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Russian culture is rich is style and variety, reflecting their love of education, arts and humanities. Russians prize success in closely each field of endeavor and intellectual or originative attainments rank equivalent to athletic, economic and political achievements.
In a country where an approximated 4 of 10 people have university degrees, it’s no surprise that chess is a viewer sport or that the country has produced a heap of world champions in recent decades. Reading ranks amidst the most standard pastimes, and why not, when Dostoyevski is a national hero.
Tchaikovsky’s ballets, Prokofiev’s symphonies, Pasternak’s poetry, Chekov’s plays, Chagall’s paintings are just a few of the most widely known and esteemed names in their arts. Russians of each class speak of operas and art galleries as without apparent effort as most Americans speak of last weekend’s scorebox and with just as much enthusiasm.
The vastness of the Russian Federation means that it is home to a great deal of ethnic groups, numerous of which have contributed to the assortment and designs of Russian clothing. Regional attire styles are beautiful, as well as convenient, as they were designed with practicality as well as beauty in mind.
Perhaps the premier folk art of the country, embroidery and woven patterns reflecting their place of origin. Colorful skirts and shawls spotlight women’s clothing, while the simple side-button men’s shirt with belted waist is a world-renowned Russian icon.
Adding a sample of Russian culture or dress to your home will make it sure that you don’t get tagged as a “nekulturney” or “uncultured person”, which, in Russia, is as bad an insult as you are likely to hear.
Romancing Folk American Cultural Studies
In American music, the notion of “roots” has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has oftentimes been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America’s musical past have vied for influence over the public imagination in this century.
Filene builds his story around a arousing and attention holding group of characters—folklorists, record company executives, producers, radio programmers, and publicists—who acted as middlemen among folk and ordinary culture. These cultural brokers “discovered” folk musicians, recorded them, and promoted them. In the process, Filene argues, they shaped mainstream audiences’ understanding of what was “authentic” roots music.
Filene moves beyond the popular boundaries of folk music to consider a wide range of performers who drew on or were drawn into the canon of American roots music—from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Challenging established accounts that would confine folk music revivalism to the 1930s and 1960s, he argues rather that the desire to preserve and popularize America’s musical inheritance is a powerful current that has run all around this century’s culture and proceeds to flow today.
From Library JournalFor the introductory half of this country!s existence, our folk song inheritance could be traced directly to British peasant culture. Early in the 20th century, musicologists started out taking note of such without doubt or question American musical genres as the Negro spiritual and the cowboy song. When recording became ordinary in the 1920s, these two styles, now known as race and hillbilly music, traditionalisti themselves as breathtakingly profitable forms of musical expression. In the early 1930s John Lomax, whose 1910 Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads was a folklorist!s staple, traveled more than 30,000 miles with a 350 Dictaphone built into the backseat of his car to record our indigenous music. These recordings featured the likes of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and Woody Guthrie and laid the groundwork for each succeeding musical generation. Here, Filene tells the story of the musicologists who preserved our indigenous music and the producers, radio programmers, and publicists who made it available to mainstream audiences. A public historian at the Minnesota Historical Society, he has researched such roots as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute to fabricate a learned and lively look at the development of our national music. Much of the territory covered here is overlooked in books on folk music, making this a reasonable buy in spite of the steep hardcover price.”Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
ReviewA arousing and attention holding history of the shifting notions of what constitutes American folk music.
New York Times Book Review
An essential work that accurately places the idea of ‘folk’ and ‘roots’ music into a realistic context.
Creative Loafing
Romancing the Folk proves a arousing and attention holding history of an idea and a shape-shifting body of song.
New York Times Book Review
Filene’s book is smart and careful and must gain a wide audience.
Journal of American History
Much of the territory covered here is overlooked in books on folk music.
Library Journal
From the Inside FlapBenjamin Filene examines the competing visions of America’s musical past—and the cultural middlemen who shaped these visions—that have vied for influence over the public imagination in this century. This book brings to light the kinship among folk or roots music and standard culture.
