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Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory
by Houston A. Baker Jr.Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr. , offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
by Angela Y. DavisThe author of "Women, Race and Class" suggests that "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday represent a black working-class, feminist ideology and historical consciousness. Davis' illuminating analysis of the songs performed by these artists provides readers with a compelling and transformative understanding of their musical and social contributions and of their relation to both the African-American community and American culture.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
by Angela Y. DavisFrom one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Blues Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Chicago (Music in American Life #489)
by David WhiteisChicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.
The Blues Lyric Formula
by Michael TaftThis book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form. Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics. This book gives a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in this formulaic structure and inspires new discussion of lyric structures. A wide array of readers will find this insightful and informative: from students of African-American music, cultural studies, history and linguistics, to Blues fans fascinated by exactly how the lyrics of this influential music style are written.
Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell
by Richard CongressYank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour Europe and to play blues festivals in the United States. In Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell, Richard Congress delivers the first biography of a family man whose playing inspired and energized the likes of David Honeyboy Edwards, Sleepy John Estes, and Henry Townsend. No other biography discusses the mandolin's influence and role in the blues. Guitar great Ry Cooder said, "Yank's style fascinated me because it had a lot of power and it's very raw-and what a great thing to do, just attack this little instrument like that." Charlie Musselwhite, the noted harp player, worked with Rachell and club hopped in Chicago with the elder bluesman. "He just had a great spirit about him," Musselwhite said of Rachell's playing and singing, "really just shouting it out. If the world was made up of people like Yank Rachell it would be a wonderful place to live." Blues Mandolin Man chronicles the life, times, and music of a man who was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1910 in rural western Tennessee. An active musician for 75 years, Rachell mastered several musical instruments and first recorded for Victor in Memphis in 1929. Through the blues, Rachell's world expanded to include Chicago, New York, recording studios and, after the sixties, radio, TV, and national and European tours. Yank's recollections reveal new information about personalities and events that will delight blues history buffs. Rich appendixes detail Yank's mandolin and guitar style and his place in the blues tradition. For this book Richard Congress, who reissued two of Rachell's old LPs in CD format, worked closely with him to record memories spanning decades of blues playing. Congress tells a compelling and engaging story about a colorful and thoughtful character who as a child picked cotton and plowed a field behind a mule, who grew to manhood coping with the southern Jim Crow system, and who participated in the creation and perpetuation of the blues.
Blues Musicians of the Mississippi Delta
by Steven ManheimThe Mississippi Delta blues run as deep and mysterious as the beautiful land from where the music originates. Blues legends B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and countless other greats came from this region. The Delta blues, born as work songs in Mississippi cotton fields, was played on city street corners and in rural juke joints. With the Great Migration of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century, the Delta blues also made its way from Mississippi to Chicago. The sound of the blues would become the blueprint for the birth of rock and roll in Memphis in the 1950s. The era of the great Delta blues musicians is over, but their legacy remains an important chapter in American music. This book contains images of these important performers and the rich Delta landscapes that influenced their music.
The Blues of Flats Brown
by Walter Dean MyersTo escape an abusive master, a junkyard dog named Flats runs away and makes a name for himself from Mississippi to New York City playing blues on his guitar.
Blues on Stage: The Blues Entertainment Industry in the 1920s (SUNY Press Jazz Styles)
by John L. ClarkBlues on Stage presents a new history of the development of the "Classic Blues" of the 1920s, offering a comprehensive review of various Black singers who recorded and were influential in this era, including Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Butterbeans and Susie, and Ma Rainey. The business of music recording and publishing, including songwriting and touring theater circuits, is explored as part of the narrative of how and when these artists became nationally popular. The most highly regarded singers of this period were not folk or rural artists, but rather highly experienced stage professionals whose careers often extended two decades or more prior to their first recordings. These artists, some of the most famous acts on the Black vaudeville and tent show circuits, were preceded in the recording studio by many cabaret and nightclub singers with a different entertainment perspective and were followed by artists who came from a more rural, less professional background. For anyone interested in the roots of jazz and blues, Blues on Stage offers a new and comprehensive introduction to the development of this American musical style.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America
by Amiri Baraka Leroi Jones"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz. . . [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music. " So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
Blue's Rainy Day Music (Blue's Clues Discovery Series, Book #2)
by Ronald KiddIt's raining and Magenta comes over for a playdate. Blue wants to make a musical instrument. Can you help find the clues and learn what instrument Blue wants to make?
