American Indian Music Research Articles

Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow: American Indian Music. CraigHarris. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 267 pp. $24.95 paperback

Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow: American Indian Music. CraigHarris. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 267 pp. $24.95 paperback

Beyond the Noble Savage: Utilizing Popular Artists When Teaching Native American Music

Beyond the Noble Savage: Utilizing Popular Artists When Teaching Native American Music

Articulating and Contesting Cultural Hierarchies: Guatemalan, Mexican, and Native American Music at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915)

AbstractThree case studies, on Guatemalan, Mexican, and Native American music performed at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, illustrate the complex and varied ways that music can both reflect and challenge dominant and local ideologies of cultural value. The Guatemalan Commission made a claim for cultural significance through the Hurtado Royal Marimba Band's residency in their pavilion. This claim, however, was made through a Euro-American framework of cultural progress; the band's performances thus obscured the important role of Afro-Guatemalans and indigenous groups in the nation's marimba tradition. Although the “Mexican Village” depicted Mexico as exotic and primitive, the daily performances of the Orquesta Típica Torreblanca in the village showcased the country's cosmopolitan side. Native Americans were frequently subjected to exoticizing and racist musical ventriloquism at the PPIE, yet on at least one occasion a group of Blackfoot people refused this imposition and used music to push for control over their representation. The presence of these musics and musicians, largely ignored in the exposition's official administrative record, demonstrates the shifting power dynamics that shaped the performance and reception of music on the fairgrounds, and reveals that even in environments heavily shaped by dominant ideologies of race, gender, and class, multiple discourses of power and value can circulate.

Encyclopedia of Native American music of North America

This book is a one-stop reference resource for the vast variety of musical expressions of the First Peoples' cultures of North America, both past and present. * Provides print and Internet resources with each entry * Presents exclusive information derived from the personal research and fieldwork of the editors * Includes a timeline that highlights important developments in First Peoples' musical expressions * Supplies an index that allows users to easily look up all of the relevant information on a topic

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music (review)

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music (review)

Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America (review)

Reviewed by: Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America M. Celia Cain Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America. Edited by Tara Browner. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. [184 p. ISBN 9780252022210. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. At St. Mary's Reserve, home of the Maliseet Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, Maggie Paul's grandson Possesom "knows the songs. He sings them . . . if anybody needs a song, he will sing a song" (p. 64). His knowledge is Maggie Paul's remarkable legacy, for the Maliseet drum had fallen silent by the late 1950s. Starting with only one song, the "Kwanute" or welcome song (p. 59), Paul, a Passamaquoddy traditional singer, restored and revitalized the traditional music of the Maliseet, thereby reminding the Maliseet how to be Maliseet and live Maliseet values. Music's ability to construct Native American identities is the uniting theme of this collection. A fire dance, a powwow song, a Waylon Jennings cover, a sung myth, a welcome song—all are different responses to different times and types of colonialism. Whatever the genre, Native Americans perform music as a means of performing indigeneity while intensifying a sense of place, self (p. 139), and the past. With essays focusing on a wide variety of case studies from around North America, some underrepresented in the literature, this volume from the University of Illinois' fine Music in American Life series demonstrates what makes Native American music native. This collection is of particular significance because the essays engage with a [End Page 776] wide variety of methodologies, including ethnographic, collaborative, analytical, historiographic, and interpretative ones. This variety makes the volume especially useful in demonstrating the "many ways of doing contemporary ethnomusicology in Indian country" (p. 2, italics in original). Additionally, a number of the contributors are Native, bringing important emic perspectives. Although Native American music is one of the founding areas of study for ethnomusicology, due to limited funding, decreased emphasis on music in Native Studies programs, and antipathy of Native Americans to being research subjects, in recent decades research has decreased (p. 1). Therefore it is not surprising, but still unfortunate, that this volume took over a decade to come to press. Some of the authors (Tara Browner, David W. Samuels) updated their essays to reflect recent developments in the field, but many did not. Only T. Christopher Aplin seems to have conducted fieldwork on his essay topic in the last decade. Nevertheless, this collection is a valuable contribution to Native Studies and ethnomusicology. While all the authors have conducted historical and/or ethnographic research, the essays by Paula Conlon and Aplin engage more with ethnographic conventions of writing. Conlon's essay examines Iglulik Inuit drum-dance songs, focusing her analysis on the song "I'm So Happy." Conlon argues that for the Iglulik, the text is primary, as drum-dance songs tell the stories of their everyday life. They can serve as a means of reconciliation, as the Iglulik resolve disputes through competition and/or the singing of humorous and castigating songs. Further, there is an interesting gendered aspect of this genre, as traditionally a man composes a song and then teaches it to his wife who serves as his memory holder, and then the wife teaches the song to the other women in the community. The women sing while the man drums and dances. Conlon witnessed the fading of this genre during her fieldwork in the mid-1980s. While drum-dance songs have been reconceptualized in Inuit popular music performance, linking the Iglulik to their past, a major theme of this collection, it is unclear if this has led to a revitalization of the traditional genre. Combining ongoing fieldwork with significant historical research, Aplin's essay on the Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache demonstrates its historical and current role in retaining and forming Apache identity in Oklahoma. The Fort Sill Apache were forced onto reservations in Arizona and New Mexico in the late nineteenth century, but after rebelling against the U.S. government were imprisoned in Warm Springs, Florida and Alabama. After nearly three decades they...

