French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons

French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons
Author :
Publisher : Springer
Total Pages : 226
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783319974248
ISBN-13 : 3319974246
Rating : 4/5 (246 Downloads)

Book Synopsis French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons by : Patricia Peknik

Download or read book French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons written by Patricia Peknik and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it. From the first recordings in the 1920s to the transformation of the genre by the 1970s, the spread of this regional sound was driven by local, national, and international elites who saw the music’s traditions and performers in the context of larger social, political, and cultural developments, including the folk revival and the civil rights and ethnic revival movements. Patricia Peknik illuminates how the music’s history and meaning were interpreted by a variety of actors who brought the genre onto a national and global stage, revealing the many interests at work in the popularization of a regional music.


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