Listen to the Mockingbird: American Folksongs and Popular Music Lyrics of the 19th Century: 130 (Green Integer) - Softcover

9781892295200: Listen to the Mockingbird: American Folksongs and Popular Music Lyrics of the 19th Century: 130 (Green Integer)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892295202 ISBN 13: 9781892295200

Publisher: Green Integer, 2006

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Synopsis:

This book reveals the vast range of the American people and their ways of living. This is a collection of 78 lyrics from American folksongs and popular music of the 19th century, tracing the hopes, dreams and surprising undertones of an adolescent country. America has always been a land of music. The pioneers sang to boost their spirits as they journeyed in a strange oppressive land. The natives sang to preserve their legacies as the last of their tribesmen died. Slaves called in secret tongues over lines of toiling backs, their lilting answers coding subversion in the rhythms of their tune. Douglas Messerli has gathered 78 lyrics of American folksongs and popular music from the 19th century, a period when the upheaval of 1778 had given way to the North-South divide, bitter disputes over human rights and the constitution and a fledgling national conscience that prevails today as the America we know and fear. Lyrics that exist in a frame of reference that contains all the elements of America - those that were there before the pioneers, and were destroyed in their passing; those that survived; and those created in the crusading convictions of the frontier pilgrims.

Some of these songs, particularly the African-American spirituals, the chanteys and the cowboy songs, are beautiful paeans to the American way of living. But the vast majority, especially the minstrel songs and the Civil War ballads, are often perverse in their racial humour and sexual undertones. Famous family favourites are revealed in their true colours - highly representative of the wild and open spaces of the American landscape and the minds of the people who conquered it.

About the Author:

Author of numerous works of poetry (most recently First Words), drama (under the name Kier Peters) and fiction, Messerli is the publisher of Green Integer.

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