Presidential election, 2016

[Eric the Green]

(01-04-2017, 04:27 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 11:38 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 04:38 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: But just as I would not push Johann Sebastian Bach, a part of my culture, upon black people (even if  his music is poignant and rhythmically-powerful), neither would I push his music in Appalachia. Multiculturalism, if it is to have meaning, must include respect for the home-spun culture of Appalachia and the Ozarks as well as of white cultural elites and middle-class minorities.

Isn't the fiddle a traditional instrument of Appalachia?  Bach wrote plenty of good music for the fiddle.  You don't have to push it, but there's no reason for cultural apartheid, either.

On that we agree, Warren.

I suppose Appalachians could appreciate that street violinist I posted not long ago here, playing the "Chaconne." And the famous Prelude is ubiquitous.

And the crossover goes both ways. Who could be more representative of "blue" culture than liberal activist and protest folksinger Pete Seeger from New York, who learned to play his primary instrument the banjo from his friends in Appalachia, and brought to life a lot of folk music generated in red states?

"During the summer of 1936, while traveling with his father and stepmother, Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville, organized by local folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom Charles Seeger had hired for Farm Resettlement music projects.[24] The festival took place in a covered baseball field. There the Seegers:

watched square-dance teams from Bear Wallow, Happy Hollow, Cane Creek, Spooks Branch, Cheoah Valley, Bull Creek, and Soco Gap; heard the five-string banjo player Samantha Bumgarner; and family string bands, including a group of Indians from the Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads. They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field, hearing music being made there as well. As Lunsford's daughter would later recall, those country people "held the riches that Dad had discovered. They could sing, fiddle, pick the banjos, and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains. I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park."[25]

For the Seegers, experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a "conversion experience". Pete was deeply affected and, after learning basic strokes from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger