ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Just as folk music depends on a community to shape it and give it voice, so too does this book owe its existence to several communities of colleagues and friends. While I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it was Bruno Nettl who first taught me to perceive the richness and diversity that folk music reflects in communities close at hand or far away, in communities rooted in their pasts or striving to adapt to a future not yet upon them. During the decade since these first studies in folk music, I have increasingly become aware of my debt to a different sort of teacher, the many musicians and consultants in the communities of the Midwest, western Pennsylvania, West Germany, and Israel where it has been my privilege to engage in fieldwork. The bulk of this book was completed during 1985-86, when I was a Junior Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. I wish to express here my gratitude to Cornell for the generous financial assistance this fellowship provided and to Jonathan Culler, Director of the Society for the Humanities, for assembling a remarkable community of scholars at the Society to guide my thinking and inspire my writing: Anthony Appiah, Bernard Faure, Carlos Fuentes, Barbara Harlow, Victor Koschmann, Uday Mehta, Giovanni Pettinato, F. Jamil Bagep, Wole Soyinka, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Alan Wolfe. My tenure at Cornell was all the richer because it afforded me the opportunity to profit from the abundant counsel and wisdom of William W. Austin. Alan Dundes invited me to contribute this book to the series Folkloristics at Indiana University Press, and I am grateful to him for his trust in me. I should also like to thank him for the many intensive hours that the two of us spent plumbing the marvelous holdings in folk music at the University of California at Berkeley, where I held a visiting faculty position in the fall of 1984. This book has benefited in ways too numerous to list here from the careful readings of its earlier incarnations by Katherine Bergeron, Alan Dundes, and Bruno Nettl; I thank them for their willingness to suggest ways of improving the manuscript, and I apologize if my intransigence has caused me to fall short of the standards they would have me meet. Much encouragement and assistance from Indiana University Press guided this book along its transformation of the oral to the written. During recent years I have experienced the formation, however incipient, of a new community of folk music: my family. Listening to my children, Andrea and Benjamin, has taught me much about oral tradition, the origins of folk music, and the ability of folk music to express the most profound of human values. As in all communities of folk music, this one has its primary musician, my wife, Christine Wilkie Bohlman. I am confident that there could be few better records of my gratitude to Christine than the old German folk song that accompanies the dedication of this book to her.

Philip V. Bohlman

Chicago, Illinois