Old Time Music

A debate contiunes as to how to adeqately describe this music, “‘Old time music,’ then, is a music rich in cultural continuity. Alan Lomax has written in his essay “Folk Song Style” (American Anthropologist, LXI, No. 6, December 1959) that such music is intent to “give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work – any or all of these personality-shaping experiences.” Such music, drenched deep in its listeners’ “personality-shaping experiences,” is inherently powerful, and was especially so in a culture, marginally literate and pre-electronic, where it was among the strongest threads of the social fabric “