Cool Stuff - Music of the Americas

 One of the things that I really enjoyed learning about when discussing Native American culture, was Sharon Burch and her song Mother Earth. I love the style of that song and recently I've been listening to more folk/older country music, which is what that song reminds me of. So, I wanted to explore more Native American artists and their music. While exploring I found an artist named Joanne Shenandoah, and I found this song that she wrote as a collaboration with another Native American artist for the Native American Music Awards. I really love how they incorporate a traditional aerophone, and they also use acoustic guitars, which have the style/roots of classic country/folk music. They also mention in the video, how when they were writing this song, they were inspired by blues and jazz elements. The lyrics of the song also have foundations of Native American culture, being about nature and dancing. Overall, this is a very soothing song, and I'm so glad that I stumbled across it. 

I also wanted to include another song by her that I really enjoyed called "To Those Who Dream" and in this song she sings in her native language as well as in English. 

The second thing I wanted to share was that I loved learning about the harp in Andean culture/South America. I decided to look around for more music on the Andean harp and I found this really pretty piece called Carnivalito. The harp is such a beautiful instrument, and before taking this class I had no idea how important it was to the native Andean culture. What was amazing to me, was how complex the harp is to play, and in the video below it's of someone playing the song on the harp, so you can see all of their movements. It reminds me of playing the piano, in the sense that the left and right hands are both doing something different (one is accompaniment, and the other is melody). 

For my final cool thing that I wanted to share, when I was looking at more Native American artists I found this rock and roll artist from the 70s named Jesse Ed Davis. His style of music is mellow/soft rock, which I really like. The song by him that I'll share is called Crazy Love and he uses a lot of different styles in his music, like blues, jazz, and country. Something I thought that was unfortunate when researching Native American artists and listening to more of their modern music, is how much they contributed to American music styles like jazz, country, and blues, but how they're not that well known. I do love that they are able to contribute to many different music genres, and still preserve important elements of their culture through music.