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Zusatztext Jim Leary has written a rich masterpiece about people and music! cultural processes! and meanings in a part of America long misunderstood or ignored. His treatment of the Goose Island Ramblers is as engaging as their personalities and the music they play from neighborhood bars to country fairs ...Full of the humor of the real folks from places defined too often by stereotypes! Polkabilly is a fine personal and musical history. Informationen zum Autor James P. Leary is a professor of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he also serves as director of the Folklore Program and co-director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. A native of northern Wisconsin, he has conducted field research on the folklore of diverse cultural groups in America's Upper Midwest for more than thirty years and is author of Minnesota Polka,Yodeling in Dairyland, Wisconsin Folklore, and So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest. Klappentext A freewheeling blend of continental European folk music and the songs! tunes! and dances of Anglo and Celtic immigrants! polkabilly has enthralled American musicians and dancers since the mid-19th century. From West Virginia coal camps and east Texas farms to the Canadian prairies andAmerica's Upper Midwest! scores of groups have wed squeezeboxes with string bands! hoe downs with hambos! and sentimental Southern balladry with comic "up north" broken-English comedy! to create a new and uniquely American sound. The Goose Island Ramblers played as a house band for a local tavern in Madison! Wisconsin from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. The group epitomized the polkabilly sound with their wild mixture of Norwegian fiddle tunes! Irish jigs! Slovenian polkas! Swiss yodels! old time hillbilly songs! "Scandihoovian" and "Dutchman" dialect ditties! frost-bitten Hawaiian marches! and novelty numbers on the electric toilet plunger. In this original study! James P. Leary illustrates how the Ramblers' multiethnic music combined both local and popular traditions! and how their eclectic repertoirechallenges prevailing definitions of American folk music. He thus offers the first comprehensive examination of the Upper Midwest's folk musical traditions within the larger context of American life and culture. Impeccably researched! richly detailed and illustrated! and accompanied by a compact disc of interviews and performances! James P. Leary's Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music creates an unforgettable portrait of a polkabilly band and its world. Zusammenfassung While the Goose Island Ramblers are a remarkable group, they are entirely representative of the many bands who, from the 1920s through the 90s have synthesised an array of 'foreign', 'American' folk, popular, and hillbilly musical strains to entertain rural, small town, working class audiences throughout the midwest....
