The Lotus Dickey Songbook

The Lotus Dickey Songbook. Rev. ed. Edited by Nancy C. McEntire, Grey Larsen, and Janne Henshaw. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 268, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, musical notation, music CD, notes, discography, bibliography, incides. $39.95 paper); Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival. By John Bealle. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 343, acknowledgments, introduction, map, photographs, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper) As a musician, Lotus Dickey (1911-1989) fits into no easy category. Spending most of his life in an isolated pocket outside Bloomington, Indiana, he worked hard - often two or three jobs at a time - and raised eight children, much of that time as a single parent. Yet he found time to learn hundreds of traditional songs and ballads as well as to develop his own corpus of music, influenced by local string bands, hymns, and popular radio music. Discovered in the 1980s, he became the darling of an increasingly large regional group of fans - invited to festivals, recorded, and endlessly interviewed. The attention spurred him to write even more tunes. Some 101 of these are collected in this songbook, with a CD of twenty-three of them, all performed by Dickey. This revised version of the songbook contains several essays on Dickey's place in Indiana music history. While he was known to many, especially in his last years, his songs are performed by only a few; his music seems not to have attracted imitators or changed the course of folk music development. His work demonstrates again the complexity of attempts to define "folk purity"; while he lived all his life in the same semirural area and was loyal to local fiddlers who influenced his style, he also listened to national radio and absorbed all the identifying characteristics of Tin Pan Alley, and he attempted, once, to sell his songs in Nashville. Dickey often played fiddle tunes, both traditional and his own compositions, at the contra dances in Bloomington after his retirement. Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival, John Bealle 's memoir of the Bloomington contra dance group from 1972 to about 1985, mentions Dickey and his energizing effect on local musicians and dancers. Bealle attempts to capture the early days of this dance group - informed by the counterculture ethos of the 1960s and 1970s - when there was no set admission price for a dance, when musicians and callers were not "pros" and did not necessarily expect to be paid. …