The Only True Folksongs in English: American Ballad Scholarship, 1855–1915 uncovers how nineteenth-century American scholars including the children of farmers, sail makers, and ministers set out to prove ...

Dylan in Cincinnati takes a fresh approach to Bob Dylan’s performance art by asking what happens when we focus on a single city across six decades.

When we think of Dylan in concert, we imagine Newport, ...

Throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, music carried messages of survival, rebellion, and solidarity. Enslaved people composed songs that were far more than laments—they were calls for liberty a ...

In Fiddling Is My Joy, Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje examines the history of fiddling among African Americans from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Although music historians acknowledge a prominent ...

Heavily influenced by Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass” in the 1940s and ’50s, gospel music in the South began to shift into bluegrass gospel, a style that combines both genres. In Bluegrass Gospel: ...

The Texas Panhandle’s frontier days were fresh in memory when fiddler Eck Robertson (1887-1975) arrived. Cowboys still worked on ranches in the 1910s but barbed-wire fences abounded too. Robertson pursued a ...

This compilation of Evanira Mendes’s biography and translated publications offers for the first time in English an opportunity to revisit the music and culture of 1950s Brazil. Examining the trajectory o ...

WINNER OF THE 2025 WAYLAND D. HAND BOOK PRIZE and INAUGURAL SPECIAL AWARD WINNER FOR SCHOLARLY EXCELLENCE AND CULTURAL IMPACT from the HISTORY and FOLKLORE SECTION of the AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY

Between ...

During his correspondence with erotic folklore collector Gershon Legman, famed chantey singer and collector Stan Hugill (1906–1992) shared unexpurgated versions of the songs in his repertoire. These bawdy s ...

My Memories of John Hartford is a memoir about author Bob Carlin's years working alongside singer, songwriter, banjoist, and fiddler John Hartford (1937-2001). Throughout his short life, Hartford was ...