Gioia Ted Gioia

Work Songs (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

All societies have relied on music to transform the experience of work. Song accompanied the farmer's labors, calmed the herder's flock, and set in motion the spinner's wheel. Today this tradition continues. Music blares on the shop floor; song accompanies transactions in the retail store; the radio keeps the trucker going on the long-distance haul.Now Ted Gioia, author of several acclaimed books on the history of jazz, tells the story of work songs from prehistoric times to the present. Vocation by vocation, Gioia focuses attention on the rhythms and melodies that have attended tasks such as the cultivation of crops, the raising and lowering of sails, the swinging of hammers, the felling of trees. In an engaging, conversational writing style, he synthesizes a breathtaking amount of material, not only from songbooks and recordings but also from travel literature, historical accounts, slave narratives, folklore, labor union writings, and more. He draws on all of these to describe how workers in societies around the world have used music to increase efficiency, measure time, relay commands, maintain focus, and alleviate drudgery.At the same time, Gioia emphasizes how work songs often soar beyond utilitarian functions. The heart-wringing laments of the prison chain gang, the sailor's shanties, the lumberjack's ballads, the field hollers and corn-shucking songs of the American South, the pearl-diving songs of the Persian Gulf, the rich mbube a cappella singing of South African miners: Who can listen to these and other songs borne of toil and hard labor without feeling their sweep and power? Ultimately, Work Songs, like its companion volume Healing Songs, is an impassioned tribute to the extraordinary capacity of music to enter into day-to-day lives, to address humanity's deepest concerns and most heartfelt needs.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. April 2006
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822387688
• Artikelnr.: 54923822

Autorenporträt

Ted Gioia, pianist, composer, and one of the founders of Stanford University’s Jazz Studies program, is the author of Healing Songs, also published by Duke University Press, as well as several celebrated books, including West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960. His book The History of Jazz was selected as one of the best books of the year by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times, and honored with the Bay Area Book Reviewers’ award for best nonfiction work of the year. His book The Imperfect Art won the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award and was named a Jazz Book of the Century by the Jazz Educators Journal. He has recorded several compact discs as a leader, including The End of the Open Road and Tango Cool.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface ix
Introduction: Why Work Songs? 1
1. The Hunter 13
2. The Cultivator 35
3. The Herder 63
4. Thread and Cloth 79
5. The New Rhythms of Work 99
6. Sea and Shore 115
7. The Lumberjack 137
8. Take This Hammer! 150
9. The Cowboy 169
10. The Miner 182
11. The Prisoner 200
12. The Labor Movement and Songs of Work 225
13. Music and the Modern Worker 242
Epologue: The Calling 256
Notes 261
Recommended Listening 305
Bibliography 313
Index 337