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Subjects: Music

“Sweet Home Alabama”: Southern Culture and the American Search for Community

by Paul Harvey

“The baby boomers are having children (creating the so-called ‘baby boomlet’), returning to church in great numbers, and (not coincidentally) finding in country music (especially ‘suburban country’) a musical expression for their increasingly conservative tastes.” People magazine, that indispensable source for vital information on Americana, has once again sniffed out the Zeitgeist. In a recent »

Swampland Jewels: Louisiana’s Goldband Collection Comes to the University of North Carolina

by Steve Green

“A firsthand look at the artisitc and business records of south Louisiana’s Goldband enterprises.” In spring 1995 the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired a rich group of archival records from Goldband Recording Corporation, a small but important recording studio that has operated out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, »

Twistin’ at the Fais Do-Do: The Roots of South Louisiana’s Swamp Pop Music

by Shane K. Bernard

“Like zydeco and Cajun music, swamp pop is vital to the cultural identity of Cajun and Creole country.” Swamp pop music is a rhythm and blues idiom that combines elements of New Orleans rhythm and blues, country and western, and Cajun and black Creole music. Highly emotional, colorful lyrics, tripleting honky-tonk pianos, bellowing horn sections, »

“Make Heaven’s Portals Ring”: Shape-Note Singing

by Gavin James Campbell

“By the last tune, singers have indeed made ‘heaven’s portals ring.’” In 1921 Herbert McNeill Poteat, professor of Latin at Wake Forest University, had heard enough: the abominable condition of southern hymnody must be corrected. Despite the large number of edifying denominational hymnals, he complained, the singing public seemed bent on supporting a horde of »