Blues & Roots Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Southern Appalachians
by Jonathan WilliamsJonathan Williams's poetry has been described as brilliant, sensuous, lyrical, quirky, suave, vital, joyful, sardonic, melodious, passionate, alive, pyrotechnic. This new, much enlarged edition of Blues and Roots displays all of the above. Williams has tramped the Appalachian Trail for decades, botanizing, jotting down specimens of authentic American speech, graffiti, superstitions, and nostrums--always curious, alert, and affectionately attentive. Blues and Roots focuses on the linguistic horizon of Appalachia in lyrics of wonder and light, of wit and comic incongruity, in found poems of the speech of his mountain neighbors. Publishers Weekly said of the earlier edition, "One of the most beautiful and evocative tributes to the Appalachians and its people yet published. " Blues and Roots is a fine celebration; Wiliams is a joyful ringmaster.
The Blues Scales - C Version
by Dan Greenblatt Sher MusicThe only book that shows how the Blues Scales (Major and Minor) are used to create jazz solos. Designed to help beginners quickly learn how to create meaningful solos without having to first master all the scales and chords of a tune. Great transcriptions of solo phrases by Miles Davis, Dave Sanborn, Dizzy Gillespie, etc. showing how the Blues Scales are used. The accompanying CD has the author and his NY rhythm section demonstrating each exercise, and also great as a jazz play-along! Endorsed by Michael Brecker, Jamey Aebersold, etc. The audio portion of this book is available for free download at http://www.shermusic.com/new/downloads.shtml.
The Blues Singers: Ten Who Rocked the World
by Julius LesterThe blues. It's that low-down feeling that makes you ache from your soul to the soles of your shoes. Here in the voice of a grandfather passing on a legacy to a younger generation, renowned author Julius Lester introduces ten of the hottest black blues singers of our time. The diva Aretha Franklin, the legendary Billie Holiday, and the fabulous B.B. King are just a taste of what's in store.
Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, Third Edition
by Steve CheseboroughAt a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the Devil so that he could become a guitar virtuoso and King of the Delta Blues. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, Third Edition will tell you where that legendary deal was supposed to have been made and guide you to all the other hallowed grounds that nourished Mississippi's signature music. Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Memphis Minnie, Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, Little Milton, Elvis Presley, Bobby Rush, Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside-the list of great artists with Mississippi connections goes on and on. A trip through Mississippi blues sites is a pilgrimage every music lover ought to make at least once in a lifetime, to see the juke joints and churches, to visit the birthplaces and graves of blues greats, to walk down the dusty roads and over the levee, to eat some barbecue and greens, to sit on the bank of the Mississippi River, and to hear some down-home blues music. Blues Traveling is the first and only guidebook to Mississippi's musical places and blues history. With photographs, maps, easy-to-follow directions, and an informative, entertaining text, this book will lead you in and out of Clarksdale, Greenwood, Helena (Arkansas), Rolling Fork, Jackson, Natchez, Bentonia, Rosedale, Itta Bena, and dozens of other locales that generations of blues musicians have lived in, traveled through, and sung about. Stories, legends, and lyrics are woven into the text so that each backroad and barroom comes alive. Touring Mississippi with Blues Traveling is like having a knowledgeable and entertaining guide at your side. Even people with no immediate plans to visit Mississippi will enjoy reading the book for its photos, descriptions, and lore that will broaden their understanding and enhance their appreciation of the blues.
Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, Fourth Edition
by Steve CheseboroughThis acclaimed travel guide, hailed as the bible of blues travelers throughout the world, will shepherd the faithful to such shrines as the intersection where Robert Johnson might have made his deal with the devil and the railroad tracks that inspired Howlin’ Wolf to moan “Smokestack Lightnin’.” Blues Traveling was the first and is the indisputably essential guidebook to Mississippi's musical places and its blues history.For this new fourth edition, Steve Cheseborough returned once again to the Delta, revisited all of the locales featured in previous editions of the book, and uncovered fresh destinations. He includes updated material on new festivals, state blues markers, club openings and closings, and many other transformations in the Delta's ever-lively blues scene. The fourth edition also features new information on the Mississippi Blues Trail, updated information on the many blues sites throughout the Delta, and twenty new photographs.With photographs, maps, easy-to-follow directions, and an informative, entertaining text, this book will lead the reader in and out of Clarksdale, Greenwood, Helena (Arkansas), Rolling Fork, Jackson, Memphis, Natchez, Bentonia, Rosedale, Itta Bena, and dozens of other locales where generations of blues musicians have lived, traveled, and performed.
