Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Movie Series Looks At History Of America's Music

America's Music is a film and performance series at the North Regional Branch of Wake County Libraries.
http://www.wakegov.com/libraries/events/Pages/americasmusic.aspx

America’s Music is a film and performance series that traces the soundtrack of a nation. The program features documentary screenings and discussions about the history of 20th century American popular music from blues to Broadway and bluegrass to rock 'n' roll. 

The series is a collaboration between the Tribeca Film Institute and the American Library Association. The North Regional Branch of Wake County Public Libraries hosts the series for the next six weeks.

The program opens with a look at blues and gospel music.  The North Regional Library will screen part of Martin Scorseses documentary series “The Blues.”  The film opens with John Lomax, who traveled the American South during the 1930s recording music.

“[Lomax] was one of the first American songcatchers.  Ethnomusicologists before the term was invented,” said Jonathan Kramer, a teaching professor of Music and Arts Studies at North Carolina State University, about the program.  

Kramer continued, “He started his journeys around the South [with] sharecroppers, hearing about a bluesman in prison, bringing his trunkload of equipment into prison.  His most famous find was Lead Belly.”

Lomax first recorded Lead Belly in prison in Louisiana.  After Lead Belly was released from prison, Lomax helped Lead Belly start a career as a recording artist. 

Alongside Scorses’s “Blues” documentary, America’s Music will also feature a screening of “Say Amen, Somebody,” a documentary of gospel music. 

Thomas Dorsey is considered the inventor of modern gospel music.  He was a bluesman who found religion, and he adapted blues music into gospel. 

“When [Dorsey] first started using the energies and rhythms and harmonies of blues into his hymnals, into his Sunday morning services, he was criticized.  ‘Why are you bringing the music of the juke joint and the honkey tonk into church?’  But the parishioners loved it and found that they could become ecstatic through this music that had previously been the dance music of Saturday night,” said Kramer. 

Stay Connected
Shawn Wen joined the staff of The State of Things in March 2012 and served as associate producer until February 2014.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.