Download or read book Beale Black and Blue written by Margaret McKee and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. C. Handy, Furry Lewis, Booker White, Lillie May Glover, Roosevelt Sykes, Arthur Crudup, B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Muddy Waters -- these and other musicians, singers, and songwriters, including the young Elvis Presley, eventually went to Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, to learn, improve, and practice their art. "To Handy and untold other blacks, Beale became as much a symbol of escape from black despair as Harriet Tubman's underground railroad," says Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall. They present Beale as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change -- from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business center to its present-day languishing. Choosing the former newspaper columnist, disc jockey, and schoolteacher Nat. D. Williams, as their main authority for the first part of this volume -- the street's history -- the authors have selected an individual with wisdom, perspective, and a distinctive voice that speaks from a lifetime of experience on Beale. His radio show on WDIA, "Tan Town Jamboree," was heard by thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley. Nat D. said, "We had a boast that if you made it on Beale Street, you can make it anywhere. And Elvis Presley made it on Beale first." Another Beale Streeter recalls, "He got that shaking, that wiggle, from Charlie Burse -- Ukulele Ike we called him -- right there at the Gray Mule on Beale." The street's history is richly complemented by the rare, extensive interviews that constitute the second half of the volume. "We undertook our research," the authors tell us, "not as a study of the blues but of the blues musicians themselves. They were a dying breed, these wandering minstrels who had become the principal storytellers of their people." Most of the musicians interviewed grew up in the rural southern areas where the authors found them, sometimes not far from their early homes. They tell of the music that took them to Memphis' street of the living blues. All show a resilience to despair, despite life's harsh times. Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, who never received his accumulated royalties, shrugs, "I come here with nothing and I ain't going away with nothing, and it's no need worrying my life with it." In the life of Beale Street and in the conversations of its musicians, we experience with penetrating awareness a delicate balance of humor, courage, and pain.
Download or read book Beale Black Blue written by Margaret McKee and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the Beale Street section of Memphis, Tennessee
Download or read book Black Camelot written by William L. Van Deburg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Kennedy era, a new kind of ethnic hero emerged within African-American popular culture. Uniquely suited to the times, burgeoning pop icons projected the values and beliefs of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and reflected both the possibility and the actuality of a rapidly changing American landscape. In Black Camelot, William Van Deburg examines the dynamic rise of these new black champions, the social and historical contexts in which they flourished, and their powerful impact on the African-American community. "Van Deburg manages the enviable feat of writing with flair within a standardized academic framework, covering politics, social issues and entertainment with equal aplomb."—Jonathan Pearl, Jazz Times "[A] fascinating, thorough account of how African-American icons of the 1960s and '70s have changed the course of American history. . . . An in-depth, even-tempered analysis. . . . Van Deburg's witty, lively and always grounded style entertains while it instructs."—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga written by Michelle R. Scott and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith's life as a lens to investigate broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural to urban migration, black community development in the post-emancipation era, and black working-class gender conventions. Arguing that the rise of blues culture and the success of female blues artists like Bessie Smith are connected to the rapid migration and industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scott focuses her analysis on Chattanooga, Tennessee, the large industrial and transportation center where Smith was born. This study explores how the expansion of the Southern railroads and the development of iron foundries, steel mills, and sawmills created vast employment opportunities in the postbellum era. Chronicling the growth and development of the African American Chattanooga community, Scott examines the Smith family's migration to Chattanooga and the popular music of black Chattanooga during the first decade of the twentieth century, and culminates by delving into Smith's early years on the vaudeville circuit.
Download or read book Dewey and Elvis written by Louis Cantor and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought the budding new music to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South's most popular white deejay, "Daddy-O-Dewey" soon became part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley and, subsequently, to conduct the first live, on-air interview with the singer. Louis Cantor illuminates Phillips's role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. Phillips's zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis's subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and oral history collections, Cantor presents a personal view of the disc jockey while restoring Phillips's place as an essential figure in rock 'n' roll history.
Download or read book Battling the Plantation Mentality written by Laurie B. Green and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. No single event makes this more plain, Laurie Green argues, than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of "freedom" in postwar Memphis, Green demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing "plantation mentality" based on race, gender, and power that permeated southern culture long before--and even after--the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan "I AM a Man!" the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. Green traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, Green demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.
Download or read book The African Americans written by Henry Louis Gates (Jr.) and published by Smiley Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles five hundred years of African-American history from the origins of slavery on the African continent through Barack Obama's second presidential term, examining contributing political and cultural events.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture 4 volumes written by Jessie Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 1916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume encyclopedia contains compelling and comprehensive information on African American popular culture that will be valuable to high school students and undergraduates, college instructors, researchers, and general readers. From the Apollo Theater to the Harlem Renaissance, from barber shop and beauty shop culture to African American holidays, family reunions, and festivals, and from the days of black baseball to the era of a black president, the culture of African Americans is truly unique and diverse. This diversity is the result of intricate customs forged in tightly woven communities—not only in the United States, but in many cases also stemming from the traditions of another continent. Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture presents information in a traditional A–Z organization, capturing the essence of the customs of African Americans and presenting this rich cultural heritage through the lens of popular culture. Each entry includes historical and current information to provide a meaningful background for the topic and the perspective to appreciate its significance in a modern context. This encyclopedia is a valuable research tool that provides easy access to a wealth of information on the African American experience.
Download or read book Segregating Sound written by Karl Hagstrom Miller and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. In a cultural history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and the market.