Blues Power in the Tuscarora Homeland: The Music of Pura Fé

Blues Power in the Tuscarora HomelandThe Music of Pura Fé John W. Troutman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Tuscarora musician Pura Fé Crescioni has toured the world for over two decades—since 1987 with the Native a cappella trio she founded, “Ulali,” and for the past few years as a solo artist. Pura Fé has shared the stage with such artists as Buffy Saint Marie, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, and Bonnie Raitt. Photograph by Patricia de Gorostarzu, courtesy of Pura Fé Crescioni. [End Page 53] This late April 2007 day marked the nicest that New Yorkers had yet experienced in the year. Pura Fé and her accompanist, Danny Godinez, were rehearsing on a bench in Central Park, reveling in the deep luster of the Sunday afternoon sky. Anyone from Seattle knows not to take such days for granted, and Pura Fé, who had recently relocated there from North Carolina, was no exception. After practicing for a while and soaking in the sun and the smiles of New Yorkers beaming from its warmth, she and Danny gathered more equipment from their rooms in the Excelsior Hotel and walked across the street to the main entrance of the Museum of Natural History. The welcome at the museum was not quite as they had anticipated—camera crews lined the marble steps and security guards prodded through the contents of their three guitar cases and other equipment bags. After the search the guards informed them that they would have to exit the building and enter through the staff entrance, where another cadre of guards awaited them. The added security was due to an appearance by Mayor Michael Bloomberg who, like Pura Fé, had received an invitation to participate in the museum’s Earth Day celebration. To complicate matters, by soundcheck it was immediately apparent that the museum staff had failed to provide the equipment that Pura Fé had requested, which forced them to scramble until show time to find the appropriate microphones and cables. Even after they got underway that afternoon, the pa system seemed to cooperate only grudgingly. Of course, Pura Fé had experienced such issues before, and she overcame the technical difficulties with the ease and seeming nonchalance that only a seasoned professional could muster. Pura Fé Crescioni, a Tuscarora musician, has toured the world for over two decades—since 1987 with the Native a cappella trio she founded, “Ulali,” and for the past few years as a solo artist. Pura Fé has shared the stage with such artists as Buffy Saint Marie, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, and Bonnie Raitt; she has sung with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, appeared on Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show,” and joined the roster of artists on the Durham-based Music Maker Relief Foundation record label. (She has also served on the non-profit label’s advisory board with B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and one of her greatest supporters, Taj Mahal). The soundtrack to the film Smoke Signals, based on the short stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), features her music, as do countless documentaries. She was voted “Best Female Artist” at the 2006 Native American Music Awards and performed at the grand opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. While Pura Fé has lived a remarkable life on the road and has earned critical praise around the globe, the one place she can always call home—the old Tuscarora homelands of North Carolina—anchors her. This becomes immediately clear in her performances and in conversations with her, and the centrality of those [End Page 54] homelands in her life and art reflects both her values as a Tuscarora woman and her inheritance, as a blues woman, of musical traditions shaped by the black, white, and Native peoples who have lived there. Indeed, her ancestry in many ways reflects the multicultural heritage of southern music. By considering the histories of her life, of her people, and of American music, we can begin to understand how in her music those histories engage one another in revelatory fashion. Tuscarora Roots Music is in Pura Fé’s genes. Her mother, Nanice Monk Lund, is a...

