"Flamenco has taken the world by storm in recent years. From London to New York and Los Angeles to Tokyo, not to mention lively festivals in Spain, huge crowds come to experience the power of flamenco. Ironically, though, if the performance is authentic - and much in the tourist trade is not - the uninitiated may find it utterly baffling. The music itself, and the use of the voice to sing it, are entirely unfamiliar. The rhythms are exotic and strange, the intensity of feeling startling. " "Yet for the Andalusians flamenco has been familiar for a thousand years: it is the song of the outcasts, the poorest of the poor. Though it is not exclusively the music of the Gypsies, they are its catalysts and spiritual torchbearers, and so their story helps us to understand the music. Author Robin Totton writes - and offers the music on the accompanying compact disc sampler - from his life among them, for he has come as close to flamenco as any outsider can hope to do. Clearly he has fallen under its spell, and readers will gladly follow as he walks us through the poetic song forms, the rhythmic guitar, and the flamboyant dance, as well as the vocabulary, names, and places, of the simmering emotion and living art of flamenco. "--Jacket.