Overview

Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal the process of how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America’s music. Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States through its commercial promotion and presentation through much of the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for example, spawned such items as a candy bar, pinball machine, bath powder, paper dolls, Halloween costumes, and beach towels. The almost five hundred images in Selling Folk Music present a new way to catalog the history of folk music while highlighting the transformative nature of the genre. Following the detailed introduction on the history of folk music, illustrations from commercial products make up the bulk of the work, presenting a colorful, complex history of folk music.

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9781628462159

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Almost 500 beautiful reproductions in their genuine colors are compiled here and give a vivid impression of roughly seventy years of folk music representations and commercial means of exploitation. Highly informative reading and a feast for folklorists and product designers alike. - Pop Culture Shelf

Author Information

Ronald D. Cohen, Gary, Indiana, is professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest. He has received numerous awards including a Grammy nomination for The Best of Broadside liner notes in 2001. His previous books include Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 - 1970; Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934 - 1997; and Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935 - 1945, published by University Press of Mississippi. David Bonner, Austin, Texas, is a copywriter. He received the ARSC Award for Excellence, Best History, in 2009 for his book Revolutionizing Children's Records: The Young People's Records and Children's Record Guild Series, 1946 - 1977.

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