Sound Salon with Jim Leary
Sound Salon with Jim Leary
Folksongs of Another America: Lost Sounds of the Upper Midwest
Thursday, November 12, 2015
6:30 – 8:30pm
126 Memorial Library
728 State St., Madison, WI
Free and Open to the Public
Jim Leary will be interviewed by Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture director Henry Sapoznik about his book Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946. The talk will be followed by a screening of the publication’s accompanying 25-minute documentary film Alan Lomax Goes North, which was produced in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Association for Cultural Equity /Alan Lomax Archive. The event is free and open to the public. Mills Music Library will have a display at the event showing key archival holdings that figured significantly in this project, and the University of Wisconsin Press will have copies of Folksongs of Another America available for purchase and autographing.
is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Scandinavian Studies, a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a longtime friend and supporter of Mills Music Library.
Leary mined much of his material from The Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946, which includes work done by UW-Madison faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas as part of the Wisconsin Folk Music Recording Project, co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin and the Library of Congress during the summers of 1940, 1941, and 1946; and recordings collected by song catcher Sidney Robertson Cowell during the summer of 1937 for the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration.
The University of Wisconsin Press co-published Folksongs of Another America in August with Dust-to-Digital, in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Association for Cultural Equity /Alan Lomax Archive. It has been receiving rave reviews, and Leary has been busy promoting it. A recording of an interview Leary did with Veronica Rueckert for Wisconsin Public Radio in July is available to listen to (or download) here. Leary was recently interviewed by Simply Folk host Stephanie Elkins for Wisconsin Public Radio, and that segment is available to listen to (or download) here. Dust-to-Digital has made a playlist of selections from the CDs available on SoundCloud.
The Sound Salon is co-sponsored by the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, University of Wisconsin Press, the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries, Mills Music Library, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore, and Dust-to-Digital.