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Earl Eugene Scruggs (1924-2012) came from the hills of North Carolina and learned the banjo from the days he was too small to hold it properly. While still a schoolboy in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, he developed the high-powered three-finger picking method that both him and the banjo famous. At age 21, he joined the founder of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe, on the Grand Ole Opry, completing a sound that Monroe had worked to conceive. Leaving Monroe in 1948, Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt started their own group and made recordings including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” The lightning-fast banjo instrumental cut a swath through American music, inspiring countless pickers and becoming the “voice” of the business-disrupting 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. During a long career in music, Scruggs had many famous friends and collaborators. His influence also meant that his Gibson Granada banjo became an icon of American music

Well before the success of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, female artists were integral to the commercial expansion and aural reception of country music. Women in early country music took on and redefined the theatrical and musical roles of the hillbilly maiden, the unruly Okie, the singing cowgirl, and the honky-tonk angel in live performance, on radio, in film, and in the recording studio. This book accounts for the vibrant presence of female country artists through an interdisciplinary focus on performance and vocal expression in relation to the cultural currents of the 1930s and 1950s. Across a variety of media, women’s country music engendered new ways of making sense of public and private spaces (such as the home, the dance hall, and the honky-tonk) that were integral to the real and imagined lives of working-class women striving for upward social mobility and/or resisting the rigidity of middle-class codes of behavior. Connecting the female singing voice to the theatrics of the popular stage and to the musical practices of specific country styles, this study shows how women in country music wielded a range of performative devices in order to work within and against social and commercial expectations.

The popularity and profile of African dance have exploded across the African diaspora in the last fifty years. Hot Feet and Social Change presents traditionalists, neo-traditionalists, and contemporary artists, teachers, and scholars telling some of the thousands of stories lived and learned by people in the field. Concentrating on eight major cities in the United States, the essays explode myths about African dance while demonstrating its power to awaken identity, self-worth, and community respect. These voices of experience share personal accounts of living African traditions, their first encounters with and ultimate embrace of dance, and what teaching African-based dance have meant to them and their communities. Throughout, the editors alert readers to established and ongoing research, and provide links to critical contributions by African and Caribbean dance experts.Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles “Chuck” Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh

For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as practitioners sing about what they believe and identify where they stand in relation to cultural and religious outsiders. This book explores these ritual functions as they are fulfilled within Jamaican church services and concerts. It highlights the ways in which Pentecostals cultivate feelings of collective distinctiveness by rendering gospel music with an island flavor and by patrolling stylistic boundaries between a holy “home” and a profane “world.” This dichotomy is destabilized through the transnational flow and appropriation of popular culture and “American” media. What emerges are the strategies of musical worship through which Pentecostals embody their religion and seek spiritual transcendence while navigating the crossroads of local and global practice. Pentecostals describe themselves as “in the world, but not of the world,” meaning that while they live and work in the broader society, they strive to be “sanctified” from it by upholding a distinct moral code. This narrative of worldly renunciation prompts believers to abandon prior habits of conduct while embracing newer, localized identities as children of God. This book uncovers how gospel music, as a dynamic cultural practice, complicates these theological affirmations and reveals the shifting foundations of Pentecostal identity in Jamaica and its diaspora.

At the heart of this study is a musical practice that occupies a significant place in the contemporary public soundscape of Turkey: the art of playing the ney. Intimately connected with Sufism in both the Ottoman Empire and, for better or worse, in modern secular Turkey, the ney has been a popular instrument throughout the Middle East and North Africa. After enduring a checkered social life during the Turkish Republic’s modernizing reforms, today in a more Islam-friendly socio-political environment the ney is flourishing. Based on extensive field research in Istanbul and an apprentice-style method of inquiry, the book documents the lifetime of preparation required to become an expert player of the ney (neyzen). It examines in particular the transformative power of this Islamic art pedagogy to cultivate new artistic and ethical perceptions in learners. Crafting oneself as a neyzen transcends ‘mere’ musical technique in profound ways, as it also involves developing a certain way of living. Exploring firsthand the practical process of musical teaching and learning, together with their ethical scaffolding, the book has theoretical implications for scholars studying many other forms of apprentice-style learning. It also helps redress the underdeveloped understandings and often-polemical claims made in both the media and by Islamophobic discourse concerning processes by which Muslims develop a religious and moral sense.