Indian Songs Research Articles

Therapeutic use of Indian ragas on various diseases

: With the rapid and fast-paced life, balancing work pressure is not easy. Many people are affected by mental stress, anxiety, depression and hypertension diseases causing harmful effects in physical and mental disorders. The medical treatment for these diseases cannot affect the root cause. The medicine causes relief in only part of affected portion. Medication may also cause side effect which may further hamper the body part. Music can play a powerful position in assisting us to lead better, fruitful lives. Listening to precise sorts of song notes at precise instances of the day has been proven to be beneficial in preserving top health. Indian songs, with its many Ragas, is understood to be specially healing value. The healing strength of song emanates from the resonance of sure ragas on hormonal and glandular capabilities which produce secretions that preserve the frame balanced and contamination free. This work describes the influence of music therapy on brain for different Indian music. The results showed that the music therapy causes improvement for subject’s blood pressure Improvement over a period of three months’ time.

Cоюз кино и музыки: о первом киномузыкальном фестивале «KINOREX» в контексте проблемы взаимодействия музыки и кино начала XXI века

Professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Grigoriy R. Konson interviews the rector of the Gnesins Russian Academy of Music, professor Aleksander S. Ryzhinskiy. The interview focuses on how film directors and composers see the role of music in films, with music considered as a twofold phenomenon: film score as such and film scores presented at the First KINOREX Film Music Festival. In the preamble, the interlocutors review current trends in film music. In this vein, they touch upon the psychological concept of the French cinematography, interpretation of the Indian song tradition in endowing films with musicality, Baroque music and modern performance practices applied in the 20th century cinema dramaturgy, the Hollywood way of soundtrack composition as a dominating model in the world cinema, and studies devoted to the works of Alfred Schnittke and Thomas Newman. Based on these examples, the interlocutors come to the conclusion that at the heart of different approaches to the film music composition there must be an organic commonality of views of the film director and the composer. Beyond that, a binding force in the process is the reliance on classical traditions of their artistic interaction: expressing the very essence of a film’s drama through music. The discussion of the First KINOREX Film Music Festival, which was held by the Gnesins Russian Academy of Music in April 2021, naturally fits into this humanistic concept. Analyzing the winning project created by director Nadezhda Shibalova and composer Nikita Yamov, the authors of the interview come to the conclusion that the musical fabric of the screen work reveals the fundamental role of music as an analogue of the film’s ethical idea, which increases the cognitive capacity of the content.

ОЛИГОТОНИКА И ХАЗМАТОНИКА В ТРАДИЦИОННЫХ ПЕСНЯХ СЕВЕРОАМЕРИКАНСКИХ ИНДЕЙЦЕВ (к 145-й годовщине со дня рождения Натали Кёртис)

The article is dedicated to the memory of the famous American ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875–1921), who made a significant contribution to the study of traditional music of North American Indians. This is the first experience in Russian musicology that addresses the theoretical issues of studying Native American vocal music. The main research problem of the article is the identification of the basic qualities of oligotonics and chasmatonics in traditional songs of North American Indians by the example of expeditionary records of Natalie Curtis. The author reveals that unichords, dichords and trichords, both in themselves and in their combinations, have semantic, symbolic and structure- forming significance for the formation of intonational structure of traditional Indian songs (lullaby, medicine, song-insert in mythological legend). The methodological base was formed by approaches of modern ethnomusicology (analysis of song genres of traditional ethnic music) and music theory (theory of mode and modal archetypes).

Interpreter of Hinduism to the West? Sir Edwin Arnold’s (Re)Presentations of Hindu Texts and their Reception