Download or read book Dixie Debates written by Richard H. King and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary American South is a region of economic expansion, political sophistication, and, particularly, cultural ferment. Its literature is well-known and celebrated. But what of the popular cultural forms of expression that have done so much to reflect the curious tensions between the traditional South—white-dominated, rural, religous—and contemporary multicultural forms and discourses? This collection offers a wealth of exciting new perspectives on cultural studies in general and of the particular forms of popular Southern culture—from rock and roll to Cajun music to the impact on the South of tourism and the questions of genre and race in contemporary film-making.
Download or read book Fever Season written by Jeanette Keith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi River in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than eighteen thousand people. The city of Memphis, Tennessee, was particularly hard hit: Of the approximately twenty thousand who didn't flee the city, seventeen thousand contracted the fever, and more than five thousand died-the equivalent of a million New Yorkers dying in an epidemic today. Fever Season chronicles the drama in Memphis from the outbreak in August until the disease ran its course in late October. The story that Jeanette Keith uncovered is a profound-and never more relevant-account of how a catastrophe inspired reactions both heroic and cowardly. Some ministers, politicians, and police fled their constituents, while prostitutes and the poor risked their lives to nurse the sick. Using the vivid, anguished accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and those who were left behind, Fever Season depicts the events of that summer and fall. In its pages we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. We also learn how a disaster can shape the future of a city.
Download or read book Beyond Piggly Wiggly written by Lisa C. Tolbert and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patented in 1917, Piggly Wiggly was by far the most influential self-service store of the early twentieth century. Before 1940 it was the only self-service chain with a national distribution network, but it was neither the first nor the only version. Beyond Piggly Wiggly reveals the importance of Piggly Wiggly in the invention of self-service and goes beyond the history of a single firm to explore the role of small business entrepreneurs who invented the first self-service stores in a grassroots social process. During the 1920s and 1930s a minority of enterprising grocers experimented with a wide variety of (sometimes wacky) design ideas for automating shopping. They created specialized stores designed as enclosed retail systems that went far beyond open display techniques to construct unique physical and psychological advantages for automating salesmanship. Beyond Piggly Wiggly offers the first perspective on the national scale of experimentation and connects the southern Jim Crow origins of self- service to the national history of this mass retailing method. Empirical analysis of store arrangements demonstrates how small stores that have previously been overlooked or undervalued as quaint anomalies were integral to the creation of supermarkets. Ultimately, self-service was more than a business decision; it was a fundamentally new social practice.
Download or read book Goin Back to Sweet Memphis written by Fred J. Hay and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memphis, Tennessee, is a major crossroads for blues musicians, songs, and styles. Memphis is where the blues first "came to town" and established itself as a cosmopolitan performance genre, and the city has long been a center of synthesis and evolution in blues recording. This volume tells the story of the blues in Memphis through previously unpublished interviews with nine performers who helped create and sustain the music from the days before its commercial success through the early 1970s. Their attitudes, experiences, and insights impart a deeper understanding of the blues aesthetic and philosophy. The performers' backgrounds range across the blues genres, from classic blues (Lillie Mae Glover) to country blues (Bukka White), from jug band blues (Laura Dukes) to tough, postwar electric blues (Joe Willie Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse). Some, like Furry Lewis and Bukka White, are known around the world. Others, like Laura Dukes, are locally popular, while Boose Taylor is virtually unknown. The range of instruments mastered by the musicians--banjo, fiddle, guitar, fife, bass, ukulele, piano, and harmonica--testifies to the many expressive voices of the blues. Some of the interviewees were singing and performing mostly for white blues/folk revivalist audiences by the 1970s; others, such as Joe Willie Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse, continued to perform mostly for black audiences in Memphis and in the small cafes that dotted the Mississippi Delta. Each interview is illustrated by noted printmaker George D. Davidson and introduced with a biographical sketch by Fred J. Hay. In addition, Hay's extensive notes identify many other blues performers--friends and music partners of the interviewees whose names come up in their many asides and allusions. Together these materials document and pay tribute to the remarkable richness of the Memphis blues scene.
Download or read book Blues Traveling written by Steve Cheseborough and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At 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 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. Steve Cheseborough is an independent scholar and blues musician. His work has been published in Living Blues, Blues Access, Mississippi, and the Southern Register .
Download or read book Notable Black Memphians written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Blues Bibliography written by Robert Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 1401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised and updated definitive blues bibliography now includes 6,000-7,000 entries to cover the last decade’s writings and new figures to have emerged on the Country and modern blues to the R&B scene.
Download or read book The Guide to United States Popular Culture written by Ray Broadus Browne and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1030 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To understand the history and spirit of America, one must know its wars, its laws, and its presidents. To really understand it, however, one must also know its cheeseburgers, its love songs, and its lawn ornaments. The long-awaited Guide to the United States Popular Culture provides a single-volume guide to the landscape of everyday life in the United States. Scholars, students, and researchers will find in it a valuable tool with which to fill in the gaps left by traditional history. All American readers will find in it, one entry at a time, the story of their lives."--Robert Thompson, President, Popular Culture Association. "At long last popular culture may indeed be given its due within the humanities with the publication of The Guide to United States Popular Culture. With its nearly 1600 entries, it promises to be the most comprehensive single-volume source of information about popular culture. The range of subjects and diversity of opinions represented will make this an almost indispensable resource for humanities and popular culture scholars and enthusiasts alike."--Timothy E. Scheurer, President, American Culture Association "The popular culture of the United States is as free-wheeling and complex as the society it animates. To understand it, one needs assistance. Now that explanatory road map is provided in this Guide which charts the movements and people involved and provides a light at the end of the rainbow of dreams and expectations."--Marshall W. Fishwick, Past President, Popular Culture Association Features of The Guide to United States Popular Culture: 1,010 pages 1,600 entries 500 contributors Alphabetic entries Entries range from general topics (golf, film) to specific individuals, items, and events Articles are supplemented by bibliographies and cross references Comprehensive index
