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Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry
by Ernest Suarez Mike MattisonPoetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.
Poetics of Music
by Igor Stravinsky Arthur Knodel Ingolf DahlThese lessons provide penetrating glimpses into the thought processes of Stravinsky's mind. While dealing with his chosen topics-the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, musical typology, the avatars of Russian music, and the performance of music-he reveals his reverence for tradition, order and discipline. He believes 'the more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free. His opinions about Wagner, Verdi, Berlioz, Hindemith, Weber, Beethoven, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky and Bach are refreshing. He also analyzes the function of the critic, the requirements of the interpreter, the state of Russian music, and musical taste and snobbery." - The American Recorder Once again the concertgoer and music lover can take pleasure in Igor Stravinsky's thoughts on the essentials of music. It was over thirty years ago that Stravinsky delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University on which the French-language edition of this book and later the English translation by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl were based. Now his Poetics of Music is available in paper-with a preface by George Seferis.
Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (hup) Ser. #2003)
by Igor StravinskyOne of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.
Poetry in English and Metal Music: Adaptation and Appropriation Across Media
by Arturo Mora-RiojaMany metal songs incorporate poetry into their lyrics using a broad array of techniques, both textual and musical. This book develops a novel adaptation, appropriation, and quotation taxonomy that both expands our knowledge of how poetry is used in metal music and is useful for scholars across adaptation studies broadly. The text follows both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. It identifies 384 metal songs by 224 bands with intertextual ties to 146 poems written by fifty-one different poets, with a special focus on Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton's Paradise Lost and the work of WWI's War Poets. This analysis of transformational mechanisms allows poetry to find an afterlife in the form of metal songs and sheds light on both the adaptation and appropriation process and on the semantic shifts occasioned by the recontextualisation of the poems into the metal music culture. Some musicians reuse – and sometimes amplify – old verses related to politics and religion in our present times; others engage in criticism or simple contradiction. In some cases, the bands turn the abstract feelings evoked by the poems into concrete personal experiences. The most adventurous recraft the original verses by changing the point of view of either the poetic voice or the addressed actors, altering the vocaliser of the narrative or the gender of the protagonists. These mechanisms help metal musicians make the poems their own and adjust them to their artistic needs so that the resulting product is consistent with the expectations of the metal music culture.
Poetry in Motion (High School Musical: Stories from East High #3)
by Alice AlfonsiEveryone at East High is freaking out. In one week, the students in Ms. Barrington's English class will have to recite an original poem in front of the whole school! Chad is usually happy to ham it up no matter who is watching, but the embarrassing memory of a past poetry performance is seared onto his brain--and he's not sure he'll be able to pull off this assignment. Troy enlists Gabriella to teach Chad and the other basketball players that there's more than one way to bust a rhyme. But will she be able to save them from schoolwide humiliation?
Points of Disruption in the Music Education Curriculum, Volume 1: Systemic Changes (CMS Pedagogies and Innovations)
by Marshall Haning Jocelyn A. Stevens Brian N. WeidnerFor decades, scholars in the field of music education have recognized the need for growth and change in our approach to teaching music, yet despite these calls for change, the music education curriculum today remains remarkably similar to that of a century ago. Points of Disruption in the Music Education Curriculum, Volume 1: Systemic Changes is one of two volumes that bring together applied suggestions, analyses, and best practices for disrupting cycles of replication in the curriculum of K-12 and collegiate music education programs in the United States and beyond, considering disruption as a force for positive change. Identifying specific strategies for interrupting or reimagining traditional practices, the contributors provide music teachers and music educators with a variety of potential practical approaches to creating changes that foster a better musical education at all levels of the curriculum.This first volume focuses on systemic changes, including topics like professional development, hiring practices, ableism and universal design, rhizomatic learning, and how to implement disruption across the music education profession. Each chapter contains specific action steps and suggestions for implementation. Bringing together five thought-provoking chapters, this concise volume offers a diverse set of concrete strategies that will be useful to a wide range of music education stakeholders, including teachers, administrators, and curriculum designers.