Blues Unlimited: Essential Interviews from the Original Blues Magazine
by Bill Greensmith Mark Camarigg Tony Russell Mike RoweBritish blues fan Mike Leadbitter launched the magazine Blues Unlimited in 1963. The groundbreaking publication fueled the then-nascent, now-legendary blues revival that reclaimed seminal figures like Son House and Skip James from obscurity. Throughout its history, Blues Unlimited heightened the literacy of blues fans, documented the latest news and career histories of countless musicians, and set the standard for revealing long-form interviews. Conducted by Bill Greensmith, Mike Leadbitter, Mike Rowe, John Broven, and others, and covering a who's who of blues masters, these essential interviews from Blues Unlimited shed light on their subjects while gleaning colorful detail from the rough and tumble of blues history. Here is Freddie King playing a string of one-nighters so grueling it destroys his car; five-year-old Fontella Bass gigging at St. Louis funeral homes; and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup rising from life in a packing crate to music stardom. Here, above all, is an eyewitness history of the blues written in neon lights and tears, an American epic of struggle and transcendence, of Saturday night triumphs and Sunday morning anonymity, of clean picking and dirty deals. Featuring interviews with: Fontella Bass, Ralph Bass, Fred Below, Juke Boy Bonner, Roy Brown, Albert Collins, James Cotton, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Joe Dean, Henry Glover, L.C. Green, Dr. Hepcat, Red Holloway, Louise Johnson, Floyd Jones, Moody Jones, Freddie King, Big Maceo Merriweather, Walter Mitchell, Louis Myers, Johnny Otis, Snooky Pryor, Sparks Brothers, Jimmy Thomas, Jimmy Walker, and Baby Boy Warren.
Blues with a Feeling: The Little Walter Story
by Tony Glover Scott Dirks Ward GainesWhenever you hear the prevalent wailing blues harmonica in commercials, film soundtracks or at a blues club, you are experiencing the legacy of the master harmonica player, Little Walter. Immensely popular in his lifetime, Little Walter had fourteen Top 10 hits on the R&B charts, and he was also the first Chicago blues musician to play at the Apollo. Ray Charles and B.B. King, great blues artists in their own right, were honored to sit in with his band. However, at the age of 37, he lay in a pauper's grave in Chicago. This book will tell the story of a man whose music, life and struggles continue to resonate to this day.
BluesSpeak: Best of the Original Chicago Blues Annual
by Koko Taylor Eddie Boyd Famoudou Don Moye Big Daddy Kinsey Lester Bowie Junior Wells Billy Boy Arnold Herb Kent Barry Dolins E. B. Redmond Q. Troupe K. Ya Salaam Julie Parson-Nesbitt Hart Leroy BibbsThis incomparable anthology collects articles, interviews, fiction, and poetry from the Original Chicago Blues Annual, one of music history's most significant periodical blues publications. Founded and operated from 1989 to 1995 by African American musician and entrepreneur Lincoln T. Beauchamp Jr., OCBA gave voice to the blues community and often frankly addressed contentious issues within the blues such as race, identity, prejudice, wealth, gender, and inequity. OCBA often expressed an explicitly black perspective, but its contributors were a mix of black and white, American and international. Likewise, although OCBA's roots and main focus were in Chicago, Beauchamp's vision for the publication (and his own activities as a blues performer and promoter) embraced an international dimension, reflecting a broad diversity of blues audiences and activities in locations as farflung as Iceland, Poland, France, Italy, and South Africa. This volume includes key selections from OCBA's seven issues and features candid interviews with blues luminaries such as Koko Taylor, Eddie Boyd, Famoudou Don Moye, Big Daddy Kinsey, Lester Bowie, Junior Wells, Billy Boy Arnold, Herb Kent, Barry Dolins, and many more. Also featured are heartfelt memorials to bygone blues artists, insightful observations on the state of the blues in Chicago and beyond, and dozens of photographs of performers, promoters, and other participants in the worldwide blues scene.
Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton
by Graham LockIn Blutopia Graham Lock studies the music and thought of three pioneering twentieth-century musicians: Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future. A century after Ellington's birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black history and compares the different approaches of Ra, a band leader who focused on the future and cosmology, and Braxton, a contemporary composer whose work creates its own elaborate mythology. Arguing that the majority of writing on black music and musicians has--even if inadvertently--incorporated racial stereotypes, he explains how each artist reacted to criticism and sought to break free of categorical confines. Drawing on social history, musicology, biography, cultural theory, and, most of all, statements by the musicians themselves, Lock writes of their influential work. Blutopia will be a welcome contribution to the literature on twentieth-century African American music and creativity. It will interest students of jazz, American music, African American studies, American culture, and cultural studies.
