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Music in Rural New England: Family and Community Life, 1870-1940.

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Music in Rural New England: Family and Community Life, 1870-1940. By Jennifer C. Post. (Revisiting New England.) Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004. [xiv, 313 p. ISBN 1-58465-415-5. $45.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index, compact disc.

Jennifer Post's Music in Rural New England: Family and Community Life, 1870-1940 is a milestone in the literature on America's far northeastern corner. Addressing the need for a historical overview of the region's vernacular music and dance traditions, Post deftly applies ethnographic rigor to the telling of a story whose details offer insightful commentary on a familiar premise: continuity and change.

Previous works focusing on New England music have emphasized the region's early psalmody, Boston's musical life, or art music. While a 1953 book, Music and Dance in the New England States, Including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island & Connecticut, edited by Sigmund Spaeth (New York: Bureau of Musical Research, 1953), is a collection of essays chronicling the folk music and dance traditions of the entire region, Post's book is the first monograph to provide an account of these traditions in northern New England; a sub-region that excludes the urban centers of Hartford and Boston. (Louis Pichierri's Music in New Hampshire, 1623-1800 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1960], is the most recent work to cover similar geographical territory.)

Beginning with a general definition of northern New England, which includes the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as a distinct social...

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