The Musical Renaissance of the late Victorian era incurred both rediscovery and reappraisal of the English musical heritage. The isolated endeavours of a handful of pioneering collectors from the oral tradition stimulated the institution of a Folk-Song Society with the aim of gathering what remained of a rapidly disappearing national resource. This article examines competing interpretations of the nature and potential application of folk-song. Cecil Sharp, who quickly assumed leadership of the folk-song movement, adopted and refined the notion that communal origin and transmission imbued folk-song with the national character and spirit. Its strategic use in the education system would, he believed, promote not just musical revival but a general national revival as well. In counterpoint to Sharp's folk-song construct, the hiterto marginalised contribution of musical antiquarian Frank Kidson is reassessed. From an ever-diminishing position of authority, Kidson continued to dismiss Sharp's new orthodoxy by insisting that most of what passed for ‘folk’ was nothing more than the remnants of old popular song. The article concludes by seeking to explain why Sharp's construct endured.

Popular music studies generally celebrate the power of music to empower the construction of individual and social identities, a site of positive self-realisation. But such an approach risks overlooking a significant element in the musical transaction. How, for example, did the inhabitants of Jericho feel? Or President Noriega when musically besieged by US troops in Panama City? Or street kids in Wollongong, New South Wales, driven out of shopping malls by the strategic broadcasting of Frank Sinatra recordings? Every time we applaud the deployment of music as a way of articulating physical, cognitive and cultural territory, we are also applauding the potential or actual displacement or even destruction of other identities. On occasions that displacement may well be conducted as an act of extreme violence: music as pain. This negative side of the territorialism of music, however, receives little attention in popular music studies, even though it is potentially the dark side of any musical transaction. In attempting to redress the balance, this article is a ‘trailer’ for a joint investigation into the use of popular music as a weapon. It represents our initial attempts to think through some of the issues surrounding popular music and its use as a tool of repression and the deliberate inflicting of pain.

This article explores political, cultural and musical issues surrounding the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, particularly over Jerusalem, which each party uses to symbolise and promote their own perception of the conflict. Specifically, I examine selected popular musical landmarks that capture the essence of the struggle from the ultra-nationalistic tones of the 1960s and 1970s to the more reconciliatory ones in the 1990s advocating peace. Special attention is given to musical cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian singers who played a strong role in the promotion of peace within a utopian dream of coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

If rock'n'roll represented new, sexualised gender identities for the teenagers of the late 1950s, why (and how) were such identities constructed through the multiple voices of the group? In Buddy Holly's ‘Oh, Boy!’ the chorus plays a prominent supportive role in relation to the lead singer; but its continual echoing of the singer's ‘Oh boy!’ allows also for a literal hearing of cries of mutual desire and admiration between two men. This representation of the ‘buddy group’ has continuities with other group, or dual representations of male identity, where mutual, male selves and desires are constructed around an imagined, comforting woman. The presence of traces of the maternal body (Kristeva's ‘semiotic’ sphere) is audible in ‘Oh, Boy!’ through the chorus's separation of rhythm and melody, and in particular, its use of ‘children's rhythms’, consistent with those analysed by the musicologist Constantin Brailoiu as a cross-cultural phenomenon. In ‘Oh, Boy!’ children's rhythms are reworked in a dialogue between singer and chorus, and between guitar and chorus in the instrumental break, in such a way that after the break the singer is able to resolve the rhythmic tensions introduced in the first half of the song and get ‘everything right’. The new symbolic identity of male adolescent independence is audibly structured by the semiotic, so reversing the surface hearing of the song as involving the subordination of the chorus to lead singer in the consensual hierarchy of ‘buddy’ relations. The relationship of Buddy Holly to Bo Diddley adds a further dimension to this structure, where ostensible equality cannot mask the uncomfortable social hierarchy of the white rock star and black mentor, and where an appeal to the other as ‘boy’ would evoke not the buddy group, but slavery.

The country singer Gram Parsons (1946-73) has in the last decade been increasingly cited as a seminal influence upon the development of contemporary alt.country and the roots/americana revivial. This article critiques Parsons and his music within the realm of contextual theology, using him as a bridge to examine the wider issue of what a theology of country music might entail. Both Parsons and Country Music in general are strongly religious in language, ethos and culture, yet the theology articulated both explicitly and implicitly is not evangelical as those outside the genre and culture might assume. Rather, the theology of country music involves a gospel of liminality, a theology of redemptive transgression that is expressed in ‘white spirituals’ where the song is a locus of grace. The article asks if Parsons was a locus of grace; are his songs those of liminal presence; does country music employ a theology of redemptive transgression?

There are few studies offering a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between popular music and youth cutting across both school and leisure sites. This article bridges missing links between girls and boys as performers and listeners of popular music in school and leisure sites. The aim is to investigate how high school pupils' discourses on popular music take place in different settings (i) with relation to gender, and (ii) with relation to the nature of musical practices. Through my ethnographic study conducted in Japan, pupils' techniques for employing popular music in various sites are clarified; firstly, in the formal site (classroom); secondly, in the semi-formal site (brass band club in school / high school band event); thirdly, in the informal site (boys as performers / visual band costume play gatherings). Three categorisations of popular music are theorised: ‘personal’, ‘common’ and ‘standard’. Boys' strategies for negotiation and differentiation, and girls' tactics for utilising common music in order to conceal their own personal music are found in each site.

Certain critical voices, typically in the world of jazz, have suggested that reissuing alternate takes can be both aesthetically and ethically disrespectful to the artists' and producers' original decisions about the relative value of the various takes. This point of view is, for example, exhibited on ESP discs, which all bear the slogan ‘THE ARTISTS ALONE DECIDE WHAT YOU WILL HEAR ON THEIR ESP-DISK’. In other words, when Charlie Parker recorded ‘Parker's Mood’, and the studio team decided to issue only one take, should we be able to listen to the other four that they rejected, but which were all released by Savoy on The Charlie Parker Memorial Albums?