New Book Under Contract with Routledge! Jew's Harps & Metal Music: Folk Traditions in Global Modernity

I'm delighted to announce that Owen Coggins and I are writing a book about jew’s harps and metal music! We've been incubating this project for several years, and it's a true pleasure to finally bring it to light. The book will appear in the Ashgate Folk and Popular Music series published by Routledge in 2023/2024. Stay tuned for more updates!

Jew’s Harps and Metal: Folk Traditions in Global Modernity is an ethnomusicological and cultural analysis of jew’s harps and metal music around the world. The jew’s harp is an ancient and globally-distributed acoustic musical instrument which, like metal, is associated with mysticism, magic, the supernatural, marginality and outsider status. The jew’s harp appears on hundreds of metal tracks by bands from dozens of countries, spanning Nordic and Baltic regions, Patagonia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Indonesia and elsewhere. The book explores how local and traditional resonances of the instrument are deployed in metal’s contemporary responses to disenchantment and depictions of mythical pasts.