Singing in Zion: Music and Song in the Life of One Arkansas Family

by Robert Cochran

Overview

This book is a lyrical, scholarly exploration of the connection between one family's musical traditions and its rural community of Zion, Arkansas. In 1959, three Gilbert sisters—Alma, Helen, and Phydella—began compiling songs they remembered as their own and sending them to one another in letters. Their tendency to center memory in sound rather than sight reveals an unusual musical birthright. Robert Cochran has constructed a composite portrait of this family for whom music is the center of life. He examines their lived experience as they anchor their history through song, singing, and the playing of musical instruments. The Gilberts are wonderful exemplars of the "mediation of oral tradition," and when approached through their music, they reveal themselves as remarkable individuals with an elaborate and firmly held sense of their unique identities. A decade in the making, Singing in Zion is written with a memoirist's sense of family history and an ethnographer's sense of the rich encounter of worlds. This narrative has a seductive simplicity that conveys much of the Gilbert family's charm while at the same time establishing a broader framework that is firmly academic. It will be enjoyed by all readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557285485
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	07/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Robert Cochran is the director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies and a professor in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Winner of several awards and fellowships, his previous publications include Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life, Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction, Our Own Sweet Sounds , and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice.

Table of Contents

	Prelude	xiii
	Singing in Zion	1
	I Know Exactly How They Sound	1
	Gilberts and Scotts	13
	The Best Banjo in the World	21
	Better than the Carter Family	24
	Fifty Years Later	27
	We All Liked All Kinds of Music	36
	Carl's Songs	44
	Dear Charlie	49
	Conversations in Song	54
	We Would Laugh at Them	59
	The Drunkard's Dream	60
	Massa's in de Cold Ground	65
	Love and Marriage	69
	Never Alone	72
	The Local Tradition	80
	Past and Present	83
	They Wanted to Interview Me	88
	Coda	103
	Appendix 1	105
	Appendix 2	247
	Notes	251
	References for Song Annotations	259
	Index	262