I don’t know much about Amami shimauta, but what I have heard is striking - the falsetto voice and intricate sanshin playing are very different from Okinawan music, but also different from traditional music in mainland Japan. And, as you said, the bachi is closer to a shamisen bachi than a sanshin bachi - it actually reminds me of the plectrum used for the Persian Oud.
I bought a book last year called " Amami min’you shimauta shuu" ("Amami Folksong Island song collection "). It has the tablature for about 60 songs, and comes with a CD with slowed down versions of several pieces for easier learning. It’s all in Japanese, but the tablature is easy to understand, and there are western scores for everything too. If you know or want to learn hiragana and katakana you will be able to sing all the lyrics as well. It’s available at this link [http://www.7netshopping.jp/books/detail/-/accd/1102895234/subno/1], and also at Amazon Japan (the link was too long to cut and paste). I haven’t tried to learn any of the pieces yet, but I think this is probably the best “how to” book on this music, and at $30 with a CD, it’s a deal.
As for other English sources, there was an album put out on Folkways in 1954 called “Folk Music of the Amami Islands, Japan”. If you plug “Amami” into the search at the Smithsonian folkways website [ http://www.folkways.si.edu/ ] you can hear samples of each song and download the liner notes for free, and download the whole album for $10.
The Garland Encyclopedia of Music also has a short description of the music. I’m including it here incase you don’t have access to the site. The authors use the Japanese government version of romanization, so the spelling is weird (Island is “sima” instead of “shima”; August is “Hatigatu” instead of “Hachigatsu”, etc.).
Amami Islands
The Amami Islands, part of the Ryûkyû kingdom from the end of the fifteenth century to the sixteenth century, were confiscated by the Satuma clan in 1609 and are now part of Kagoshima Prefecture. Although the administrative connection between the Amami Islands and the Ryûkyû kingdom lies far in the past, geographical proximity has ensured continual cultural contact. Thus not only is Amami music closely related to Okinawan music; it also serves as a cultural link between Okinawa and Kyûsyû.
The most important Amami folk tradition is hatigatu odori ‘August dance’, a circular folk dance performed by men and women, some of whom beat small drums. The dancers are divided by gender into two half circles. Each community has about ten to thirty hatigatu odori pieces in its repertoire. The strophes of each song are sung alternately by the men and women. Antiphonal singing, called uta kake, is found throughout the Ryûkyûs, especially in the Amami Islands, where it is highly refined. Uta kake may have some connection with similar antiphonal arts found among the minorities of southern China.
Entertainment songs are called sima uta and may be accompanied by the Amami sansin, which is the same basic shape as the Okinawan instrument but has thinner strings and is plucked with a flexible bamboo pick. The Amami sima uta style is distinctive because the sansin adds brilliant ornamentation on the fingerboard and there are broad disjunctive melodic movements in the vocal part. Sima uta is closely related to hatigatu odori in its repertoire and its antiphonal singing, uta kake. At parties, sima uta can be performed as uta asobi ‘singing game’; each participant makes a proposition by singing a verse and is answered with a verse from another singer. The singers vie with each other in the selection of witty poetic texts and in improvisational techniques. In the past, such dueling was also connected with courtship. If a young man wanted to propose to a woman, they would engage in an uta kake duel. If the woman lost the duel, she would have to accept the singer’s proposal.
Today, the social functions and musical styles of sima uta are changing. Masters of the style, called uta sya, have recently begun to produce commercial cassettes and compact disks.
Other Amami folk genres have fallen into disuse. For example, omori or nagare, religious songs similar to the Okinawan umui, are now no longer performed because they were associated with animism, which was suppressed by the Satuma government. In the same way, work songs called ito, formerly an accompaniment to repetitive activities such as rowing, pounding, or planting rice, exist only in the memory of older people.
tonal system: “A few examples of another scale, ritu (do, re, fa, sol, la), can be found in the classical kudoki repertoire and in Amami folk songs.”
rhythm: “In the Amami Islands, performers frequently accelerate dance tempos so much that they become too fast for dancing.”
I play and sing (learning) Amami shimauta and shamisen.
and i’m glad you came here Gabby i think its’ good to have people who represent other styles as well.