Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music.(Review)

By Benjamin Filene. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. [ix, 325 p. ISBN 0-8078-2550-6 (cloth); 0-8078-4862-X (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

Benjamin Filene's strong addition to the series Cultural Studies of the United States from the University of North Carolina Press reveals just how wide a net students in American studies cast these days. A graduate of Yale University's American studies doctoral program, Filene writes that he "benefited greatly from the searching insights and friendly criticism of a group of peers at Yale that met to discuss how to incorporate music into cultural history" (p. x). One of his peers, Suzanne Smith, turned her dissertation into a well-received book about Motown, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Perhaps more of them will follow in the footsteps of Filene and Smith.

It is significant that, with the exception of anthropologist John Szwed, who teaches two courses that are cross-listed with music, none of the scholars Filene turned to at Yale were members of its music department. This fact underscores the sad reality that Yale University is much like the rest of academia, where a direct dialogue between music and American studies is meager at best. Irrespective of the vagaries that often compartmentalize the academic world, Filene has written a first-class interdisciplinary study that speaks not only to musicologists but also to scholars in cultural history, southern studies, folklore, anthropology, and popular culture, who are at least occasionally represented in American studies departments or programs.

Although one finds little original research per se in Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, its essential and core strengths are twofold. First, the author offers original, well-reasoned, and interesting interpretations and analyses of familiar topics that range from early-twentieths-century ballad collecting to the impact of Bob Dylan on American cultural and musical ...