Violeta Parra: Her Life, Work, and Legacy

Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile. Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn. Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.

Sweet Thing

Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form is a historical and analytical study of one of the most productive and enduring shared musical resources in North American vernacular music. Many of us learn the form as children, when we sing “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,” and we hear it frequently in popular music, but usually without realizing that this poetic and rhythmic pattern has been penetrating the minds of musicians and listeners for centuries. The antecedents of the form date back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England, and appear in seventeenth-century English popular music; eighteenth-century English and American broadside balladry; nineteenth-century American folk hymnody, popular song, gospel hymnody, and ragtime; and American folk repertoire collected in the early twentieth century. It continued to generate many songs in early twentieth-century popular genres, including blues, country, and gospel music, through which it entered into many postwar popular genres like rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, country pop, the folk revival, and rock music. This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the centuries-long history of the scheme, and defines its musical parameters in twentieth-century popular music.

Bluegrass Music and Urban Appalachian Identity in Cincinnati

Neighborhood cultural and political development in 1960s and 1970s Cincinnati coalesced around music, a positive expression of urban Appalachian culture. United Appalachian Cincinnati embraced folk-revival bluegrass and established new advocacy. Mike Maloney, Ernie Mynatt, and Stuart Faber helped Appalachians receive federal money via agencies addressing urban issues. Main Street Bible Center, Appalachian Identity Center, and the Appalachian Heritage Room were early manifestations. The Urban Appalachian Council emerged in 1974. Earl Taylor was lionized as the “authentic” bluegrass musician. After 1960, musicians honed their skills to his music at Ken-Mill Café. In the early 1970s the Katie Laur Band played in schools. Cincinnati’s Appalachian Festival—begun in 1970—highlighted positive aspects of mountain culture, including music and crafts.

The American Folk Revival Comes to North Carolina

During the big folk revival, one of the acts to emerge was blind guitarist Arthel “Doc” Watson. He became a legendary and much-beloved figure on the folk circuit, with a highly influential style of flat-picking, even though he himself always claimed to be nothing special. Gone since 2012, Watson’s influence lives on through MerleFest, the annual music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, that he started in the 1980s to honor his late son and accompanist Merle Watson.

“An Evening with Salvador Allende”: del hito en suspensión a la suspensión del hito

Mediante el análisis de un evento musical pionero de la solidaridad internacional con Chile tras el Golpe de 1973, el presente artículo busca aproximarse a los mecanismos de omisión que surgen ante la falta de una inscripción histórica concreta. La necesidad de trabajar esta memoria (Jelin, 2002), las paradojas del internacionalismo artístico ¬ investigadas por Giunta –particularmente, el que involucra a Latinoamérica y Estados Unidos– (2008), las comunidades musicales imaginadas (Born y Hesmondhalgh, 2000) de la Nueva Canción Chilena y el folk revival estadounidense, encarnadas en la relación de Víctor Jara y Phil Ochs, son los marcos que utilizamos para establecer la urgencia de poner en valor y tensionar este evento para así activar una red de otras acciones similares que aún no encuentran espacio en la actualidad.