An album produced by two Vanderbilt University professors is the first music collection to be added to a National Endowment for the Humanities collection of works which strengthen students’ understanding of American history and culture.
Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder is part of the new We the People collection from the NEH. This year’s collection has the theme of Pursuit of Happiness, and includes Those Happy Golden Years by Wilder, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and other classics of literature.
The NEH will distribute the works chosen to 2,000 public, school and military libraries in the United States and overseas.
“This kind of attention from the NEH is humbling,” said Dale Cockrell, a professor of musicology at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.
“Those whose work sits on the We the People bookshelf are the heroes of my youth and of my adulthood. It is beyond an honor to occupy any of the space that they hallow.”
Cockrell produced Happy Land with Butch Baldassari, an adjunct associate professor of mandolin at Blair.
The album of string band music, Stephen Foster classics and hymns and spirituals features song selections from the more than 120 songs that run through the plots of Wilder’s eight Little House books (published by HarperTrophy) that chronicle pioneer life in 1800s America. Songs including “Oh! Susanna” and “Barbara Allen” were given lively and contemporary acoustic arrangements meant to reintroduce children and adults to the music heritage of America.
The album features performances by Riders in the Sky, Dave Olney, Andrea Zonn, Deborah Pacard, Pat Enright, Douglas P. Green, Keith Little and The Princely Players.
The album was released on Pa’s Fiddle Recordings (www.pasfiddle.com). A sequel album, Arkansas Traveler: Music from Little House on the Prairie, has been recorded and is being prepared for release.
For more information on the NEH’s We the People program, go to http://www.wethepeople.gov/bookshelf/happinesslist.html on the Internet.
Listen to a lecture about Happy Land by Dale Cockrell.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu