Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics

Edited By: Victor Kennedy

£61.99

The fifteen chapters here look at a variety of popular and folk music from around the world, with examples of British, Slovene, Chinese and American songs, poems and musicals, demonstrating how lyrics set to music can reflect, express and construct collective identities.

Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics looks at a variety of popular and folk music from around the world, with examples of…

Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics looks at a variety of popular and folk music from around the world, with examples of British, Slovene, Chinese and American songs, poems and musicals. Charles Taylor says that “it is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time”; one can make the same claim for music. Inexorably tied to time, to the measure of the beat, but freed from time by the polysemous potential of the words, song rapidly becomes “our” song, helping to cement memory and community, to make the past comprehensible and the present bearable. The authors of the fifteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how lyrics set to music can reflect, express and construct collective identities, both traditional and contemporary.

Victor Kennedy is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, having previously taught at the University of Toronto, Trent University and Humber College in Canada. He is the author of Strange Brew: Metaphors of Magic and Science in Rock Music (2013), and co-editor, with Michelle Gadpaille, of Words and Music (2013) and Symphony and Song (2016).

Michelle Gadpaille is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, having previously taught at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Canadian Short Story (1988) and As She Should Be: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing (2010), as well as co-editor of Words and Music (2013) and Symphony and Song (2016).

Carla Fusco, Katie Peterson