ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of musical ethnographies, midcentury exotica, and the soundtracked coffee-table book. In much the same way that Bubble Books repackaged children’s songs of an earlier era, midcentury ethnographic labels such as Folkways sourced their content from rapidly disappearing traditions. Simultaneously, these labels pioneered the use of extensive liner notes and booklets in an effort to frame the recordings as cultural artifacts. Midcentury exotica often echoed this approach, wrapping its recordings in snippets of print that emphasized both the “primitivism” of the music and the “futurism” of stereophony. Emerging from these developments was the Columbia Legacy Collection, a fourteen-volume book-and-record series released intermittently between 1954 and 1972. All but forgotten today, this series of soundtracked books offers a peculiar window into the midcentury American mindset. In song and print, the Columbia Legacy Collection strove to appeal to contradictory consumer desires: the security of the familiar and the excitement of the foreign. This known/unknown approach, then, tended to re-present what we might call the comfortably exotic, inviting Americans to imagine Others – and themselves – by synthesizing words and music.