Points of Disruption in the Music Education Curriculum, Volume 2: Individual Changes (CMS Pedagogies and Innovations)
by Marshall Haning Jocelyn A. Stevens Brian N. WeidnerFor decades, scholars in the field of music education have recognized the need for growth and change in our approach to teaching music, yet despite these calls for change, the music education curriculum today remains remarkably similar to that of a century ago. Points of Disruption in the Music Education Curriculum, Volume 2: Individual Changes is one of two volumes that bring together applied suggestions, analyses, and best practices for disrupting cycles of replication in the curriculum of K-12 and collegiate music education programs in the United States and beyond, considering disruption as a force for positive change. Identifying specific strategies for interrupting or reimagining traditional practices, the contributors provide music teachers and music educators with a variety of potential practical approaches to creating changes that foster a better musical education at all levels of the curriculum.This second volume focuses on changes that can be implemented by individual educators, covering topics including transcultural approaches, student-teacher power relations, methods courses, integrated music education, and administrator support of teacher agency, student–teacher power relations, and reimagining music education. Bringing together 6 thought-provoking chapters, this book offers a diverse set of concrete strategies that will be useful to a wide range of music education stakeholders, including teachers, administrators, and curriculum designers.
Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga
by Maureen CallahanIn just a two-year span, Stefani Germanotta, a struggling performer in New York's Lower East Side burlesque scene, has become the global demographic-smashing pop icon known as Lady Gaga. She is a once-in-a-decade artist, a gifted singer, composer, designer, and performance artist who mixes high and low culture, the avant-garde with the accessible, authenticity with artifice.Who is Lady Gaga? She is a twenty-five-year-old woman whose stage mantra--"I'm a free bitch!"--is the polar opposite of who she is offstage: isolated, insecure, and unable to be alone. She is an outrÉ artist who wanted to be a sensitive singer-songwriter. She is a woman who says no man can ever compete with her career, but who goes back and forth with the ex-boyfriend who said she was too ambitious. She claims not to care what people think, but spends her downtime online, reading what people have to say about her. She claims to be a con artist and utterly authentic. She is never less than compelling.Based on more than fifty original interviews with friends, employees, rivals, and music industry veterans, Poker Face is the first in-depth biography of the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that is Lady Gaga.
Polish Estrada Music: Organisation, Stars and Representation (Slavonic and East European Music Studies)
by Ewa MazierskaPolish estrada music dominated Polish popular music throughout the state socialist period but gained little attention from popular music scholars because it was regarded as being of low quality and politically conformist. Ewa Mazierska carefully examines these assumptions, considering those institutions which catered for the needs of estrada artists and their fans, the presence of estrada in different media and the careers and styles of the leading stars, such as Mieczysław Fogg, Irena Santor, Violetta Villas, Anna German, Jerzy Połomski, Maryla Rodowicz, Zdzisława Sośnicka, Zbigniew Wodecki and Krzysztof Krawczyk. Mazierska also discusses the memory and legacy of estrada music in the post-communist period. The book draws on Poland’s cultural and political history and the history of Polish popular music and media, including television and radio. Mazierska engages with concepts such as genre, stardom and authenticity in order to capture the essence of Polish estrada music and to provide a comparison with popular music produced in other countries.
Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery
by Zehavit Stern Ela Bauer Naomi Seidman Daniel Kupfert Heller Marcos Silber Justin Cammy Eugenia Prokop-Janiec Bozena Shallcross Malgorzata Stolarska-Fronia Magdalena Kozlowska Sylwia Jakubczyk-Sleczka Alicja Maslak-MaciejewskaPolish Jewish Culture beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture. Each essay presents readers with the extraordinary production and consumption of culture by Polish Jews in literature, film, cabaret, theater, the visual arts, architecture, and music. They show how this process was defined by a reciprocal cultural exchange that flourished between cities at the periphery—from Lwów and Wilno to Kraków and Łódź—and international centers like Warsaw, thereby illuminating the place of Polish Jews within urban European cultures. Companion website (https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu)
Polish Popular Music on Screen
by Ewa MazierskaThis book examines the interface between Polish popular music and screen media against the background of Polish history, cinema, and popular culture and situates that interface in a local as well as global context. It looks at Polish musicals, biographical films about musicians, documentary films and, finally, music videos. The author draws attention to the immense popularity of musical comedies in Polish interwar cinema, the enduring appeal of musical genres during the period of state socialism, despite their low status in film criticism, and the re-birth of musicals in the 2010s. Mazierska also discusses the most important stars, directors and authors of songs presented in Polish films, and points to the effect of technological changes on inception and transformation of music-centred genres of screen media, including the effect of YouTube on their growth and preservation. The book is informed by the question of how parochial and universal is Polish popular music and its screen representation.