Brooks Wright's 1957 biography of Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) was entitled Interpreter of Buddhism to the West. This reflects the fact that Arnold's best known work is The Light of Asia, telling the life story of the Buddha. His role in disseminating Buddhist ideas (or ideas about Buddhism), both through the extraordinary success of The Light of Asia and through other activities, both journalistic and campaigning, that acquired prominence because of his high public profile, has led commentators to consider his legacy first and foremost in relation to Buddhism. However, Arnold played a similar part in respect of Hinduism. Concentrating on Indian Idylls, containing episodes from the Mahabharata; The Indian Song of Songs, a version of the Gitagovinda; and The Song Celestial, a version of the Bhagavad-Gita, together with treatments of upanisadic literature in The Secret of Death and Lotus and Jewel, this article has three main sections. First, there is an overview of the Victorian era in order to identify evidence of interest in, and enthusiasm for, the East, particularly India and Hinduism. Second, there is a more detailed discussion of knowledge of Hinduism in various fora, including the academic, located in the context of the primacy accorded to scripture in a textual model of religion. Third, there is an examination of the nature and purpose of translation, because it was primarily as a translator, albeit avowedly in a poetic and popular style, that Arnold conceptualized, or at least articulated, his own purpose and agenda. While it is notoriously difficult to assess the impact of any author or publication, it is concluded that Arnold's contribution to the 'Easternization' of the West encompassed Hinduism as well as Buddhism.

Americanization on Native Terms: The Society of American Indians, Citizenship Debates, and Tropes of "Racial Difference"

Americanization on Native Terms:The Society of American Indians, Citizenship Debates, and Tropes of "Racial Difference" Cristina Stanciu (bio) "America" IN OCTOBER 1911 local newspapers in Columbus, Ohio, reported on an unprecedented gathering of Native Americans. The Society of American Indians (SAI) met strategically in Columbus on Columbus Day, an irony the local newspapers failed to notice; but they did report on meetings with local and national dignitaries, as well as an evening of entertainment consisting of "Indian songs and dances and the portrayal of scenes from Indian life."1 The SAI was also greeted by local chapters of patriotic organizations such as the Ohio Daughters of Pocahontas and the Improved Order of Red Men, which presented the attendees with small American flags as souvenirs. This effervescence of American patriotism reached its peak when the SAI members were reported singing the song "America" on top of a mound, followed by "an impromptu war dance on the same elevation."2 As the SAI grew in the following years, it went on to stage its own Native pageants, a growing national attraction, as US nativism was also on the rise.3 But why would a group of professional, articulate Native men and women, wearing citizens' clothing, intone "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," a song so antithetical to the scope of the SAI—"the revival of the natural pride of origin, the pride of the race"—as penned by its first president, Reverend Sherman Coolidge?4 For students of Native history, it is hard, although not impossible, to imagine a few Native men doing a war dance on top of a sacred mound during the SAI's first meeting in Columbus, Ohio. But the Native men and women gathered on the campus of Ohio State University in 1911 had different wars to wage with white America, and their decision to sing a patriotic song before dancing a traditional dance was perhaps indicative of their strategic use of public spaces and their performance on multiple local and national scenes. Contemporary Native critics like Osage literary critic Robert Warrior find this image troublesome, and rightly so; in a special issue dedicated to the SAI's one hundredth anniversary, Warrior argued that, "[a]propos their [End Page 111] widely shared belief in the passing by the wayside of older forms of Indianness, we could caption this photo, ironically, 'The End of History.'" Granted that such concerns are warranted, especially when raised by contemporary Native intellectual historians working through the legacy of an older Native organization for contemporary Native communities, not all the Native people present at the first meeting of the SAI shared the belief in the passing of "older forms of Indianness." Oneida SAI founding member Laura Cornelius Kellogg claimed unambiguously, "I'm not the new Indian; I'm the old Indian adjusted to new conditions" in an attempt to bridge the Old with the New.5 If we think about this episode in the larger context of the early twentieth-century ideological pressures of the Americanization movement, we may also read the irony of this performance and strategic use of Americanness in less apocalyptic terms than Robert Warrior. Yes, the patriotic local societies welcomed the Native intellectual elite to Columbus by presenting them with American flags. However, if we consider the growing numbers of national patriotic societies and nationalist pageants in the first decades of the twentieth century, flag exercises, and other public displays of patriotism triggered by the so-called immigrant invasion and an exacerbated nativism, we could construe this episode as a necessary simultaneous reaffirmation of American nationalism and emergent Native nationalism in the SAI members' performance of both American and Native allegiances—a form of what historian Jeffrey Mirel calls "patriotic pluralism," which I interpret to mean competing nationalisms in a Native context: on the one hand, a deep commitment and allegiance to Native nations; on the other, a strategic commitment to the settler nation.6 As I show throughout this article, the Red Progressives used the immigrant analogy as a common strategy to argue for Indian citizenship: The immigrant can easily become a citizen; why not the Indian? The most politically active and savvy members of the SAI argued for...

Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902–1918. American Popular Music Series. By Michael A. Amundson

Music historians generally agree that the first recording of a western or “cowboy” song was “Jesse James” by concert singer Bentley Ball in 1919, while Carl Sprague, who waxed “When the Work’s All Done this Fall” in 1925, was the first authentic cowboy to record. In this new book, Michael A. Amundson explores the phonograph industry’s earlier recordings of western-themed material. This material sprang from the pens of professional songwriters based in New York and the performances were by vaudeville performers such as Billy Murray, Ada Jones, and Len Spencer, none of whom had experience in the West beyond singing in regional theaters. Talking Machine West is divided into three sections. The first discusses the author’s engagement with popular music history, exploring early recording equipment and processes with a focus on cylinder recordings. Next, Amundson provides an overview of the early recording industry, the idea of the West in popular culture, and places western themed recordings within that context. Important factors in emergence of popular images of the West are Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, western tourism, and influence of Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner. Equally important in the writing of popular music was the rise of blackface minstrel and ethnic imagery. These factors merge into an examination of the songs and recordings themselves. Amundson is particularly adept at outlining the types of songs represented in the catalogue “including cowboy poetry, western skits, cowboy songs, love songs, Indian songs, Wild West show songs, cowgirl songs, and both cowboy and Indian ragtime dance songs” (p. 45). Racial and ethnic attitudes, common on the early twentieth-century American stage, find discussion and show that Western compositions were not immune to those trends.

Alam Pikir Masyarakat Madura yang Terepresentasikan Melalui Lagu Ta’ Andi’ Rokok (Cia-Cia)

Ta’ Andi’ Rokok (Cia-cia) is a Madurese dangdut song adaptated from Indian song entitledChaiyya-Chaiyya. The song lyrics are very infl uenced by the conception or perspective ofthe creator. This reasearch aims to understand paradigm of Madurese people representedthrough the song by using Foucault’s theory. The reasearch uses multidiscipline approachesby involving several different studies in order to reach comprehensive understanding.The research showsthat the Cia-cia song contains the discourse that consists of a groupof statements (speech) of debt and humour. Through the statements, the kinship andcharacteristic model of Madurese people may be taken as conclusion. Some discourse thenconstruct some dominant subjects which are,tarétan (cousins), kanca tatanggâ (neighbour),kanca main (friends), oréng teggâs (fi rm person), oréng sabbâr (patient person), humourist,and honest person. While some subordinate subjects are Bhâlâ Jâuh (extended family),moneylender, the other, oréng lécak (the indecisive), temperamental person, serious person,and deceitful.

Battles, Syntheses, Revisions, and Prophecies: Histories and Modernities in the Phoenix Indian School's <em>Native American</em>, 1901–1916

