Cajun Waltz

Download or read book Cajun Waltz written by Robert H. Patton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lyrics of a Cajun waltz may be dark as midnight with heartache and trouble, but still the music swings. The same goes for what happens after a shifty musician and a lonely shopgirl let destiny sweep them into an ill-suited marriage in swampy southwest Louisiana on the eve of the Depression. Love doesn’t much figure between Richie Bainard and Esther Block. They build a business together while dreaming opposite dreams of fulfillment. But like a gumbo simmering with peppers and spice, desires finally come to a boil. Three generations of the volatile clan grapple with the region’s economic struggles and racial tensions. The Bainard children, twins Bonnie and R.J. and their half-brother, Seth, pursue separate cravings for money, sex, and religion. The chase in each case runs off the rails thanks to an ex-marine with a soft heart and a brutish devotion, a dazzling young stepmother of mixed race and mixed motives, and a high school tart who proves tougher and truer than all of them. Ultimately it takes the mass devastation of Hurricane Audrey in 1957 to cleanse the reckless passions. The aftermath is painful but pure, like an old blues song that puts tears in your eyes while you dance.

Download or read book Cajun Dancing written by and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana written by Joshua Clegg Caffery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers

Download or read book Dance Music written by Nicolae Sfetcu and published by Nicolae Sfetcu. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dance music is music composed, played, or both, specifically to accompany dancing. It can be either the whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. Dance music works usually bear the name of the corresponding dance, e.g. waltzes, the tango, the bolero, the can-can, minuets, salsa, various kinds of jigs and the breakdown. Other dance forms include contradance, the merengue, the cha-cha-cha. Often it is difficult to know whether the name of the music came first or the name of the dance. Although dance is often accompanied by music, it can also be presented alone (Postmodern dance) or provide its own accompaniment (tap dance). Dance presented with music may or may not be performed in time to the music depending on the style of dance. Dance performed without music is said to be danced to its own rhythm. An introduction to classical and modern dance including hip hop dance, what is dance, and the dance music (electronic music, rock and roll, disco, house, techno, trance, etc.)

Download or read book The Mythology of Dance written by Harry Eiss and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-18 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lights dim and soon the theatre becomes dark. The audience conversations end with a few softly dissipating whispers, and the movie begins. Nina Sayers, a young ballerina, dances the prologue to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a ballet expressing a story drawn from Russian folk tales about a princess who has been turned into a White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her. However, this is not that ballet. This is the beginning of Black Swan, a controversial movie employing symbolism in a complex interweaving of dance and film to reveal the struggles and paradoxes of everything from a female rite-of-passage to questions about where artistic expression should demand self-sacrifice and whether such sacrifice is worth the price. The dance floor is the stage of life, the place where physical actions take on the symbolic meanings of mythology and express the deepest archetypes of the human mind. This book explores how dance gives shape to those human needs and how it reflects, and even creates, the maps of meaning and value that structure our lives. Though the volume looks at all the forms of dance, it focuses on three main categories in particular: religious, social, and artistic. Since the American Musical and subsequent Musical Videos have both reflected and influenced our current world, they receive the most space—such acclaimed performers as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, such important composers and lyrists as Gershwin, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein, Porter, Berlin, Webber, Bernstein, the Beatles, and the Who, and such choreographers as Graham, Balanchine, Robbins and Fosse are examined in particular detail.

Download or read book Ozarks Fiddle Music written by Drew Beisswenger and published by Mel Bay Publications. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which includes 308 tune transcriptions, is organized around individual fiddlers who typically combine Appalachian-style fiddling with rags, pop standards, Midwest-style fiddling and sometimes a touch of Western swing to create a style often identifiable as Ozarks. Thirty Ozarks fiddlers and their lives are highlighted with biographical sketches, photographs, and tune histories. Another 50 great Ozarks fiddlers are presented in a similar manner but with less detail. the book and accompanying CD (with 37 tunes, many recorded in the field) emphasize the older fiddling traditions connected to the square dances and community events more than those connected to bluegrass music and modern contest fiddling. Some of the tunes in the collection are old standbys such as Bile Them Cabbage while others such as Finley Creek Blues are unique to the region.The book is the result of years of work by two respected researchers. Gordon McCann won the prestigious Missouri Arts Award in 2002 for his decades of work documenting, studying, and accompanying Ozarks fiddle music. Drew Beisswenger, a music librarian at Missouri State University with a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, has published three other works about fiddle music and is known for his strong transcription and analysis skills.

Download or read book The Drummer's Bible written by Mick Berry and published by See Sharp Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated to include 50 additional grooves, this encyclopedic book and two-CD set contains more than 450 musical examples in standard notation, showing grooves and practical variations. Overviews of the history and development of almost all popular music styles are covered alongside innumerable helpful performance tips. The two accompanying CDs feature performances of nearly 200 of the grooves, including every primary style example, all performed both with and without a click track. Styles covered include blues, rock, jazz, reggae, country, klezmer, ska, samba, punk, surf, heavy metal, latin rock, and funk; virtually every style a performing drummer will ever need to play is in there. This revised second edition also includes an updated bibliography and discography, as well as more historical information about the individual styles.