Playing, joking, teaching, courting, encouraging, and praying: such everyday activities and the songs that go with them are the subjects of this unique study of contemporary Southern Cheyenne women's music.

Based on Virginia Giglio's respectful but easy, familial relationship with the Indian singer-composers, Southern Cheyenne Women's Songs includes an overview of Cheyenne culture and history as well as analyses of thirty-two songs and their variants: lullabies and children's songs, hand-game songs, social songs, and Christian spiritual songs.

In addition to musical and textual transcriptions and translations, the author provides the rich cultural context of the music: the songs' history and the circumstances and backgrounds of the singer-composers, who told her the songs' meanings and the social settings in which they are used and shaped in the ongoing Cheyenne musical tradition. A sampling of closely related Arapaho Indian songs is an appendix.

1. The songs collected, transcribed, and recorded in this reverent and insightful study offer a fascinating entryway into the lives of today's Plains women. Southern Cheyenne Women's Songs, in addition to having value for ethnomusicologists, cultural anthropologists, and other students of Indian cultural expression, will also be useful in women's studies and to readers with a general interest in things Indian.