Video and Book Reviews Nothin' But the Blues for Harmonica with Bobby Joe Holman Hal Leonard HL00320081 (1998) Following the success of his first video, Play Harmonica in One Hour, blues singer/songwriter/teacher Bobby Joe Holman takes another 60 minutes to introduce video students to his own style of playing the blues on the electric (miked) harmonica. Useful tips on how to hold (and not hold) the "harp" with a microphone are discussed, along with suggestions on the best type of amplifiers and mikes and the correct settings for them. A good deal of musical instruction is explained and carefully demonstrated along the way, including single note runs, the use of octaves, hand and throat vibratos in the second and third positions, and bending notes. Holman is often accompanied by a hot little live band, and the whole video is a great place for the somewhat experienced, but still novice, harmonica player to learn to play the electric blues. — Lahri Bond (Amherst, MA) Public Worship, Private Faith - Sacred Harp and American Folksong by John Bealle University of Georgia Press ISBN 0-8203-1988-0 (1997 ); 308 pp. Public Worship, Private Faith is a book about a book: The Sacred Harp, a shape-note hymn collection that has been used continuously in the South since its publication in 1844. Bealle has produced what is, at times, a perceptive and insightful study of how a musical form, initially regarded as new and progressive, came to be an icon of the stubbornly unchanging nature of Southern music. At other times, however, this book is simply tedious. Essentially, Bealle begins his story too early. In a daunting 80-page first chapter, he traces the development of congregational singing and its reform over about 200 years, hounding the subject from New England's Puritan churches to the new congregations of the "urban frontier" of Cincinnati. Drawn from a variety of secondary literatures, this chapter follows every twist and turn, giving a detailed, yet still unclear, picture of controversies and histories that seem, to a great extent, irrelevant. The rest of the book makes the first chapter worthwhile, a considerable compliment. In his second chapter, Bealle considers "Sacred Harp as Cultural Object," explaining the position that Sacred Harp singing occupied on the cultural landscape as writers like Carl Carmer and George Pullen Jackson discovered it and brought it to national attention in the 1920s and 1930s. Next, Bealle discusses "Writing Traditions of The Sacred Harp." It is to Bealle's credit that he mines what might otherwise seem to be dry lists of songs and singers to find important clues about how Sacred Harp figures into the lives and musical world of its participants. Finally, Bealle examines the Sacred Harp revival. The main thrust of this chapter is that the original, authentic Sacred Harp tradition has absorbed new singers from outside and conferred upon them authenticity. The book closes with several documents related to Sacred Harp and its writing traditions reprinted as appendices. - Bruce E. Baker (Goose Creek, SC) This is an excerpt from Dirty Linen #78 To read the entire article, Subscribe! © 1998 Dirty Linen, Ltd., Baltimore MD No reproduction in any form is permitted without written permission from the editors.