Bob Dylan: American Troubadour (Tempo: A Rowman & Littlefield Music Series on Rock, Pop, and Culture)
by Donald BrownWith Bob Dylan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his iconic status as an American musical, cultural, and poetic giant has never been more apparent. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book to look at Dylan’s career, from his first album to his late masterpiece Tempest. Donald Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan’s prolific body of work, placing Dylan’s career in the context of its time in order to assess the relationship of Dylan’s music to contemporary American culture. Each chapter follows the shifting versions of Dylan, from his songs of conscientious social involvement to more personal exploratory songs; from his influential rock albums of the mid-1960s to his adaptations of country music; from his three very different tours in the 1970s to his “born again” period as a proselytizer for Christ and his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the 1990s to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in
Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews
by Jonathan Cott“A historical compilation to savor” (Los Angeles Times) that is “invaluable…irresistible” (The New York Times)—the ultimate collection of interviews and encounters with Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, spanning his entire career from 1962 to today.Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews features over two dozen of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, gathered in one definitive collection that spans his career from street poet to Nobel Laureate. First published in 2006, this acclaimed collection brought together the best interviews and encounters with Bob Dylan to create a multi-faceted, cultural, and journalistic portrait of the artist and his legacy. This edition includes three additional pieces from Rolling Stone that update the volume to the present day. Among the highlights are the seminal Rolling Stone interviews—anthologized here for the first time—by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder, Mikal Gilmore, Douglas Brinkley, and Jonathan Lethem—as well as Nat Hentoff’s legendary 1966 Playboy interview. Surprises include Studs Terkel’s radio interview in 1963 on WFMT in Chicago, the interview Dylan gave to screenwriter Jay Cocks when he was a student at Kenyon College in 1964, a 1965 interview with director Nora Ephron, and an interview Sam Shepard turned into a one-act play for Esquire in 1987. Introduced by Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott, these intimate conversations from America’s most celebrated street poet is a “priceless collection with honest, open, and thoughtful musings…a fascinating window into his one-of-a-kind mind” (Publishers Weekly).
Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work
by Timothy HamptonA career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwritingBob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.
Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet
by Seth RogovoyBob Dylan and his artistic accomplishments have been explored, examined, and dissected year in and year out for decades, and through almost every lens. Yet rarely has anyone delved extensively into Dylan's Jewish heritage and the influence of Judaism in his work. In Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovoy, an award-winning critic and expert on Jewish music, rectifies that oversight, presenting a fascinating new look at one of the most celebrated musicians of all time. Rogovoy unearths the various strands of Judaism that appear throughout Bob Dylan's songs, revealing the ways in which Dylan walks in the footsteps of the Jewish Prophets. Rogovoy explains the profound depth of Jewish content -- drawn from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Kabbalah -- at the heart of Dylan's music, and demonstrates how his songs can only be fully appreciated in light of Dylan's relationship to Judaism and the Jewish themes that inform them. From his childhood growing up the son of Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, who were at the center of the small Jewish community in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, to his frequent visits to Israel and involvement with the Orthodox Jewish outreach movement Chabad, Judaism has permeated Dylan's everyday life and work. Early songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" derive central imagery from passages in the books of Ezekiel and Isaiah; mid-career numbers like "Forever Young" are infused with themes from the Bible, Jewish liturgy, and Kabbalah; while late-period efforts have revealed a mind shaped by Jewish concepts of Creation and redemption. In this context, even Dylan's so-called born-again period is seen as a logical, almost inevitable development in his growth as a man and artist wrestling with the burden and inheritance of the Jewish prophetic tradition. Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet is a fresh and illuminating look at one of America's most renowned -- and one of its most enigmatic -- talents.
Bob Dylan
by June Skinner SawyersPacked with information, savvy insights, and surprising facts, this guide to Dylan's years in New York City examines the role that the city played in the creation of his music, the evolution of his creative process, and the continual reinvention of his public persona.In the landscape of Manhattan, Dylan created words and sounds that redefined the possibilities of popular music throughout the world. Chronicling where he lived, worked, and played, this book offers an evocative portrait of the city, especially its folk scene during the 1960s. With street maps featuring more than 50 sites-from fleabag hotels and avant-garde clubs to tiny coffeehouses and vast concert halls-readers can navigate Bob Dylan's New York and experience the sites and sounds that influenced the singer, such as Café Wha?; the Chelsea Hotel; Columbia's Studio A, where he recorded songs such as "Desolation Row" and "Positively 4th Street;" the Decker Building, where he hung out with Andy Warhol and Nico; the Delmonico Hotel, where he introduced the Beatles to marijuana; and the Bitter End, where he spent much of the summer of 1975 playing pool and guitar.