Romancing Folk American Cultural Studies Image
Romancing Folk American Cultural Studies Image
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Romancing Folk American Cultural Studies Picture
Most helpful client reviews
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
 The Roots Behind Roots Music
By A
Most books when it comes to frequent music fall into one of two categories. You have your pretentious rock n’ roll critic who writes in impenetrable and cryptic prose (Hello Anthony DeCurtis and Robert Christgau) or you have strictly academic writings that miss the heart of what is oftentimes music felt at a gut level. Then along comes Benjamin Filene. Filene offers up a brilliant discussion of the ways in which folk music became a part of our American consciousness. Profiling the careers of such artists as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, “Romancing the Folk” presents an exceedingly lively, readable and well thought out discussion of the way folk music was staged to the American public and at last accepted as a valid art form in it is own right. In doing so, Filene breaks from the stale world of conventional frequent music writing and gives you a fine read while you listen to “Blood on the Tracks,” “Goodnight Irene,” “Hoochie Coochie Man” or “Talking Union.”
12 of 13 humans found the following review helpful.
Clamoring for more from Filene
By J. Christmas
This is a with respect to history indepth yet immensely gratifying work. Filene’s take on “roots music” is refreshing–honest and free of gushing hyperbole; just cynical sufficient without ever getting acerbic.
The stories Filene chooses to tell are illuminating and oftentimes funny–Leonard Chess faking his way through Blues hitmaking; Leadbelly being marketed as a country bumpkin in overalls when he preferent to wear suits.
There are so a great deal of more stories to be told, though–musicians to discuss, angles of the folk boom to expand, that I wish Filene would write more–perhaps another volume.
17 of 20 persons found the following review helpful.
 Strong and Engaging, and Very Readable
By Christopher W. Chase
Benjamin Filene’s account of the roots of the category of “American roots music” is inexorably aimed at peeling away discursive layers within that very term itself to disclose the historical continuities and disjunctures at the heart of it. As Filene puts it: “What makes the formation of America’s folk canon so fascinating, though, is that just as apart cultures became harder to define and locate in industrialized America. the notions of musical purity and primitivism took on intensified value, even in avowedly mercantile music. Twentieth-century Americans have been systematically searching for the latest incarnation of ‘old-time’ and ‘authentic’ music.” And Filene shows deftly how these categories are to a great extent inflected with racial and class issues.
But Filene’s work begins much earlier, with the early 19th century effort in the US and later in the UK to gather and collate British folk song texts and from time to time the tunes that went this them. He demonstrates that this effort was exhaustively infused with romanticism–an try to record and preserve a “better” culture before capitalism, greed, irreligion and science came along. This grew from the German philosophical fascination with the ‘Kultur des Volkes,’ and into an momentum to forge a British national culture based on the English peasantry—even from time to time as found in the American Appalachian population (!)—and of course, an undertone, made explicit here and there–of racial purity.
This is peculiarly substantial in that standard interest in anything like folk song appears to have begun for African-American forms before Anglo ones–but was apparently stopped by the mythic valorization of whites as unfeigned folk. It seems that Anglo songs edged out other types as the basis of this new mythic canon that was forming, even as the Fisk singers and blackface minstrelsy became more popular in the 1870′s. In fact, Filene argues convincingly that the way in which Black folk songs (spirituals) were collated preserved an idea of Black passivity and the exotic look with fixed eyes in whites. Of course blackface minstrel performances reinforced this. The only other challenge was Lomax’s collection of cowboy ballads, which he unsuccessfully tried to peg to the spirit of English rural culture. In the 1920′s attempts at using a more racially and geographically inclusive cultural building with rural songs, white, black, and latino, were undertaken by poetical Carl Sandburg.
Most of the book deals with the bequest of the cult of authenticity developed and shaped by the Lomaxes from their field recordings and artisan promotion. Their prompt willingness for gathering and encouraging their ideas of “true folk singers” can not be underestimated, and in doing so, they shifted the canon away from whiteness, or so it seemed. Filene’s account of The Lomaxes and Lead Belly perhaps best demonstrates the role of exoticism in manufacturing authentic “American”ness at that queer time. The tours undertaken by the Lomaxes emphasize Lead Belly’s virtuosity and expansive knowledge, but simultaneously fabricate him as a primitive, exotic “Heart of Darkness” figure that lay at the core of authentic American folk-song, and by extension lay at the periphery of contemporary, decadent, urban white Modernist America. When they started to get not only recording techonology, but official government and Library of Congress support, that added an entire new dimension of national culture building, as well as “documentary”-style authoritativeness to their work–as they in a literal sense started out fabricating a usable musical past for the United States.
