If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture
2011; Western States Folklore Society; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-811X
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoIf Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture. By Robert Cantwell. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. xxvii + 264, notes, index. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)This book is a collection of essays written or published between 1992 and 2008 by of academia's most astute observers of vernacular traditions. The essays focus on music, festivity, and culture and underlying truth that we share, as a society, a collective life that far transcends even our most urgent concerns as persons, families, and communities (i). This book belongs on every folklorist's shelf, as well as on shelves of scholars and students of such kindred fields as American Studies, Social History, and Ethnomusicology.The essays reflect author's keen intellect, diverse interests, rich life experiences, and creative writing skills; thus, it is not a one size fits all compilation. I found chapters that touched on my provinces of knowledge (e.g. public folklore and vernacular music) absolutely brilliant, while some of those referencing top ics or literature outside my sphere were predictably challenging. Readers will find articulate discussion on a very wide range of issues relevant to folklore and culture. Each essay excavates a richness of meaning in folklore materials that goes far beyond superficial discussion. The essays also are written in a delectable narrative style that usually sets a story up with point of reference and artfully segues to or several analogous referent(s). The book is divided into three parts: first focuses on individual's aesthetics; second offers insight into festival events; and third addresses broader issues of social theory. This review offers brief commentary on and description of each chapter.Chapter One explores how humans find and describe meaning in music events. Cantwell uses several songs, including Canal Street Blues, to keenly deconstruct multiple layers of meaning coming from such disparate sources as personal history, memory, cultural contexts, and melodic and narrative structures. This chapter is of finest pieces of writing about music that I've ever read. Chapter Two looks at Harry Smith's groundbreaking 1952 re-release Anthology of American Folk Music as both an important cultural document and an impressionistic art form in itself. Chapter Three addresses issues surrounding interplay between human inquiry and technology. He writes, is well to have outdone ourselves with our machines; but to produce anything worth knowing, we must first find out what we don't know (51). The last chapter of first section explores shifting paradigms of knowledge. Cantwell notes that the real subject. . . is attention itself. . . with reference to what we inherit, cognitively, from intellectual revolutions of seventeenth century (xx). It is Cantwell's most effective chapter in describing how major meta-currents or paradigmatic structures in our cultural and social environment relate to individual and group experience.The second section looks at three festival events, actual and imaginary. Chapter Five takes an historical look at origin and development of folk festivals in United States, focusing primarily on Smithsonian Folk Festival and National Folk Festival. Published in 1992, this essay was of first to take a critical look at multiple contexts in which folklorists present traditional artists to public at festival events and thus sometimes reframe culture. …
Referência(s)