Battles, Syntheses, Revisions, and PropheciesHistories and Modernities in the Phoenix Indian School's Native American, 1901–1916 Jennifer Bess (bio) Ever since the schools have been established and the Indians have come under the control of the government, most all have dropped our ways and have accepted the white man's ways. Today our race has given up not only its superstitious customs but also many of its legends and beautiful songs which we love so well. They are of great value to us because they tell of the happiness, joys, longings and love of our people, as well as their hard struggles. Today in our homes some of us are not allowed to sing the Indian songs. If we do we are thought to be very impolite or rude. They prefer to hear us sing the English songs. Had the white people let the Pima have their dances and songs, like other tribes, the songs would be of more value to them than the white man's. Lately the white people have begun to realize the beauty of our songs and legends and to urge us to write them. —Emily Allison (Pima) in The Native American, 19091 Emily Allison's account of the Pima (Akimel O'odham) legend of Hauk, the witch of the mountain, provides its audience with much more than a story of its frightening protagonist: in the lengthy metanarrative cited above, Allison challenges the assimilationist agenda of the federal Indian boarding schools with the value she finds intrinsic to Indigenous ways of knowing. Published in the Phoenix Indian School's carefully edited periodical, The Native American, commencement speeches such as Allison's often reflect what James Scott calls the public transcript, which he defines as a "self-portrait of the dominant elites," in this case, validating the successes and righteousness of the Indian Office (18). Yet speeches like Allison's also confront the authority of this master narrative. Addressing [End Page 29] audiences composed of Indian Office employees, local Anglo residents, Phoenix Indian School alumni/ae, and a multitribal student body, she and her peers engaged in acts of resistance by defining their identities as boarding school students in ways that, to adapt a phrase from Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks, connected new ideas to their own interests and objectives under conditions beyond their control (70). While few went on to become activists, community leaders such as George Webb (Pima, graduated in 1912) and Peter Blaine (Tohono O'odham, attended 1915–16), or widely read memoirists such as Webb and Anna Moore Shaw (Pima, graduated in 1916), all of them used their ability to read and write English to "transform the discourses into which they enter[ed]" and to critique and reinterpret Anglocentric historiography and its ethos of cultural superiority (Katanski 9). Scholarship on the federal boarding schools has acknowledged the Carlisle Indian Industrial School's Red Man as a model instrument of propaganda and as a record of student learning. Daniel Littlefield and James Parins's reference work details what little context is known regarding the editorial control, student contributions, and printing process of The Red Man and its many heirs. Amelia Katanski, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, and Beth Haller deepen contemporary understanding of the forms of coercion and censorship typifying boarding school publications, which forced student to reproduce stereotypes supporting white supremacist ideologies. The recent studies of Cristina Stanciu and Amanda Zink add that, while "ventriloquizing institutional rhetoric" (Stanciu 37), students also managed to assert their individual and communal identities, their hopes for the future, and, in the words of Robert Allen Warrior, their "intellectual sovereignty" on the pages of school publications (Tribal Secrets 98). In K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa McCarty's terms, Phoenix Indian School commencement speeches and their publication supplied a modest "safety zone" where students were able to articulate their knowledge of Native American history, oral traditions, and local geography in "carved out spaces of Indian-ness" (74, 90). Accordingly, the following close reading of commencement speeches' engagement with these topics reveals the extent to which the students were able to stop seeing "through the eyes of a prejudiced white" and express "pride in our own Indian blood...

A Study on Feature Selection and Classification Techniques of Indian Music

In this paper we present the effect of four feature selection algorithms namely genetic algorithm, Forward feature selection, information gain and correlation based on four different classifiers (Decision tree C4.5, K-Nearest neighbors, neural network and support vector machine). The feature sets used in this paper are extracted features from the preprocessed songs using MIR Toolbox in MATLAB, which encompass rhythm based, timbre based, pitch based, tonality based and dynamic features. Feature vectors are extracted from music segments from first 30 seconds and last thirty seconds of the music signal (time-decomposition). Experiments were carried out on the three dominant genres of Indian music: Carnatic, Hindustani and Bollywood. Our dataset is small with 290 songs, trimmed to extract the first and the last 30 second percepts. As pure Carnatic and Hindustani music being more prevalent in traditional settings, have limited work done to make their digital copies available but the collection of music we have used consists of songs of some of the most profound singers contributing to each of these genres. For high-dimensional feature sets, the feature selection provides a compact but discriminative feature subset which has an interesting trade-off between classification accuracy and computational effort. The experimental results have shown that the common features selected by each of the feature selection algorithms with respect to classifiers and percentage of classification accuracies for all the classification algorithms. Furthermore, it can be observed from our experiment that information gain based feature selection gives better and consistent accuracies than other feature selection algorithms and Neural network and SVM classifiers are the best suited classifiers for Indian Song dataset.

Willa Cather and “Solastalgia”: Yearning for a Lost, Invented Landscape

Abstract This essay examines Willa Cather's unpublished, undated poem “Pueblo Indian Song,” a typescript pinned to the verso of the half title page of Cather's personal copy of the 1903 edition of April Twilights. It makes a case that the poem was composed in about 1925, based on letters, travel diaries, and her fictional vocabulary. The poem places Cather's aesthetic in the realm of cultural alterity onto which she can project a sexual persona that she otherwise restricts to the privacy and intimacy of her relationship with Edith Lewis. The poem belies Cather's solastalgia, a word that initially has to do with landscape and ecological disruption but comes to be identified with personal identity and displacement of sexual identity.