Indian Blues: The Indigenization of American Popular Music

Indian Blues The Indigenization ofAmerican Popular Music Jo/m W. Troutman Native artists todayperform not onlyatpowwows butalso inrockand hip-hopclubs. Infact,American Indians have performed European andAfrican-derived musicfor centuries. Thefollowing essay revealsonefacet of thishistory, whenNative musicians turnedthe federalgovernment's"civilization" campaignon itshead, indigenizingthe music meant todetribalizethem. above The Navajo rock band Blackfire In 1955 anthropologist James Howard cast a dim light over the expressive culture of American Indians, remarking that powwows reflecta "process by which socio-cultural entities . . .are losing their tribaldistinctiveness and in its place are developing a nontribal Indian' culture."1 He believed thatAmerican Indian musical tradi tions were fast becoming generic, "pan-tribal" per formances that reflected a decreasing vitality and diversity of songs and dances. Any powwow sing er or dancer would immediately rejecthis analysis on the simple basis thattriballyspecific?and clan or family-specific?songs have vastly multiplied over thepast century, just as intertribalpowwow culture has proliferated to an extraordinary and quite heterogeneous degree. Yet equally profound in growth to powwow culture are theways in which American Indians have also manipulated 42 i World Literature Today Iand refiguredother formsofmusic, in theprocess developing new means within expressive culture toperform their identities as indigenous peoples. Just as the continued expanse of inter tribalpowwow culture has facilitated the sharing and development of new varieties of songs and dances, Native singers, musicians, and dancers of all varieties continue to access every available musical arena, including cyberspace. The Native American Music Awards, or "Nammys," are tell ing: they comprise over thirtygenres of music and provide awards ranging from best powwow and Native American Church recordings to best blues and hip-hop recordings. Indeed, many Native musicians have recognized popular music genres as opportunities to expand their tribal, oral traditions. For example, the 2008 Nammy Record of theYear award went to Blackfire's (Silence) Is a Weapon. The two-disc set is a tour de forceby these veteran "Alter-Native" and punk rockers from theDine Nation. They describe themselves on theirMySpace site as a "traditionally influ enced, high-energy, politically driven group com prised of two brothers and theirsister. Born into theheart of a political land dispute area on Black Mesa in the Navajo Nation, thisFamily's powerful music reflects the Hopes, Freedoms, and Barriers of today'sworld." Blackfire in facttours the world and has gained respect in many circles; their2002 album One Nation Under featured the last record ed vocals by punk legend Joey Ramone, and David Fricke, Rolling Stonemagazine's premier music critic,has promoted Blackfire in his col umns. (Silence) Is aWeapon consists of one disc of charging, protest rock-n-roll interlaced with Dine chants; the other disc is solely Dine ceremonial vocal and drum songs. Both discs suggest musi callywhat it means toBlackfire to beDine today, and the album demonstrates their extraordinary ability toweave thousands of years of ideas into one musical text. In effect, these artists have refig ured themeaning ofwhat constitutes their tribal, and indeed "Indian," music altogether. The practice by American Indians of fusing tribally derived music with that of Anglos and African Americans has existed for a very long time. Sacred music in missions and churches probably provided the first and certainly the longest-lasting variety of this blending of tradi tions, and the genres of American secular, popu larmusic have provided another. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of Native musicians such as Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, Kaw-Creek Saxophonist JimPepper, and Dakota singer Floyd Red Crow Westerman gained international fame for their rock, jazz, country, and folk recordings. These musicians and others gained an even high erprofile in the midst of theNative protestmove ments such as the takeover of Alcatraz Island, which captured the national media's attention at that time. Westerman's album Custer Died for Your Sins, for example, provided an equally scathing soundtrack forVine Deloria Jr/sgroundbreaking Nativepeoples forquite some timehad been blowing the saxophone, sawing the fiddle(or violin), and strumming guitars and mandolins. How theycame to those instruments and to these new styles ofmusic becomes particularly revealing when we considertheways in which thepracticeofmusic had become so divisively, politically charged in Indian Country inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1969 "Indian manifesto...

‘Savage Blonde’: Willa Cather and the Making of an American Musician

AbstractWilla Cather's fiction devotes extraordinary attention to music and musicians – more, perhaps, than any other American fiction writer. This article explores how Thea Kronborg, the diva‐heroine of Song of the Lark, reflects emerging notions of American music at the turn of the 20th century, particularly those that rest on references to and transcriptions of African or Native American music. I argue that the development of Thea's musicality enacts a form of embodied transcription that both reveals and conceals the ‘folk’ musicality it claims to represent.

Review: Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-Wow by Tara Browner; Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements, edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine

Review: Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-Wow by Tara Browner; Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements, edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine

Native American Music Forgotten

Native American Music Forgotten

Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements (review)

Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements (review)

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library (review)

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library. http://memory.loc.gov/. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Requires standard web browser; for audio: requires RealAudio player with 14.4kbps or faster Internet connection, MPEG2/layer 3 (.mp3) player, or WaveForm (.wav) player; for highest quality images some collections require Tagged Image File Format (.tiff) viewer. It is appropriate that, in this bicentennial year of the establishment of the Library of Congress, we review the library's gift to the nation--a digital multimedia library named the American Memory Project (AMP). The aim of the project, to have over a million items on the site by this anniversary year, has been achieved. AMP has been growing rapidly since 1995, and now has over seventy fully digitized collections. Its contents range from manuscript letters to baseball cards, daguerreotypes to digital photographs, wax cylinder recordings to commercial jazz recordings, music manuscript scores to printed sheet music, and film clips to motion pictures. This wealth of resources is intended for researchers, students, teachers, and the public at all levels. The materials are drawn not only from the Library of Congress, but from a variety of institutions across the country. To date, approximately $60 million from both public and private sources has been spent on the project. Private donors include both individuals a nd corporations; noteworthy are Ameritech's three-year competitive grants. These funds provided support for institutions nationwide. Of the seventy collections, eighteen contain music or are music-related, with seven more music-related collections in preparation. This review concentrates on these eighteen collections. Collections The wide variety of topics included in AMP is reflected in the music collections. There are sheet music collections from Duke University (Historical American Sheet Music) and Brown University (African-American Sheet Music) from the same period, 1850-1920. Other sheet music collections include Music for the Nation, American Sheet 1870-1885, a collection of sheet music originally submitted for copyright registration during the post--Civil War era, and We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, a collection devoted to President Lincoln and the Civil War. This collection spans the period from the presidential campaign in 1859 to the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909. The sheet music collections generally include scanned scores in their entirety; some, such as the We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, also transcribe the lyrics separately. Cover art is scanned in color where the original was in color. At present, there are no sound recordings of the music to go with the scores. In addition to sheet music, there is a c ollection of nineteenth-century song sheets, America Singing, which contains only lyrics and no music. AMP is rich in ethnographic collections with multimedia access. These include: Gold, Sidney Robertson Cowell's WPA California Folk Project; Southern Mosaic, John and Ruby Lomax's recordings from their trip to the southern states; Hispano and Culture from the Rio Grande, Juan Rael's documentation of religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; the American Folklife Center's Indian Music, which presents traditional Omaha Native American music; and Alan Jabbour's Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier, performed by octogenarian Henry Reed of the Virginian Appalachians. Another ethnographic collection, 'Voices from the Dust Bowl, though not primarily a music collection, also contains some music. The collection documents the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941 through audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, an d ephemera collected during two field trips. …

Spirit of the First People: Native American Music Traditions of Washington State

ForewordPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionSingers, Dancers, Dreamers, Travelers: Native American Song Traditions, Musical Instruments, and Dance Regalia in Washington StateSeeds of Our Ancestors: Growing up in the Skokomish Song TraditionThe Circle of SongNative Songs and Seasonal Food-Gathering TraditionsNative Songs Taught by Ellen W. Saluskin (Hoptonix Sawyalilx)Song Traditions of the YakamaMakah Music: Preserving the TraditionsNative Music of the Pacific Northwest: A Washington State PerspectiveSong Traditions of the Indian Shaker ChurchSongs from the Coast, Sound, and Plateau: Native American Music Traditions in Washington TodayAppendixesTen Early Ethnographers in the Northwest: Recordings from Washington StateCreating and disseminating Ethnographic Recordings: Washington State Materials in Washington, DCMelville Jacobs and Early Ethnographic Recordings in the NorthwestBibliographyIndex

Creation’s Journey: Native American Music, 1992–1993Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women

Book Review| January 01 1999 Creation’s Journey: Native American Music, 1992–1993Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women Creation’s Journey: Native American Music, 1992–1993.Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women. Claire R. Farrer Claire R. Farrer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (1999) 112 (443): 85–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/541406 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Claire R. Farrer; Creation’s Journey: Native American Music, 1992–1993Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 1999; 112 (443): 85–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/541406 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 1999 The American Folklore Society1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

North American Indian Music: A Guide to Published Sources and Selected Recordings

North American Indian Music: A Guide to Published Sources and Selected Recordings

Resources for Teaching Native American Music

Resources for Teaching Native American Music

Moving within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance

Moving within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance

Women in North American Indian Music: Six Essays

Women in North American Indian Music: Six Essays