Folk Song Style and Culture.

TLDR

Lomax’s global folk‑music archive led him to view song style as a learned cultural pattern that expresses shared feelings and shapes community activities, emphasizing collective norms over individual variation and offering insights into premarital conduct relevant to psychiatry. The book reports a five‑year NIMH‑supported study designed to test hypotheses about the relationship between folk‑song style and culture derived from Lomax’s theory. Alan Lomax directed a 14‑member multidisciplinary team of social scientists, psychologists, linguists, and computer mathematicians who collected an extensive dataset over the study period. The study produced a truly staggering amount of data, with results to be presented in forthcoming publications.

Abstract

This book reports a five-year NIMH-supported research study of the relationships between folk song and culture. Alan Lomax, an ethno-musicologist, directed the 14-member research team of social scientists, psychologists, linguists, and computer mathematicians. A truly staggering amount of data was collected, and reference is made to future publications. Lomax's extensive collection of folk music from every part of the globe led him to propose that song style is "a pattern of learned behavior, common to the people of a culture." The chief purpose of song is "to express the shared feelings and mold the joint activities of some human community." He is, thus, concerned with the collective rather than the individual, with the normative rather than the particular patterning of behavior. His hypotheses stem directly from this concern. Of special interest for psychiatry is the resulting information about patterns of premarital conduct, of