Willa Cather and “Solastalgia”: Yearning for a Lost, Invented Landscape

Abstract This essay examines Willa Cather's unpublished, undated poem “Pueblo Indian Song,” a typescript pinned to the verso of the half title page of Cather's personal copy of the 1903 edition of April Twilights. It makes a case that the poem was composed in about 1925, based on letters, travel diaries, and her fictional vocabulary. The poem places Cather's aesthetic in the realm of cultural alterity onto which she can project a sexual persona that she otherwise restricts to the privacy and intimacy of her relationship with Edith Lewis. The poem belies Cather's solastalgia, a word that initially has to do with landscape and ecological disruption but comes to be identified with personal identity and displacement of sexual identity.

Performing ‘Soviet’ film classics: Tajik Jimmy and the aural remnants of Indian cinema

ABSTRACTThe Indian film Disco Dancer (Subhash, 1982), which was wildly popular in the Soviet Union in 1984, tells the success story of Anil, a destitute child who dreams of fame. Anil moves to the city, is discovered by an agent, and is branded as the disco star Jimmy. More than twenty years later, Baimurat Allaberiev, a guest worker from Tajikistan, has enacted this plot by performing film songs from Disco Dancer. Uploading his performances on media-streaming hosts under the name Tajik Jimmy, Allaberiev achieved notoriety, parlaying his online success into live concert performances in Moscow and St Petersburg. The reappearance of Disco Dancer songs is by no means a uniquely Russian phenomenon. However, these texts serve as an appropriate departure point to explore the role of amateur online media in contemporary post-Soviet culture. The reworking of Indian film songs more than twenty years after the film's original screenings recalls not only the popularity of the Indian film in the Soviet Union, but also conflates it with many other aspects of Soviet and post-Soviet life. An entangled web of meaning negotiates the divides between professional and amateur performance, the social plights of guest workers and their cinematic representations, and finally, the modes of circulation between old and new media formats.

Feathered footsteps: mythologizing and ritualizing Black Indian processions in New Orleans

This essay explores intersections between the ritual veneration of stereotypified Native American spirit figures by American Spiritualists and the performative traditions of ‘Masking Indian’ practised by urban African Americans in New Orleans' Mardi Gras processions. The author examines the ways in which communities in New Orleans, of both sacred and secular identity, employ images of Native Americans as icons of spiritual power and presence. This essay suggests some ways in which this process constitutes an instance of co-narration, in which clergy and congregants of Spiritualist/Spiritual churches – whose narratives of the Indian spirits find expression through interlacing oral and ritual performances – have helped to establish a sacred dimension for Indian processions in New Orleans, adding an overtly spiritual note to otherwise secular ‘rites of territory repossessed’. Through an examination of the community response to the death of Big Chief Allison ‘Tootie’ Montana, and the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in 2006, the article explores the ways in which Indian icons and imagery still stand for many New Orleanians as powerful signs of something in the soul that, to paraphrase a popular Mardi Gras Indian song, won't kneel and won't bow down.

Use of genetic algorithms for Indian music mixing

Music has changed and evolved through time and time tells that it has always been for the better. In our study, we have implemented Genetic Algorithms for the generation of music by music mixing to provide willing music lovers, the first step to personalize music to suit their liking. A music loop library, containing a list of all tentative loops which are to be used in the remix production alongwith the parameters which define them, is used for this purpose. A loop is an endless band of tape or music allowing continuous repetition. These loops cover all the major music instrument families with particular emphasis on Indian musical instruments as they have been extracted from Indian songs after careful observation using a sound editor. The combinations of different loops for the analysis is run through genetic algorithms. Some important parameters of a loop from the point of view of music mixing are: Depth, BPM (beats per minute), length of the loop and type of the instrument. A fitness function is calculated for the genetic algorithm to rank various combinations of loops for the next generation. The best loop combination can be selected out of the final set of population.

FRACTAL ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT EASTERN AND WESTERN MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

In this paper, we attempt musical analysis by measuring fractal dimension (D) of musical pieces played by several musical instruments. We collected solo performances of popular instruments of Western and Eastern origin as samples. We attempted usual spectral analysis of the selected clips to observe peaks of fundamental and harmonics in frequency regime. After appropriate processing, we converted them into time series data sets and computed their fractal dimension. Based on our results, we conclude that instrumental musical sounds may have higher Ds than those computed from vocal performances of different types of Indian songs.

