"The sounds are as sweet as mountain air: the lonesome drift of a fiddle, the easy pluck of banjo strings, the wailing notes from a harmonica, a romping guitar chord, the thump of a homemade drum, a vocal moan. On the surface they seem so simple, even fleeting, as if they were created to celebrate only the moment or to capture a particular emotion, like love or loss. Yet almost always they're drawn from a deeper place and, when bound together, become part of a powerful tradition. These sounds in all their variety and beauty, are America . . . .

. . . American roots music. Whether it was made on a back porch in a West Virginia holler, at a house party in Chicago, in a Mississippi juke joint, at a bluegrass cutting contest in eastern Kentucky, beyond the bayou in Cajun back country, or in a black Baptist church in North Carolina or Newark, New Jersey, this music has warmed us, enlightened us, informed us, touched us, defined us. We may not buy it in bulk, as we do our popular music, but we respect it and cherish it, much like we do tales told by a family elder or a poem with great meaning. And when we listen to it, we take great pride in its diversity and history, and we allow it to enter our soul and become an indispensable part of us."

--Robert Santelli
from his Introduction to
American Roots Music (2001)

In this weeklong summer institute, Idaho teachers will explore what poet Carl Sandburg referred to as The American Songbag, "a ragbag of strips, stripes, and streaks of color . . . melodies and verses . . . from diverse regions, from varied human characters and communities, and each sung differently in different places." Over the course of a week, scholars will explore with teachers the roots of America's musical heritage through lecture and performance, through explication of recordings, through film and video documentary, and through hands-on demonstration.

Teachers will explore the story of the fiddle in early America, the blues, songs of work and the American West, and Idaho's own folk music heritage. As a Smithsonian traveling exhibit on American roots music tours six Idaho communities in 2007-2008, this institute will immerse teachers of all subjects, disciplines, and grade levels in a week of study and discussion with some outstanding scholars and performers.

Successful applicants will receive lodging and meals, texts, and the opportunity to apply for optional college credit. In addition to receiving the primary texts, teachers also will receive a photocopied compilation of related essays and articles recommended by the presenting scholars. Teachers will be selected before May 1 and sent texts to read in advance of the institute.

PRIMARY TOPICS AND SCHOLARS

DAILY PRESENTATIONS:

Robert Santelli
Got My Mojo Working: Blues and American Roots Music

The blues is the backbone of the African-American contribution to American roots music. Born in the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th century, the blues became the black man's struggle for racial and economic equality set to music. Originally a music form born in the country, the blues migrated north to cities such as Chicago, where it transformed itself into a vibrant, electric music form, championed by blues greats such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

"Got My Mojo Working" places the blues in an American roots music context. Using interviews, film footage, and rare recordings, Santelli traces the exciting road the blues traveled in the 20th century.

Robert Santelli is the author of more than a dozen books on American music, including American Roots Music, Hard Travelin' (The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie), and The Big Book of Blues. In addition to writing, Santelli has taught American music history at Monmouth and Rutgers Universities in New Jersey and at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1994, Santelli became the first Director of Education at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland where he created such programs as the American Music Masters Series, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Teacher's Institute, the Hall of Fame Series, and the Oral History Series. In 2000 Santelli left the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to become CEO of Experience Music Project, the acclaimed interactive music museum in Seattle. During his time at EMP Santelli produced concerts, radio documentaries, and tv specials all related to American roots and popular music. He also lobbied Congress to issue a formal edict establishing 2003 as Year of the Blues and worked with Martin Scorsese on his PBS series, The Blues. In 2006 Santelli was named executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, slated to open in late 2008.

Alan Jabbour
Fiddle Tunes Of The Old Frontier: A Fiddle-Illustrated Lecture

The fiddle--that is, the Italian-style modern violin--was the chosen instrument of a revolution in instrumental music and dance that swept the English-speaking world in the last half of the 18th century. This revolution coincided with the larger social and cultural revolutions of the era, and the music of the fiddle became a powerful reflector of the values and cultural style of the newly emergent America of the 19th century. The fiddle was an especially interesting component of Appalachian culture, and a new repertory and style of fiddling arose in the Appalachians that had a significant influence on the emerging culture of the westward expansion in the 19th century. From fiddle tune titles to the actual performance style, everything in the art of the Appalachian fiddle tune can be read as a cultural indicator of the larger trends in American culture -- including a creative synthesis of European American, African American, and Native American stylistic preferences.

Alan Jabbour was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida. A violinist by early training, he put himself through college at the University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting old-time fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper South from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. He taught a repertory of old-time fiddle tunes to his band, the Hollow Rock String Band, which was an important link in the instrumental folk music revival in the 1960s. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore, and ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1968-69. He then moved to Washington, D.C., for over thirty years of service with Federal cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress 1969-74, director of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts 1974-76, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress 1976-99. Since his retirement, he has turned enthusiastically to a life of writing, consulting, lecturing, and playing the fiddle.

Hal Cannon
Why the Cowboy Sings

The cowboy song is one of the richest of American traditions. Mix the stark realities of a life outdoors with animals, add a heavy dose of the creative juices of the popularizers, then combine all that with civilizations ancient metaphors from the pastoral life, and what you get is a concoction that is, at once, the story of the American West and a pretty fair view of human nature.

Why do cowboys sing, what are the stories behind the cowboy song, why don't we hear sheepherder songs -- all to be discussed by Hal Cannon, founding director of the Western Folklife Center and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada.

Hal Cannon was the founding Director of the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada, and its famous child, the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Cannon has published a dozen books and recordings on the folk arts of the West including his bestselling anthology, Cowboy Poetry, A Gathering. More recently Cannon along with producer Taki Telonidis have produced over fifty features for public radio stations nationwide. Currently they have a series, What's In A Song, which airs monthly on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. With his wife, author Teresa Jordan, he created the series The Open Road: Exploring America's Favorite Places which was featured on Savvy Traveler. Cannon has received numerous awards, including the1998 Will Rogers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Utah Governor's Award in the Arts in 1999 and the Governor's Award in the Humanities in 2002. As a musician, Hal and his band, the Deseret String Band (a.k.a. The Bunkhouse Orchestra), made a specialty of researching and performing 19th-century music from the West.

Rosalie Sorrels
Way Out in Idaho: The Idaho Songbook Project

In this session Rosalie Sorrels will describe, discuss, and perform some of the songs she gathered as part of a statewide Idaho song-gathering project for the state's 1990 centennial commemoration, published as Way Out in Idaho. In towns large and small she told family stories, and sang songs she learned from her own family in an effort to draw out old songs about mining, logging, ranching, pioneering, and other songs inspired by local events and history that members of her audiences remembered that may have been passed along from one person to the next. She will discuss the oral tradition of folk music, the process of preserving those songs, how teachers may continue the tradition, and she will note parallels between national and local efforts to document this grassroots heritage.

Rosalie Sorrels has traveled the country for nearly five decades singing songs and telling stories to audiences in the nation's largest concert halls and smallest coffee houses. She raised five children, recorded more than 20 record albums since the 1960s, and edited three books. In 2005, her CD My Last Go Round was nominated for a Grammy Award. In May of 2007, an hour-long Idaho Public Television concert documentary about Rosalie, entitled Way Out in Idaho, will be broadcast nationally on PBS. She lives in a cabin her father built in the mountains north of Boise, near Idaho City.