American Music Review
Vol. XLI, No. 1, Fall 2011
By Jeffrey Taylor
As the Occupy Wall Street movement has unfolded here in New York, many of us have wondered if the time-honored American tradition of protest music would find a home there. With Woody Guthrie very much on our minds these days (see below), recent re- ports of the performance of his songs by protestors have reminded us that if alive he would probably be firmly planted in the center of Zuccotti Park. An appearance in October by his old pal Pete Seeger with protestors on the West Side sealed the deal. Despite all our nation's difficulties, it is a fascinating time to be an Ameri- can music scholar.
We sadly note the passing of pioneering American music scholar Charles Hamm in October, at age 86. Hamm was a Re- search Fellow here at the Institute in the 1980s, and his mono- graph from that time, Afro-American Music, South Africa, and Apartheid (1988), remains in print. We will include a more exten- sive feature on Hamm in our next issue.
Those of you calling the Institute these days will hear an un- familiar voice on the phone: that of our new College Assistant Anjuli Deos, who took over from fellow vocalist Sara Dougherty this summer when she left to pursue new opportunities. We wel- come Anjuli to our staff, and wish Sara all the best. In the first few weeks of her new position, Anjuli proved immensely helpful with our typically eclectic Music in Polycultural Americaseries, which included Will Fulton's detailed study of one of Jimi Hendrix's most fascinating songs (see p. 6) and an invigorating look at John Cage by Cornell professor Benjamin Piekut, whose brilliant new book,Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant- Garde and Its Limits, is available from UC Press. The series was rounded out by a celebration of Ray Allen's Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Urban Folk Music Revival (University of Illinois Press), complete with foot-stomping (and multi-generational!) old-time music by the Dustbusters with ex- Rambler John Cohen.
