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Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Refiguring American Music)
by Maureen MahonAfrican American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
Black Diva of the Thirties: The Life of Ruby Elzy (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
by David E. WeaverWhile undergoing routine surgery to remove a benign tumor, Ruby Elzy died. She was only thirty-five. Had she lived, she would have been one of the first Black artists to appear in grand opera. Although now in the shadows, she was a shining star in her day. She entertained Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. She was Paul Robeson's leading lady in the movie version of The Emperor Jones. She starred in Birth of the Blues opposite Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. She sang at Harlem's Apollo Theater and in the Hollywood Bowl. Her remarkable soprano voice was known to millions over the radio. She was personally chosen by George Gershwin to create one of the leading roles in his masterpiece, that of Serena in the original production of Porgy and Bess. Her signature song was the vocally demanding “My Man's Gone Now.” From obscurity she had risen to great heights. Ruby Pearl Elzy (1908-1943) was born in abject poverty in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Her father abandoned the family when she was five, leaving her mother, a strong, devout woman, to raise four small children. Ruby first sang publicly at the age of four and even in childhood dreamed of a career on the stage. Good fortune struck when a visiting professor, overwhelmed upon hearing her beautiful voice at Rust College in Mississippi, arranged for her to study music at Ohio State University. Later, on a Rosenwald Fellowship, she enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York City. After more than eight hundred performances in Porgy and Bess, she set her sights on a huge goal, to sing in grand opera. She was at the peak of her form. While she was preparing for her debut in the title role of Verdi's Aida, tragedy struck. During her brief career, Ruby Elzy was in the top tier of American sopranos and a precursor who paved a way for Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, and other black divas of the operatic stage. This biography acknowledges her exceptional talent, recognizes her contribution to American music, and tells her tragic yet inspiring story.
Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive
by Mark Anthony NealA framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital eraIn an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams’s 1916 silent film short “A Natural Born Gambler” or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance.While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital. Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.
Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection (Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology)
by Portia K. Maultsby Fernando Orejuela Stephanie ShonekanMusic has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright," J. Cole’s "Be Free," D’Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game’s "Don’t Shoot," Janelle Monae’s "Hell You Talmbout," Usher’s "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In this collection of critical studies, contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.
Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap
by Xinling LiThis book offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who happen to be out black gay men. It examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low and HIV/AIDS. It considers how the biased promotion of feminised gay male artists/characters in mainstream entertainment industry has rendered masculinity an exclusively male heterosexual property, providing a representational framework for men to identify with a form of “homosexual masculinity” – one that is constructed without having to either victimise anything feminine or necessarily convert to femininity. The book makes a strong case that it is possible for individuals (like gay rappers) to perform masculinity against masculinity, and open up a new way of striving for gender equality.
Black Metal
by Dayal PattersonFeaturing a wealth of new interviews with the genre's most central figures, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult offers the most comprehensive guide yet to the most controversial form of extreme metal. From the pioneers of the early '80s to its fiery rebirth in Scandinavia through to today's diverse groups, this epic analysis captures the movement's development in unparalleled depth.
Black Music (Akashi Classics: Renegade Reprint Series)
by Leroi Jones"Jones has learned-and this has been very rare in jazz criticism-to write about music as an artist."-Nat Hentoff ksBlack Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books, 2007), was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.
The Black Musician And The White City: Race And Music In Chicago, 1900-1967
by Amy AbsherAmy Absher’s The Black Musician and the White City tells the story of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-twentieth century. While depicting the segregated city before World War II, Absher traces the migration of black musicians, both men and women and both classical and vernacular performers, from the American South to Chicago during the 1930s to 1950s. Absher’s work diverges from existing studies in three ways: First, she takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the significant role that classically trained black musicians played in building the Chicago South Side community. By acknowledging the presence and importance of classical musicians, Absher argues that black migrants in Chicago had diverse education and economic backgrounds but found common cause in the city’s music community. Second, Absher brings numerous maps to the history, illustrating the relationship between Chicago’s physical lines of segregation and the geography of black music in the city over the years. Third, Absher’s use of archival sources is both extensive and original, drawing on manuscript and oral history collections at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, Columbia University, Rutgers’s Institute of Jazz Studies, and Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive. By approaching the Chicago black musical community from these previously untapped angles, Absher offers a history that goes beyond the retelling of the achievements of the famous musicians by discussing musicians as a group. In The Black Musician and the White City, black musicians are the leading actors, thinkers, organizers, and critics of their own story.
Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement
by Naomi AndreFrom classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemmings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison (Border Crossings #Vol. 9)
by Saadi A. SimaweThe legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women’s studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.
Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Jon Stratton Nabeel ZuberiBlack Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, and debates about media and technology. Contributors examine the impact of the local, the ways that black music in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London evolved differently and how black popular music in Britain has always developed in complex interaction with the dominant British popular music tradition. This tradition has its own histories located in folk music, music hall and a constant engagement, since the nineteenth century, with American popular music, itself a dynamic mixing of African-American, Latin American and other musics. The ideas that run through various chapters form connecting narratives that challenge dominant understandings of black popular music in Britain and will be essential reading for those interested in Popular Music Studies, Black British Studies and Cultural Studies.
Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement
by Reiland RabakaBlack Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement critically explores the soundtracks of the Black Power Movement as forms of "movement music." That is to say, much of classic Motown, soul, and funk music often mirrored and served as mouthpieces for the views and values, as well as the aspirations and frustrations, of the Black Power Movement. Black Power Music! is also about the intense interconnections between Black popular culture and Black political culture, both before and after the Black Power Movement, and the ways in which the Black Power Movement in many senses symbolizes the culmination of centuries of African American politics creatively combined with, and ingeniously conveyed through, African American music. Consequently, the term "Black Power music" can be seen as a code word for African American protest songs and message music between 1965 and 1975. "Black Power music" is a new concept that captures and conveys the fact that the majority of the messages in Black popular music between 1965 and 1975 seem to have been missed by most people who were not actively involved in, or in some significant way associated with, the Black Power Movement.
Black Punk Now
by James Spooner and Chris L. TerryA canonizing, bold, and urgent anthology setting a new precedent for Black Punk Lit, created by generations of Black punks—featuring both new voices and those from the not-so-recent pastBlack Punk Now is an anthology of contemporary nonfiction, fiction, illustrations, and comics that collectively describe punk today and give punks—especially the Black ones—a wider frame of reference. It shows all of the strains, styles, and identities of Black punk that are thriving, and gives newcomers to the scene more chances to see themselves.Curated from the perspective of Black writers with connections to the world of punk, the collection mixes media as well as generations, creating a new reference point for music-lovers, readers, and historians by capturing the present and looking towards the future. With strong visual elements integrated throughout, this smart, intimate collection is demonstrative of punk by being punk itself: underground, rebellious, aesthetic but not static—working to decenter whiteness by prioritizing other perspectives.Edited by graphic novelist and filmmaker James Spooner, and author Chris L. Terry, contributors to the collection include critic Hanif Abdurraqib and Mars Dixon, conversations with Brontez Purnell, and a roundtable of all femme festival organizers.
Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe
by Mick Wall'An epic tale, told the way it should be' RECORD COLLECTOR'The book he was born to write' CLASSIC ROCK MAGAZINE'An entertaining read for long-standing fans and newcomers alike' GUITARISTThe final word on the only name synonymous with heavy metal - Black Sabbath.Way back in the mists of time, in the days when rock giants walked the earth, the name Ozzy Osbourne was synonymous with the subversive and dark. Back then, Ozzy was the singer in Black Sabbath, and they meant business. A four-piece formed from the ashes of two locally well-known groups called The Rare Breed (Ozzy and bassist Geezer Butler) and Mythology (guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward), all four founding members of the original Black Sabbath grew up within half-a-mile of each other.This biography tells the story of how they made that dream come true - and how it then turned into a nightmare for all of them. How at the height of their fame, Sabbath discovered they had been so badly ripped off by their managers they did not even own their own songs. How they looked for salvation from Don Arden - an even more notorious gangster figure, who resurrected their career but still left them indebted to him, financially and personally. And how it finally came to a head when in 1979 they sacked Ozzy: 'For being too out of control - even for us,' as Bill Ward put it.The next 15 years would see a war break out between the two camps: the post-Ozzy Sabbath and Ozzy himself, whose solo career overshadowed Sabbath to the point where, when he offered them the chance to reform around him again, it was entirely on his terms. Or rather, that of his wife and manager, daughter of Don Arden - Sharon Osbourne.
Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe
by Mick Wall'An epic tale, told the way it should be' RECORD COLLECTOR'The book he was born to write' CLASSIC ROCK MAGAZINE'An entertaining read for long-standing fans and newcomers alike' GUITARISTThe final word on the only name synonymous with heavy metal - Black Sabbath.Way back in the mists of time, in the days when rock giants walked the earth, the name Ozzy Osbourne was synonymous with the subversive and dark. Back then, Ozzy was the singer in Black Sabbath, and they meant business. A four-piece formed from the ashes of two locally well-known groups called The Rare Breed (Ozzy and bassist Geezer Butler) and Mythology (guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward), all four founding members of the original Black Sabbath grew up within half-a-mile of each other.This biography tells the story of how they made that dream come true - and how it then turned into a nightmare for all of them. How at the height of their fame, Sabbath discovered they had been so badly ripped off by their managers they did not even own their own songs. How they looked for salvation from Don Arden - an even more notorious gangster figure, who resurrected their career but still left them indebted to him, financially and personally. And how it finally came to a head when in 1979 they sacked Ozzy: 'For being too out of control - even for us,' as Bill Ward put it.The next 15 years would see a war break out between the two camps: the post-Ozzy Sabbath and Ozzy himself, whose solo career overshadowed Sabbath to the point where, when he offered them the chance to reform around him again, it was entirely on his terms. Or rather, that of his wife and manager, daughter of Don Arden - Sharon Osbourne.
Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe
by Mick WallDecades before reality television was invented, Ozzy Osbourne was subversive and dark. Ozzy was the singer in the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, and they meant business. In an era when rock bands were measured by how 'heavy' they were, no one was weightier than Black Sabbath. All four founding members of the original Black Sabbath grew up within half-a-mile of each other in a tiny Birmingham suburb. Though all shared a deep love of music--The Beatles for Ozzy, the Mothers of Invention for Geezer, the Shadows and Chet Atkins for Iommi, and Gene Kruppa for Ward— they formed their group "as the quickest way out of the slums." This is the story of how they made that dream come true--and how it then turned into a nightmare for all of them. At the height of their fame, Sabbath discovered they'd been so badly ripped off by their managers they didn't even own their own songs. They looked for salvation from Don Arden—an even more notorious gangster figure, who resurrected their career but still left them indebted to him, financially and personally. It finally came to a head when in 1979 they sacked Ozzy: "For being too out of control--even for us," as Bill Ward put it. The next fifteen years were a war between the post-Ozzy Sabbath and Ozzy himself, whose solo career overshadowed Sabbath so much that a reunion was entirely on his terms. Or rather, those of his wife and manager—to add a further bitter twist for Sabbath, daughter of Don Arden —Sharon Osbourne.
Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Andrew L. CopeThe definition of 'heavy metal' is often a contentious issue and in this lively and accessible text Andrew Cope presents a refreshing re-evaluation of the rules that define heavy metal as a musical genre. Cope begins with an interrogation of why, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Birmingham provided the ideal location for the evolution and early development of heavy metal and hard rock. The author considers how the influence of the London and Liverpool music scenes merged with the unique cultural climate, industry and often desolated sites of post-war Birmingham to contribute significantly to the development of two unique forms of music: heavy metal and hard rock. The author explores these two forms through an extensive examination of key tracks from the first six albums of both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, in which musical, visual and lyrical aspects of each band are carefully compared and contrasted in order to highlight the distinctive innovations of those early recordings. In conclusion, a number of case studies are presented that illustrate how the unique synthesis of elements established by Black Sabbath have been perpetuated and developed through the work of such bands as Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Nightwish, Arch Enemy and Cradle of Filth. As a consequence, the importance of heavy metal as a genre of music was firmly established, and its longevity assured.
Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People (Routledge Russian and East European Music and Culture)
by Jim SamsonBlack Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music ‘scenes’. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.
Black Space: Negotiating Race, Diversity, and Belonging in the Ivory Tower (The American Campus)
by Sherry L. DeckmanProtests against racial injustice and anti-Blackness have swept across elite colleges and universities in recent years, exposing systemic racism and raising questions about what it means for Black students to belong at these institutions. In Black Space, Sherry L. Deckman takes us into the lives of the members of the Kuumba Singers, a Black student organization at Harvard with racially diverse members, and a self-proclaimed safe space for anyone but particularly Black students. Uniquely focusing on Black students in an elite space where they are the majority, Deckman provides a case study in how colleges and universities might reimagine safe spaces. Through rich description and sharing moments in students’ everyday lives, Deckman demonstrates the possibilities and challenges Black students face as they navigate campus culture and the refuge they find in this organization. This work illuminates ways administrators, faculty, student affairs staff, and indeed, students themselves, might productively address issues of difference and anti-Blackness for the purpose of fostering critically inclusive campus environments.
Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott
by Zac CrainBlack Tooth Grin is the first biography of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, the Texas-bred guitarist of the heavy metal band Pantera, who was murdered onstage in 2004 by a deranged fan-24 years to the day after John Lennon met a similar fate.Darrell Abbott began as a Kiss-inspired teenage prodigy who won dozens of local talent contests. With his brother, drummer Vinnie Abbott, he formed Pantera, becoming one of the most popular bands of the '90s and selling millions of albums to an intensely devoted fan base. While the band's music was aggressive, "Dime" was outgoing, gregarious, and adored by everyone who knew him.From Pantera's heyday to their implosion following singer Phil Anselmo's heroin addiction to Darrell's tragic end, Black Tooth Grin is a moving portrait of a great artist.
Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas
by Reiland RabakaBlack Women’s Liberation Movement Music argues that the Black Women’s Liberation Movement of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s was a unique combination of Black political feminism, Black literary feminism, and Black musical feminism, among other forms of Black feminism. This book critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political, and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement, and Sexual Revolution. The soul, funk, and disco music of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement era is simultaneously interpreted as universalist, feminist (in a general sense), and Black female-focused. This music’s incredible ability to be interpreted in so many different ways speaks to the importance and power of Black women’s music and the fact that it has multiple meanings for a multitude of people. Within the worlds of both Black Popular Movement Studies and Black Popular Music Studies there has been a long-standing tendency to almost exclusively associate Black women’s music of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s with the Black male-dominated Black Power Movement or the White female-dominated Women’s Liberation Movement. However, this book reveals that much of the soul, funk, and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement. Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, and Sexuality Studies.
Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After (American Music History)
by Katie Kapurch Jon Marc SmithFrom the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play.Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today.Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.
The Blackbird Academy Foundations: Must-know Audio And Recording Principles
by Kevin Becka Blackbird AcademyThe Blackbird Academy Foundations: Must-Know Audio and Recording Principles is designed to build your music engineering and audio production skills. The principles are directed at beginners to more advanced music creators, remixers, musicians, songwriters, singers, and those curious about what it takes to record, overdub, and mix quality music. Those who aspire to music, from ages 10 and up, will gain operational skills and understanding of basic to advanced recording concepts including: • Signal flow • Microphone recognition and advanced placement • The keys to achieving great results when recording • Essential analog and digital gear used in audio production • Using a digital audio workstation • Understanding analog to digital, and digital to analog, conversion • Using plug-ins and analog processing when recording, overdubbing, and mixing • Developing software skills, such as tuning processing, editing, and mixing • Console basics and operation • Using auziliary tracks and buses • Using shortcuts to build speed • Learning how to listen • And much more! Those more advanced will also achieve benefits from reading what was written around the gear and workflow at Blackbird Studio, the world-renowned production facility located in Nashville, Tennessee. Blackbird has produced hundreds of hit records from a variety of artists, including Taylor Swift, Jack White, Martina McBride, The Black Keys, Kings of Leon, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, and many more. Readers will learn an impressive range of valuable information only known in the inner circles of production at the heart of Music City USA.
Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (Ashgate Popular And Folk Music Ser.)
by Michael PickeringBlackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States fed into significant song and music genres that were assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative. Minstrelsy was not confined to its value as song, music and dance. Jokes at the expense of black people along with demeaning racial stereotypes were integral to minstrel shows. As a form of popular entertainment, British minstrelsy created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book attends closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. At the same time British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers are understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, t
Blackness in Opera
by Guthrie Ramsey Eric Saylor Karen M. Bryan Naomi AndreBlackness in Opera critically examines the intersections of race and music in the multifaceted genre of opera. A diverse cross-section of scholars places well-known operas (Porgy and Bess, Aida, Treemonisha) alongside lesser-known works such as Frederick Delius's Koanga, William Grant Still's Blue Steel, and Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! to reveal a new historical context for re-imagining race and blackness in opera. The volume brings a wide-ranging, theoretically informed, interdisciplinary approach to questions about how blackness has been represented in these operas, issues surrounding characterization of blacks, interpretation of racialized roles by blacks and whites, controversies over race in the theatre and the use of blackface, and extensions of blackness along the spectrum from grand opera to musical theatre and film. In addition to essays by scholars, the book also features reflections by renowned American tenor George Shirley. Contributors are Naomi André, Melinda Boyd, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Karen M. Bryan, Melissa J. de Graaf, Christopher R. Gauthier, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Gayle Murchison, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Eric Saylor, Sarah Schmalenberger, Ann Sears, George Shirley, and Jonathan O. Wipplinger.