by John A. Lomax ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017
Essential reading for neo-folkies, alt-country fans, blues enthusiasts, and most other stripes of music lover.
A reissue, 70 years after the original publication, of the lightly learned, endlessly interesting memoir by pioneering folklorist Lomax.
“Home on the Range” is a definitively American song and one that most Americans know. We owe that knowledge, and the primacy of the simple but compelling song, to Lomax, who, following a bread-crumb trail of clues, found it embodied in a “drink dispenser, a Negro,” who shooed him away from the San Antonio railyard in which he was sleeping off a drunken binge but then, in the shade of a mesquite tree, sang it the next day. Recording the man on that day in 1908, Lomax had the music transcribed and, as he writes, it “has since won a high place as a typical Western folk tune.” Lomax popularized the song, but he did much more: he discovered Lead Belly on a work farm and helped introduce “Goodnight, Irene” into the national lexicon. Folklorically inclined readers—or, perhaps, fan of roots music—will thrill at Lomax’s accounts of how he happened across songs like “Whoopie ti-yi-yo,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “John Henry,” “Rock Island Line,” and “The Buffalo Skinners.” A case in point is Vera Tartt’s singing “Boll Weevil Blues” and then, on Lomax’s prompting for another blues song, delivering a haunting song: “Another man done gone / from de County Farm; / I didn’t know his name; / He had a long chain on….” Lomax’s wanderings across the country in search of cowboy songs, prison work songs, Appalachian ballads, and the like delivered a huge part of our folkloric repertoire, which were rare gems even then. As he notes, given their druthers, those cowboys expressed “frank disbelief in my undertaking and with little respect for the intelligence of a man undertaking the work of collecting such material” and would just as soon have listened to Tin Pan Alley tunes, but they gave up their knowledge anyway.
Essential reading for neo-folkies, alt-country fans, blues enthusiasts, and most other stripes of music lover.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1371-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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