Folksinger-songwriter Bill Staines came of age at the height of the mid-twentieth-century American folk music revival and has spent the years since then writing and playing music that seems impelled by the conviction that this vanished era's core stylistic premises and clear-eyed optimism remain as alive and available as they were at the revival's peak. Through this exploration of his 1984 album Bridges, I seek to show that Staines accomplishes this fantasy of the revival's continued vitality not, as his commentators frequently suggest, by clinging fast to decades-old stylistic practices but by introducing a dimension of reflexivity into his craft. What comes to matter is not music's political or social meaning but the self-conscious celebration of the idea of music having such a meaning.

The article's first section explores Staines's self-mythologizing enfolding of his own persona into Woody Guthrie's in the Guthrie ballad that opens the album. The second section examines Bridges' poetic weaving of music into narratives of social redemption and personal self-actualization. The third section examines Bridges' many moments of diegetic song, which effectively collapse the worlds of Staines's poetic subjects into that of his immediate audience. The last section explores how melodic choices in the traditional song that closes the album have the effect of bringing many of the songs that precede it directly into the fold of traditional music.

This article explores the cultural work of white masculinity in barbershop quartet singing in two historical contexts: the barbershop revival of the 1920s and 1930s and barbershop's struggle for survival in twenty-first century Philadelphia. It first details how revivalists attempted to re-create Victorian white masculinity by codifying and promoting a barbershop musical style and repertory that fostered closeness between men. By performing their musical style in public, masculine spaces, and admitting only white men to their gatherings, the organizers of the Barbershop Harmony Society opposed a number of contemporary social changes in the United States, including shifting gender roles, a rise in immigration, the economic instability of the Great Depression, and New Deal liberalism. The article then documents how and why barbershoppers in Philadelphia at the turn of the twenty-first century still perform this “close,” neo-Victorian mode of white masculinity. In this new context, barbershop whiteness enabled a group of white men to claim belonging in their racially divided city despite years of migration and displacement caused by deindustrialization and urban decay. In both historical moments, barbershoppers used whiteness to challenge social and economic change and to assert the continued relevance of their musical style.

This article is a study of ornamentation in the fiddling of Eileen Ivers. Ivers grew up in the Bronx, studied with Limerick-born fiddler Martin Mulvihill, and has since become one of the most well-known of contemporary Irish fiddlers. Although Ivers is known primarily for her Irish fusion playing style, her more traditional core style is reflected in this article, which is based on a series of interview-lessons. The types of ornaments and their placement, combination, function, and effect in Ivers's performance of Irish dance music are discussed.