popular music for decades, this is the first book to explore the history and appeal of these treasured songs. David Metzer investigates how and why the styles of ballads have changed over a period of more than seventy years, offering a definition of the genre and discussing the influences of celebrated performers including Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston. The emotional power of the ballad is strongly linked to the popular mood of the time, and consequently songs can tell us much about how events and emotions were felt and understood in wider culture at specific moments of recent American history. Tracing both the emotional and stylistic developments of the genre from the 1950s to the present day, this lively and engaging volume is as much a musical history as it is a history of emotional life in America.

The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950

The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950 PDF Author: Allen Forte
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691043999
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz. Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.

The Ballad in American Popular Music

The Ballad in American Popular Music PDF Author: David Metzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509746
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
While ballads have been a cornerstone of popular music for decades, this is the first book to explore the history and appeal of these treasured songs. David Metzer investigates how and why the styles of ballads have changed over a period of more than seventy years, offering a definition of the genre and discussing the influences of celebrated performers including Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston. The emotional power of the ballad is strongly linked to the popular mood of the time, and consequently songs can tell us much about how events and emotions were felt and understood in wider culture at specific moments of recent American history. Tracing both the emotional and stylistic developments of the genre from the 1950s to the present day, this lively and engaging volume is as much a musical history as it is a history of emotional life in America.

The Popular Ballad

The Popular Ballad PDF Author: Francis Barton Gummere
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballads
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Book of Old English Ballads

A Book of Old English Ballads PDF Author: George Wharton Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballads
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Ballad and Oral Literature

The Ballad and Oral Literature PDF Author: Joseph Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674060456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Francis James Child, compiler and editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, established the scholarly study of folk ballads in the English-speaking world. His successors at Harvard University, notably George Lyman Kittredge, Milman Parry, and Albert B. Lord, discovered new ways of relating ideas about sung narrative to the study of epic poetry and what has come to be called - oral literature. In this volume, 16 scholars from Europe and the United States offer original essays in the spirit of these pioneers. The topics of their studies include well-known Child ballads in their British and American forms; aspects of the oral literatures of France, Ireland, Scandinavia, medieval England, ancient Greece, and modern Egypt; and recent literary ballads and popular songs. Many of the essays evince a concern with the theoretical underpinnings of the study of folklore and literature, orality and literacy; and as a whole the volume re-establishes the European ballad in the wider context of oral literature. Among the contributors are Albert B. Lord, Bengt R. Jonsson, Gregory Nagy, David Buchan, Vesteinn Olason, and Karl Reichl.

The Dramatic Element in the Popular Ballad

The Dramatic Element in the Popular Ballad PDF Author: George Morey Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballads
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Ballad Book

The Ballad Book PDF Author: MacEdward Leach
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballads
Languages : en
Pages : 842

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads. (Abridgement)

The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads. (Abridgement) PDF Author: Bertrand Harris Bronson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in ten parts from 1882 to 1898, contained the texts and variants of 305 extant themes written down between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unsurpassed in its presentation of texts, this exhaustive collection devoted little attention to the ballad music, a want that was filled by Bertrand Harris Bronson in his four volume Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. The present book is an abridged, one-volume edition of that work, setting forth music and text for proven examples of oral tradition, with a new comprehensive introduction. Its convenient format makes readily available to students and scholars the materials for a study of the Child ballads as they have been preserved in the British-American singing tradition. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The English Traditional Ballad

The English Traditional Ballad PDF Author: David Atkinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351544810
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ballads are a fascinating subject of study not least because of their endless variety. It is quite remarkable that ballads taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time and by hundreds of kilometres in distance, should be both different and yet recognizably the same. In The English Traditional Ballad, David Atkinson examines the ways in which the body of ballads known in England make reference both to ballads from elsewhere and to other English folk songs. The book outlines current theoretical directions in ballad scholarship: structuralism, traditional referentiality, genre and context, print and oral transmission, and the theory of tradition and revival. These are combined to offer readers a method of approaching the central issue in ballad studies - the creation of meaning(s) out of ballad texts. Atkinson focuses on some of the most interesting problems in ballad studies: the 'wit-combat' in versions of The Unquiet Grave; variable perspectives in comic ballads about marriage; incest as a ballad theme; problems of feminine motivation in ballads like The Outlandish Knight and The Broomfield Hill; murder ballads and murder in other instances of early popular literature. Through discussion of these issues and themes in ballad texts, the book outlines a way of tracing tradition(s) in English balladry, while recognizing that ballad tradition is far from being simply chronological and linear.

Child's Unfinished Masterpiece

Child's Unfinished Masterpiece PDF Author: Mary Ellen Brown
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252035941
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
The premier scholar of the English-language traditional or popular ballad, Francis James Child spent decades working on his widely read and performed collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. In this first single author monograph of Child's life and work, Mary Ellen Brown analyzes Child's editorial methods, his decisions about which ballads to include, and his relationships with colleagues at Harvard and abroad. Brown draws on his extensive correspondence with collaborators to trace the production of his monumental work from conception and selection through organization and collation of the ballads. Child's Unfinished Masterpiece shows readers what was at stake in Child's search for original manuscript materials housed at libraries and estates far afield and his desire to uncover unedited versions of previous editors' texts. In analyzing Child's letters, Brown also delves into his important network of collaborators, scholars, and friends such as William Macmath, Sven Grundtvig, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, who influenced the organization and content of his work. Readers learn about the questions Child faced as an editor: whether the materials he gathered were authentic, whether a piece was more ballad or a song, or whether the text was sufficiently old or traditional. In showing Child's struggles with content and organization for The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Brown notes the difficulty in defining the ballad genre while also showing that a clear definition is not a fatal flaw of the volume or to scholars' continued study of it.