Political Beethoven
by Nicholas MathewMusicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career – from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna – to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice – a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.
Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis
by Sara Marcus“Political Disappointment is an abundant text, overflowing with Sara Marcus’s considerable gifts. She is adept at presenting history and narrative with equal clarity; her writing is urgent but also optimistic. This is a book that is sometimes painful but never sacrifices hope or beauty.”—Hanif AbdurraqibMoving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment—the unfulfilled desire for change—into a basis for solidarity.Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities.Political Disappointment shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world.Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcus’s unique history of the twentieth century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life.
Political Rock (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Kristine WeglarzPolitical Rock features luminary figures in rock music that have stood out not only for their performances, but also for their politics. The book opens with a comparative, cultural history of artists who have played important roles in social movements. Individual chapters are devoted to The Clash and Fugazi, Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Sinead O'Connor, Peter Gabriel, Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, Steve Earle and Kim Gordon. These artists have been chosen for their status as rock musicians and connections to political moments, movements, and art. The artists and authors show that rock retains a critical strain, continuing a tradition of rock politics that matters to fans, activists, and movements alike.
Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg (Border Crossings #Vol. 5)
by Daniel Albright Russell A. Berman Charlotte M. CrossThe original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.
Politics as Sound: The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983 (Music in American Life)
by Shayna MaskellUncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city's youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC's hardcore scene during its short but storied peak. Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation's capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music's aesthetics and the unique impact of DC's sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music's structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit. A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.
Polka King: The Life and Times of Polka Music's Living Legend
by Jimmy SturrArguably the most important polka practitioner of his generation, reedist/vocalist Jimmy Sturr has won an eye-popping 18 Grammy Awards, and when you hear his exuberant brand of the music that is his heart and soul, you'll understand why. Blending the timeless elements of traditional polka music with hints of country, Cajun, and rock and roll, Sturr's unique sound has taken polka to new heights of accessibility and popularity, and his modernized renditions of polka standards and renditions of rock classics have captured the imagination (and feet) of listeners throughout the world. In his memoir Polka King, you'll meet the man behind the beer barrel. In his lively, oftentimes hilarious literary debut, Jimmy chronicles how a small-town boy from tiny Florida, N.Y., made good, ultimately becoming a respected bandleader, entrepreneur, and Grammy winner with guest appearances on Saturday Night Live. He'll take you into the recording studio and onto the stage, where he's shared the microphone with the likes of Willie Nelson, The Oak Ridge Boys, and Charlie Daniels. Featuring forewords by Willie Nelson, Bobby Vinton, and &“Whispering" Bill Anderson, Polka King will introduce the world to a one-of-a-kind artist who has taken one of the world's most beloved musical genres and made it his own.
Polycultural Synthesis in the Music of Chou Wen-Chung
by Mark A. Radice Mary I. ArlinThe displacement of Chou Wen-chung from his native China in 1948 forced him into Western-European culture. Ultimately finding his vocation as a composer, he familiarized himself with classical and contemporary techniques but interpreted these through his traditionally oriented Chinese cultural perspective. The result has been the composition of a unique body of repertoire that synthesizes the most progressive Western compositional idioms with an astonishingly traditional heritage of Asian approaches, not only from music, but also from calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and more. Chou’s importance rests not only in his compositions, but also in his widespread influence through his extensive teaching career at Columbia University, where his many students included Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, and many more. During his tenure at Columbia, he also founded the U.S.-China Arts Exchange, which continues to this day to be a vital stimulus for multicultural interaction. The volume will include an inventory of the Chou collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.
Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres
by Peter PesicPolyphony -- the interweaving of simultaneous sounds -- is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of "polyphonicity" -- of "many-voicedness" -- in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience -- all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic "music of the hemispheres" that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the "neural orchestra" of the brain. Pesic's story begins with ancient conceptions of God's mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.
Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Peter PesicAn exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains.Polyphony—the interweaving of simultaneous sounds—is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”—of “many-voicedness”—in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience—all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic's story begins with ancient conceptions of God's mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.
