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Mildred Bailey - You're Laughing at Me

Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop creates a forum for the interdisciplinary discussion of popular music performed and created by American Indian musicians. In addition to examining the influence of popular musical forms from blues, jazz, country western, rock, folk, punk, reggae, and hip hop on Indigenous expressive forms, our contributors similarly note the ways that the various genres have been shaped by what some have called the “Red Roots”of American-originated musical styles... the study of this body of music provides an important window into history, politics, and tribal communities, as it simultaneously provides a complement to literary, historiographical, anthropological, and sociological discussions of Native culture. In doing so, our understanding of American culture as a whole is challenged and enriched.

The study of Indigenous music and song-making has long been constrained to the realm of ethnomusicology, and has often focused on the old songs, “traditional songs,” or chants. It has been studied for its rhythmic patterns, timbre, tonality, and symbolic meaning. However, it hasn’t been discussed in the broad continuum of expressive artistic responses that lends itself to literary and rhetorical analyses. While there is clear value in the linguistic and ethnomusicological approaches, it is important to recognize that music commands attention within other fields, as well as note that the artificial divisions between song, music, and literature are constructs of western academia. By translocating our discussion of contemporary Indigenous popular music, we’re claiming new and multiple spaces for the analysis of musical traditions; traditions that are responsive, evolving, and in dialogue with shifting sociopolitical contexts. Arnold Krupat, well-known scholar of American Indian literature, once said, “Literature is that mode of discourse which foremost seeks to enact and perform its insights, insisting that we understand with affect, feel with comprehension”... The register of the literary is different and unique, involving emotional and affective cognitive involvement: indeed, it commands it. Krupat’s comment is true for music as well. In fact, in writing about the distinctiveness of song and music generally... “Singing heightens the aural and visceral presence of the body in language.” 
Source: Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop by Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson, and Kimberli Lee


Mildred Bailey - You're Laughing at Me
  • Released on Where Are You? Single February 1937
  • First recording by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra
  • Written by Irving Berlin

"Mildred Bailey greatly contributed to the 1930's jazz and swing music scenes. She greatly influenced the musical career of her childhood friend Bing Crosby, and also acted as a mentor to Billie Holiday. In 1989, Bailey was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame."

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Location: United States

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