Classification of Different Indian Songs Based on Fractal Analysis

In this paper some of the prevailing classifications of Indian songs are quantified by measuring their fractal dimension. Samples were collected from three categories: Classical, Semiclassical, and Light. After appropriate processing, the samples were converted into time series datasets and their fractal dimension was computed. Based on these results, an online method for classification is offered.

Charles Koechlin, Catherine Urner, and the Shatto-Urner Manuscript Collection at the University of California, Berkeley

After the death of the organist Charles Shatto on New Year's Day 1983, the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) inherited a substantial collection of manuscripts by Shatto himself, his wife Catherine Urner (1891-1942), and their composition teacher and mentor, Charles Koechlin (1867-1950). This article refers mainly to the Koechlin part of this archive, which I studied in detail after being first asked to assess it by John Emerson in 1984. An abbreviated checklist (with index) can be found in an appendix, and the manuscripts in question are now housed in the new Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at Berkeley. But we should remember that, without Charles Shatto, there would have been no archive to classify, so I am sure we are all deeply grateful to him. The Urner part of the archive, which is presently being digitized at the F. Eugene Miller Foundation offices under the direction of Michael Meadway, contains over eighty songs by Catherine (ten of which were published in Paris by Maurice Senart in 1928), many American Indian songs, twenty-four choral works, eight orchestral works (including The Bride of a God, written in collaboration with Koechlin in 1929), seventy-four piano, and forty-three organ pieces, and thirty chamber works. Charles Shatto's arrangements of his wife's music are also included in the archive. Koechlin's status as a composer has risen considerably over the last decade or so, thanks largely to the many superb compact disc recordings by conductors such as David Zinman, Leif Segerstam, and Heinz Holliger. Indeed, his complex and visionary symphonic poems need repeated hearings before they can be fully appreciated. During his lifetime, Koechlin suffered from the vicious circle that music must first be known to be played, and vice versa, and the prevailing quest for unknown pieces by great composers at the expense of great pieces by unknown composers has not helped his case. Neither has the substantial [End Page 48] body of potentially worthy French composers who were Koechlin's contemporaries and, in most cases, friends. Although Koechlin worked constantly to get his music performed, his brief spate of publications and critical recognition in the early 1920s was overshadowed by his growing reputation as a teacher and pedagogue by the early 1930s. In 1942 the equally visionary writer Wilfrid Mellers championed him as being "among the select number of contemporary composers who really matter."1 His astute prophecy came true, for Koechlin is now rated alongside Debussy (whose ballet Khamma he orchestrated in 1912-13) as an independent and original contributor to the development of modern French music. He was a pioneer of polytonality and polymodality from the early 1900s onwards, besides being a master contrapuntist whose idol was J. S. Bach. But above all, it was the sheer scale, luminous orchestration, and the enduring rhythmic freshness of his visionary symphonic works that have justified his elevation. Koechlin's reevaluation has also been helped by his devoted offspring, especially Madeleine and Yves Koechlin; by Otfrid Nies, who has established an archive of his music and writings in Kassel, Germany;2 and perhaps a little by my own monograph on his life and works. This was originally written at the request of Professor Charles Cushing of UCB, and has since been published by Harwood Academic Publishers.3 Whilst on the subject of books, I must also recommend Barbara Urner Johnson's superb new monograph on her aunt, entitled Catherine Urner andCharles Koechlin: A Musical Affaire.4 Through her wide-ranging research, and her access for the first time to the full range of correspondence between the two composers, she has uncovered a story of courage, devotion, and self-sacrifice that has shed new light on Koechlin, and on the musical scene in Paris and California in the 1920s and 1930s. Her book has also provided a unique perspective on the artistic struggle of a woman composer...

Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism

This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the South. W.J. Cash's 1941 observation that "there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them" is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its "lost cause" tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public tituals - parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions - that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study - anthropology, geography, history, and literature - to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically "Solid South." Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich "creole" of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.

Southern heritage on display: public ritual and ethnic diversity within southern regionalism

This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the W.J. Cash's 1941 observation that there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its lost cause tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public tituals - parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions - that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study - anthropology, geography, history, and literature - to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically Solid South. Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich creole of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.

"Real" Indian Songs: The Society of American Indians and the Use of Native American Culture as a Means of Reform

"Real" Indian Songs: The Society of American Indians and the Use of Native American Culture as a Means of Reform