Chris Goertzen is professor of music history and world music at the University of Southern Mississippi. His books include Fiddling for Norway: Revival and Identity; Southern Fiddlers and Fiddle Contests; Made in Mexico: Tradition, Tourism, and Political Ferment in Oaxaca; George P. Knauff's ""Virginia Reels"" and the History of American Fiddling; and American Antebellum Fiddling, the latter four published by University Press of Mississippi.
Although folklorists regularly study oral, musical, customary, or material traditions practiced within cultural communities, they infrequently examine all of at once; and when they do, their efforts seldom achieve the level of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical depth and sophistication evident in Goertzen's work. Those compelled by the tensions between locally grounded artistic traditions and global cultural changes will welcome Goertzen's evidence and insights, as will aficionados of the rug-weaving, guitar-making, and contest-fiddling traditions explored through illuminating images and prose.--James P. Leary, author of Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 Chris Goertzen is a master storyteller whose affection for folk arts shines through each page of this book.--David G. Hebert, coeditor of Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology