This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

Henry Ford's interest in reviving the dances of his youth and publicizing old fiddlers was a major media phenomenon of the 1920s. The claims of one fiddler became the source of the often repeated, but erroneous, assertion that Ford sponsored a national fiddlers' contest, which in turn has become a part of country music lore. This article, based mostly on archival sources and newspapers, attempts to describe the particular musical and dance traditions that interested Ford, his personal activities and ambitions in this area, his motivations, and the larger popular interest in the subject itself.

U.S. choral societies typically formalize themselves as secular organizations analogous to symphony orchestras and opera companies. Yet choral societies differ from symphonic or operatic organizations because almost all choruses depend on volunteer singers. Part of what attracts singers into choruses is a sometimes unacknowledged affinity between the religious traditions of liberal Christians and Jews and the culture of choral singing as practiced in formally secular choral societies. The liberal tradition in religion encourages a habitus toward music that might be called a “sense of liturgy”: The interpretation of musical works historically and collectively, rather than as didactic works addressed to an individual. Although many canonical choral works are Christian in content, liberal religion encourages distancing mechanisms that allow people from other faith traditions, or none at all, to engage with these works. In short, the posture of artistic autonomy often found within formally secular choral societies, in which there is no overt religious test for membership, owes part of its genesis to the religious habits of liberal Christians and Jews. The present article explores this affinity by drawing on ethnomusicological fieldwork among choral singers in New England, as well as published accounts of a 1996 controversy over the performance of religious music by a public school choir in Utah.

In JSAM 4(2), on page 220, note 17, and on 246, the citation for John Brackett's book is given incorrectly. It should read as follows:

John Brackett, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

The author apologizes for this error.