Erwin Bosman

Do I sound provocative? What if I contend moreover that strictly speaking the blues were denatured the very minute their first notes were put on paper sometime around the turn of the first decade of the 19th century?  If I claim furthermore that the epithet “the blues” has become less

I have always had a soft spot for persons and events which for whatever reason have fallen out of grace in history books. Often, their story discloses much more of their environment than the historic relics which have been promoted on a pedestal, for the historic aura of the latter

“Black Voices, White Visions.” Such was the subtitle Marybeth Hamilton (2007) reserved for her book “In Search of the Blues”, in which she argues that the concept of the Delta Blues emerged in the late twentieth century mainly as the product of a longstanding white fascination with the voices and

President Theodore Roosevelt once called the Chautauqua “the most American thing in America.”  At the latter part of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, the Chautauqua was one of the most popular shows in rural America.  Though ordinarily billed as “high culture”, with an emphasis on education

The circus brings to mind feelings of joy, laughter and amazement sprinkled with glitter, and spiced with the smell of sawdust. We see lions, elephants and clowns, and we hear the cries of relief when one trapeze artist catches his partner somersaulting several meters above the floor.  It is, however,

Acknowledgements: I sincerely thank Kevin Nutt of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, and the Alabama Folklife Association for putting at my disposal the writings of Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbott, published in: “Tributaries, Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association”, 2002, Joey Brackner editor. It has to be mentioned,