The Uses of the Folk introduces a new way of understanding the relationship between artists and populations designated as "the folk" and the scholars who define them. The issue begins with the premise that vernacular culture is an important tool through which communities assert their interests and identities within national and international politics. More than simply protecting or preserving traditions in the face of modernization, folk culture and state or academic interest in it gives many practitioners a rare but powerful voice within debates about modernity, national identity, and...

In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song...

In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song...