In fact, Filene’s analysis fits utterly with Jacques Attali’s theories on music, insofar as Lead Belly’s music could be said to be a constructed and promoted by Lomax as a sublimated form of `animal nature’ (ancestor) and racialized `primitive violence’ (demon), exhibited in spectacle for the consumption of middle-brow and high-brow white audiences. Filene connects this racialized bequest of “authenticity” with the normally found ideology that “roots” musicians even today are expected to be overly emotive, premodern, and non-commercial. In other words, they will have to carry out “Otherness” for their predominantly white, bourgeois audiences in order to be authentic. To be fair, this momentum waxed strong in 1930′s American. James Agee and Walker Evans. Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” a number of popular magazines–, all played into this impulse. To be popular though, you couldn’t be too successful, or you might compromise your authenticity. Sound familiar? The paradox of Roots music and Leftist politics, in the 1930′s, both together in the Popular Front.
Moreover, it is perchance speculative, but notwithstanding provocative, to note that Lead Belly’s popularity took place in the wane of the Harlem Renaissance (and into the 1940′s), and rather perchance signaled for white consumption a sign of (or the `return’ of) a more racialized `authentic n*ggerness’ inscribed in black bodies, in contrast to the earlier “New Negro” and the later post-WWII racial agitators. For future artists, like Muddy Waters, the bequest of transformation took more commercial, but similar sets of turns. As Waters grew in popularity, his music shifted from Mississippi delta through country inflection–from acoustic to electric, in an undertake to adopt to urban styles…and then pressure to go back again to his more “primitive” beginnings for sales purposes. From the influence of Lomax to the mercantile propagation of Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, Filene follows Waters through his career to see the more spectacular effect of “roots” discourse upon him and perceptions of him. We get an in particular huge eyeful when Filene takes extra time out to make an analyzation of Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”, just one of a good deal of usual songs invoking pagan, magical, feral and occult tropes to signify both danger and desire for the listening subject. Waters influence on the Rolling Stones and The Beatles is noted, and we start out to see how folk constructions of authenticity gain a larger influence in Rock and Roll, even as black artists in that genre fail to catch fire with white youth as strongly as later white rock musicians did–or as even strongly as white folk artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.
Later parts of the work demonstrate the emergence of folk institutionalism in Washington, from the Federal Writers Project, the Resettlement Administration, and the Library of Congress all contributing to this effort within the framework of New Deal politics, and the growing idea that folklore always has a functional factor to play in a given society. Rather then “vestigial,” folklore becomes “germinal.” The search for musical folklore takes these foundations to the city for perchance the firstborn time in “roots” discourse. And also to war, as government agencies came under increasing pressure to turn all distinct features of policy towards the effort in WWII. At the same time, a push to professionalize folklore in academia gained ground as well–graduate programs in folklore were established, thence invented a contentious political history for each field of culture impacted by contemporary folklore studies, no less than in American Studies. Richard M. Dorson, an early Americanist, was also an early “Folklore” specialist, and worked tirelessly to construct methodologies for subsequent use. Lomax, too, became an academic–an early methodologist in 1960′s ethnomusicology. And with the institution of Folklore in the Academy of Letters, the annual Folk Festival is born, for the most part again, through the aegis of the Smithsonian—yet another example of government sponsorship and cultivation of Kulturvolk as national basis, continuing to the present day. The modern day so-called “folk revival” is born as well through the attempts of Pete Seeger, who carried on the functionalist tradition of the Lomaxes in his efforts. Folk cultures have in a literal sense become American cultures–in the sense that they may even suck all the air out of that category, leaving little for other than these constructed myths.
I be grateful for the way that Filene goes with regards to his project, using a combining of comparative visual analysis of photographs, and album covers, as well as musical and lyrical analysis. His willingness to take into account close readings of song collections (like ‘American Ballads’, ‘Our Singing Country’, and ‘American Songbag’), and merchandise of early government/corporate partnerships in radio programming (such as “We Hold These Truths”) speak to the power of his interdisciplinary method. And in uncovering more than just two periods of attention to folk music (the 1930s and the 1960s) he demonstrates a longer, more resilient undercurrent of American modernity and it is self-renewal.
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