From: Notes | Date: March 1, 1994| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1994 Music Library Association, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Kip Lornell has attempted something that is probably impossible: to write a comprehensive introduction to American folk idioms. To use a baseball metaphor, he has hit a triple, but it is a triple in a game where home runs probably do not exist, at least through the efforts of a single player.

Lornell avers that "this book surveys the entire field" (p. xi), but even a quick perusal of the table of contents demonstrates that his main concern is with Anglo-American, African-American, and folk-derived commercial musics. In 245 pages of text, a mere thirty-seven (less than fifteen ...