Roots Music

When we talk about roots music, what do we mean and what is at stake? Ethnomusicologist Mark F. DeWitt delves into these questions in an introductory bibliographic essay and selects twenty-one articles published between 1974 and 2010 that have advanced our knowledge and insight about this topic. The collection focuses on the nexus between popular musics in North America and Europe and the traditional musics that have been their foundation, on both the real and imagined connections between the present and past: Olly Wilson and Gerhard Kubik on African American music, Aaron Fox on country music, Eric Lott on blackface minstrelsy, Barry Shank on the elusive Bob Dylan. Works by Sara Cohen, Beverley Diamond, Peter Manuel, Svanibor Pettan and others range on subjects from the accordion, balladry and blues to Bulgarian folk orchestras, flamenco, gospel, Irish sessions, Native American women musicians, the Roma, Tex-Mex music and zydeco.

Mark F. DeWitt was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2010 and is the inaugural holder of the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music. Prior to that, he was an independent scholar and won the Society for Ethnomusicology's 2004 Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize for "innovative methods in the study of musical instruments", specifically for an article on the Cajun accordion. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley and has also taught at Ohio State University.