Play of a Fiddle gives voice to people who steadfastly hold to and build on the folk traditions of their ancestors. While encountering the influences of an increasingly overwhelming popular culture, the men and women in this book follow age-old patterns of folklife and custom, making their own music and dance in celebration of them. Shedding new light on a region that maintains ties to the cultural identities of its earliest European and African inhabitants, Gerald Milnes shows how folk music in West Virginia borrowed rhythmic, melodic, and vocal forms from the Celtic, Anglo, Germanic, and African traditions. These elements have come together to create a body of music tied more to place and circumstance than to ethnicity. Milnes explores the legacies of the state's best-known performers and musical families. He discusses religious music, balladeering, the influence of black musicians and styles, dancing, banjo and dulcimer traditions, and the importance of old-time music as a cultural pillar of West Virginia life. A musician himself, Milnes has been collecting songs and stories in West Virginia for more than twenty-five years. The result is an enjoyable book filled with anecdotes, local history, and keen observations about musical lives.
The persecution of Old World German Protestants and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century--following debilitating wars, the Reformation, and the Inquisition-- brought about significant immigration to America. Many of the immigrants, and their progeny, settled in the Appalachian frontier. Here they established a particularly old set of religious beliefs and traditions based on a strong sense of folk spirituality. They practiced astrology, numerology, and other aspects of esoteric thinking and left a legacy that may still be found in Appalachian folklore today. Based in part on the author's extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery; German Appalachian Folklore describes these various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world. By concentrating on these inheritances, Gerald C. Milnes draws a larger picture of the German influence on Appalachia. Much has been written about the Anglo-Celtic, Scots-Irish, and English folkways of the Appalachian people, but few studies have addressed their German cultural attributes and sensibilities. Signs, Cures, and Witchery sheds startling light on folk influences from Germany, making it a volume of tremendous value to Appalachian scholars, folklorists, and readers with an interest in Appalachian folklife and German American studies.
Play of a Fiddle gives voice to people who steadfastly hold to and build on the folk traditions of their ancestors. While encountering the influences of an increasingly overwhelming popular culture, the men and women in this book follow age-old patterns of folklife and custom, making their own music and dance in celebration of them. Shedding new light on a region that maintains ties to the cultural identities of its earliest European and African inhabitants, Gerald Milnes shows how folk music in West Virginia borrowed rhythmic, melodic, and vocal forms from the Celtic, Anglo, Germanic, and African traditions. These elements have come together to create a body of music tied more to place and circumstance than to ethnicity. Milnes explores the legacies of the state's best-known performers and musical families. He discusses religious music, balladeering, the influence of black musicians and styles, dancing, banjo and dulcimer traditions, and the importance of old-time music as a cultural pillar of West Virginia life. A musician himself, Milnes has been collecting songs and stories in West Virginia for more than twenty-five years. The result is an enjoyable book filled with anecdotes, local history, and keen observations about musical lives.
The persecution of Old World German Protestants and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century--following debilitating wars, the Reformation, and the Inquisition-- brought about significant immigration to America. Many of the immigrants, and their progeny, settled in the Appalachian frontier. Here they established a particularly old set of religious beliefs and traditions based on a strong sense of folk spirituality. They practiced astrology, numerology, and other aspects of esoteric thinking and left a legacy that may still be found in Appalachian folklore today. Based in part on the author's extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery; German Appalachian Folklore describes these various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world. By concentrating on these inheritances, Gerald C. Milnes draws a larger picture of the German influence on Appalachia. Much has been written about the Anglo-Celtic, Scots-Irish, and English folkways of the Appalachian people, but few studies have addressed their German cultural attributes and sensibilities. Signs, Cures, and Witchery sheds startling light on folk influences from Germany, making it a volume of tremendous value to Appalachian scholars, folklorists, and readers with an interest in Appalachian folklife and German American studies.
She lived at full throttle on stage, screen, and in real life, with highs that made history and lows that finally brought down the curtain at age forty-seven. Judy Garland died over thirty years ago, but no biography has so completely captured her spirit -- and demons -- until now. From her tumultuous early years as a child performer to her tragic last days, Gerald Clarke reveals the authentic Judy in a biography rich in new detail and unprecedented revelations. Based on hundreds of interviews and drawing on her own unfinished -- and unpublished -- autobiography, Get Happy presents the real Judy Garland in all her flawed glory. With the same skill, style, and storytelling flair that made his bestselling Capote a landmark literary biography, Gerald Clarke sorts through the secrets and the scandals, the legends and the lies, to create a portrait of Judy Garland as candid as it is compassionate. Here are her early years, during which her parents sowed the seeds of heartbreak and self-destruction that would plague her for decades ... the golden age of Hollywood, brought into sharp focus with cinematic urgency, from the hidden private lives of the movie world's biggest stars to the cold-eyed businessmen who controlled the machine ... and a parade of brilliant and gifted men -- lovers and artists, impresarios and crooks -- who helped her reach so many creative pinnacles yet left her hopeless and alone after each seemingly inevitable fall. Here, then, is Judy Garland in all her magic and despair: the woman, the star, the legend, in a riveting saga of tragedy, resurrection, and genius.
A Blake Bibliography was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The aim of this book is to list every reference to William Blake published between 1757 and 1863 and every criticism and edition of his works from the beginning to the present. Partly because of the deluge of scholarship in the last forty years, it includes perhaps twice as many titles as Sir Geoffrey Keynes's great bibliography of 1921. An introductory essay on the history of Blake scholarship puts the most significant works into perspective, indicates the best work that has been done, and points to some neglected areas. In addition, all the most important references and many of the less significant ones are briefly annotated as to subject and value. Because many of the works are difficult to locate, specimen copies of all works published before 1831 have been traced to specific libraries. Each of Blake's manuscripts is also traced to its present owner. Two areas which have received relatively novel attention are early references to Blake (before 1863) and important sale and exhibition catalogues of his works. In both areas there are significant number of important entries which have not been noticed before by Blake scholars. The section on Blake's engravings for commercial works receives especially detailed treatment. A few of the titles listed here have not been described previously in connection with Blake.
George Heriot (1759-1839), a Scot, is best known as a skilled landscape watercolourist and as the contentious deputy postmaster general of British North America from 1800 to 1816. He was also a travel writer (his Travels through the Canadas was published in 1807) and a poet. In this volume, a combination of biography and art history, Gerald Finley presents, for the first time, a rounded picture of Heriot, revealing his motives and ideals while also illuminating the texture of life in Canada during the early years of settlement. In describing Heriot's several roles as artist, administrator, patriot, spy, Finley presents a portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman whose superficial desires were for an active public life but whose deeper yearnings were for a life of contemplation. As a member of the gentry it was natural that Heriot found his way into public service, for which he was suited both by education and by upbringing. Nevertheless, his public career did not always run smoothly and it ended in frustration and sadness. However, through his writing and especially his art Heriot found welcome relief from the tensions of his public duties. Indeed, Heriot's chief importance lies in his art. Trained as a topographical artist, he was an important exponent of the picturesque landscape. As a mode of vision the Picturesque furnished him with a special way of looking at recording the Canadian scene – to him Canada possessed the qualities of Arcadia. This viewpoint served both as aesthetic consolation and as stimulus to inspiration. This volume serves to recognize Heriot's artistic achievement and to accord him the place he deserves in the history of Canadian art and of the country itself.
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