Polyphonie und Hybridität: Musikaustausch zwischen China und Europa (Studien zu Musik und Gender)
by Xuan FangIn zehn Beiträgen wird der Musikaustausch zwischen China und Europa als eine lange Geschichte von grenzüberschreitenden Begegnungen und Verflechtungen thematisiert: Im Fokus stehen zum einen Hybridbildungen im Spannungsfeld einer Rückbesinnung auf eigene Traditionen und einer Anerkennung der eigenen „Zusammengesetztheit“, zum anderen konkrete Austauschbeziehungen, also eine transkulturelle Musikvermittlung durch Lehrer*innen-Schüler*innen-Beziehungen, zum dritten die Rezeption chinesischer Musik in Europa, beginnend bei Berichten der Jesuiten im 17. Jahrhundert.
Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant (Music in Context)
by Catherine A. BradleyPolyphony associated with the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame marks a historical turning point in medieval music. Yet a lack of analytical or theoretical systems has discouraged close study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical objects, despite the fact that such creations represent the beginnings of musical composition as we know it. Is musical analysis possible for such medieval repertoires? Catherine A. Bradley demonstrates that it is, presenting new methodologies to illuminate processes of musical and poetic creation, from monophonic plainchant and vernacular French songs, to polyphonic organa, clausulae, and motets in both Latin and French. This book engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring concepts of authorship and originality as well as practices of quotation and musical reworking.
Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature)
by Nduka Otiono Josh TothPolyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the cultural and aesthetic impact of Dylan’s musical and literary production. Significantly distinct in approach, each chapter draws attention to the function and implications of certain aspects of Dylan's work—his tendency to confuse, question, and subvert literary, musical, and performative traditions. Polyvocal Bob Dylan places Dylan’s textual and performative art within and against a larger context of cultural and literary studies. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess how Dylan’s Nobel Prize–winning work fits into and challenges traditional conceptions of literature.
Pongs & Poems (Norsk utgave)
by Georgie EliotwellDet er to dikt i boken – «Griller i håvet» og «Otto», resten er pongs. Ordet er en hybrid mellom ordene poem og song. Den tar de to første bokstavene fra poem og de to siste fra song. Pongene ble til i hodet mitt da jeg kjørte på motorveien til jobb. Det gikk flere år før jeg skrev dem ned. Jeg husket dem ved å «synge dem»(om man kan kalle det det) på mine daglige kjøreturer. I denne boken er det ingen musikk tillagt tekstene, men tonsetting har vært forsøkt. Om jeg prøver å synge dem stinker det. Noe som passer, ettersom pong også kan bety «stank», fordi jeg er en forferdelig sanger. Om en leser ønsker å tonesette en eller flere pongs, blir jeg svært glad om jeg fåre høre dem, så ta kontakt på sosiale medier om så er tilfelle.
Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane (American Made Music Series)
by Dan GutsteinPoor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane chronicles the origins and evolution of a folk tune beloved by millions worldwide. Dan Gutstein delves into the trajectory of the “Liza Jane” family of songs, including the most popular variant “Li’l Liza Jane.” Likely originating among enslaved people on southern plantations, the songs are still performed and recorded centuries later.Evidence for these tunes as part of the repertoire of enslaved people comes from the Works Progress Administration ex-slave narratives that detail a range of lyrics and performance rituals related to “Liza Jane.” Civil War soldiers and minstrel troupes eventually adopted certain variants, including “Goodbye Liza Jane.” This version of the song prospered in the racist environment of burnt cork minstrelsy. Other familiar variants, such as “Little Liza Jane,” likely remained fixed in folk tradition until early twentieth-century sheet music popularized the melody.New genres and a slate of stellar performers broadly adopted these folk songs, bringing the tunes to far-reaching listeners. In 1960, to an audience of more than thirty million viewers, Harry Belafonte performed “Little Liza Jane” on CBS. The song was featured on such popular radio shows as Fibber McGee & Molly; films such as Coquette; and a Mickey Mouse animation. Hundreds of recognizable performers—including Fats Domino, Bing Crosby, Nina Simone, Mississippi John Hurt, and Pete Seeger—embraced the “Liza Jane” family. David Bowie even released “Liza Jane” as his first single. Gutstein documents these famous renditions, as well as lesser-known characters integral to the song’s history. Drawing upon a host of cultural insights from experts—including Eileen Southern, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Talley, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Charles Wolfe, Langston Hughes, and Alan Lomax—Gutstein charts the cross-cultural implications of a voyage unlike any other in the history of American folk music.