Download or read book Crooner written by Alex Coles and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate history of the crooner in popular music from the 1950s to the present. In this book, Alex Coles explores the history of the crooner—someone who sings close to the mic in a soft style—in popular music from the 1950s to the present. Each chapter focuses on how one song by one artist contributes to the image of the crooner in the popular imagination. The book describes the rich diversity of crooners throughout music history, including artists in disco, rock, hip-hop, and more such as Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, Barry White, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Tom Waits, Grace Jones, Ian McCulloch, Nick Cave, and Nas. Ultimately, Coles shows how the crooner continues to connect listeners with their hidden feelings.
Download or read book Real Men Don t Sing written by Allison McCracken and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.
Download or read book The Crooner written by Aubrey Priest and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten friends go on a trip to Las Vegas looking for the fun excitement, women and the pure rush of living the high life in Sin City. One of the ten men has a dark secret that will cast them into the depths of Hell as they find themselves trapped in the underbelly of the city that never sleeps. Their friendship is replaced by a profound brotherhood as they fight to stay alive while playing a deadly and unrelenting game of cat and mouse with killers around every corner and people conspiring against them at every turn. Trained assassins want the ten men dead while the leader of a terrorist sleeper cells seeks vengence against the assasins. The FBI and Las Vegas PD are driven to stop the bad guys before they kill again. Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows is the biggest threat to them all, The Crooner.
Download or read book Bing Crosby written by Richard Grudens and published by celebrity profiles publilshing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the quintessential Bing Crosby tribute from the pen of author and music historian, Richard Grudens, documenting the story of Crosby's colourful life, family, radio and television shows, and films; the amazing success story of a career that pioneered popular music spanning generations and inspiring many followers: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Jerry Vale, Dean Martin, Eddie Fisher, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley and Billy Eckstine, all of whom acknowledge their debt right between the covers of this book. An inspirational introduction by his lovely wife, Kathryn Grant Crosby, is followed by endearing, anecdotal accounts of those ubiquitous 'Road' films with Bob Hope, and detailed personal testimonials from show business icons in their own words. A 'must read' for Crosby fans, collectors, admirers, music lovers, and everyone who cherishes the music and anecdotes of the players involved in the Golden Age of Popular Music.
Download or read book Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique written by Joseph Lanza and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a narrative full of passion, as well as showbiz personalities like Pola Negri and Carole Lombard, Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique combines a remarkable collection of Columbo's letters, diary entries, scrapbook clippings, and other personal effects - all woven with an intimate biography that pleads the case for romantic balladeers."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Rise of the Crooners written by Michael Pitts and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2001-12-22 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Rudy Vallee—these cultural icons whose fame spanned all the important mass media, also played a vital role in the origin and development of the crooning tradition. Crooning represented one of the most important musical styles of the twentieth century, intermingling with jazz and fronting the big band craze of the thirties and forties. Crooners spurred the rise of radio as home staple and the Golden Age of film musicals. When commercial television became a viable commodity, crooners anchored perhaps the first TV programming innovation, the variety show. It took the cataclysmic aesthetic and cultural changes ushered in by rock 'n' roll in the 1950s to finally bring crooners down from their pedestal. The Rise of the Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the emergence of the crooning style. Ian Whitcomb, a successful popular music vocalist himself for almost 40 years, provides a personal perspective on this phenomenon. The lives and careers of six pioneers of the style—Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Marvin, and Nick Lucas—are covered at length. With the exception of one entry devoted to Crosby—possibly the greatest entertainer of the past century—these biographies (appended by lengthy bibliographies and discographies) are more thorough and up-to-date than any treatment in print about these seminal artists.
Download or read book Nocturnes written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes an inspired sequence of stories as affecting as it is beautiful. With the clarity and precision that have become his trademarks, Kazuo Ishiguro interlocks five short pieces of fiction to create a world that resonates with emotion, heartbreak, and humor. Here is a fragile, once famous singer, turning his back on the one thing he loves; a music junky with little else to offer his friends but opinion; a songwriter who inadvertently breaks up a marriage; a jazz musician who thinks the answer to his career lies in changing his physical appearance; and a young cellist whose tutor has devised a remarkable way to foster his talent. For each, music is a central part of their lives and, in one way or another, delivers them to an epiphany.
Download or read book The Italian Crooners Bedside Companion written by Richard Grudens and published by celebrity profiles publilshing. This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides insight into the lives of Italian musical personalities and features over 100 photos. This compendium explores the musical world of Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine, Perry Como, Jerry Vale, Al Martino, Dean Martin, Julius La Rosa, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Don Cornell, Bobby Darin, Louis Prima, Lou Monte, Russ Columbo, and many others.
Download or read book Jazz and American Culture written by Michael Borshuk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores jazz as a cultural lodestone and source of critical inquiry for over a century.
Download or read book Crooning written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Funny, outrageous, cynical, and spellbinding.”—People magazine. In this first-ever digital edition of John Gregory Dunne’s acclaimed collection Crooning, readers find evidence from the get-go confirming the writer’s reputation as one of the most clear-seeing, incisive observers of the American cultural and political scene. In sixteen sharp, distinctively voiced essays, Dunne profiles a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who three decades later passed himself off as a young Chicano novelist; considers the Kennedy men and conservative William F. Buckley, takes us inside California’s labyrinthine water politics and criminal justice system, details the workings of the Los Angeles county morgue, and is on the ground observing in Jerusalem just weeks before the intifada enveloped the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1987. Here, too, are superbly entertaining accounts of the Hollywood star system and studio machine, Dunne drawing on two decades of experience as an L.A.-based journalist and fiction-writer with regular forays into screenwriting. He is candid and insightful about the business of writing and life of the dedicated writer as well. In “Laying Pipe,” Dunne chronicles the five-year experience of writing his epic novel The Red White and Blue. And in “Critical,” he focuses on book reviews and reviewers from his perspective as an author who, along with manifold strong notices, also received the occasional critical knock. He names names, and takes the opportunity to fire back at one of his critics. Early in Crooning, Dunne tells us that when he tires of the writing grind, he fantasizes about being a Johnny Mercer-like crooner, then reveals a moment later that he is tone deaf. The title, then, is playful - and in more than one way. Instead of writing sweet narrative melodies, Dunne built his career through work that exposes, challenges, thrums with opinion, and bristles with spiky, knowing humor. Download Crooning and dive into a book of provocative reportage, great stories, and witty, vigorous prose.
Download or read book Crooning written by William F. Caesar and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 6 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lure of Crooning Water written by Marion Hill and published by McLeod & Allen. This book was released on 1913 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Music Sound and Technology in America written by Timothy D. Taylor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.
Download or read book Hearing Luxe Pop written by John Howland and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Download or read book The Chemickal Marriage written by Gordon Dahlquist and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miss Temple, young, wealthy and far away from home, never wanted to be a heroine. Yet her fiancé is dead - admittedly by her own hand - her companions slain and her nemesis, the terrifyingly wicked Contessa Lacquer-Sforza, still at large. It falls upon Miss Temple's tiny shoulders to destroy a deadly cabal whose alchemy threatens to enslave the world. But Dr Svenson and Cardinal Chang are alive - barely. Exhausted and outnumbered, their bodies corrupted by a poisonous blue glass, Miss Temple, Dr Svenson and Cardinal Chang must pursue their enemies through city slums and dazzling palaces as they fight to prevent the cabal's unholy marriage between man and science. In the final installment of Dahlquist's epic trilogy, an assassin, an heiress and a surgeon battle against the world's most frightening evil... in an adventure that will decide everything.
Download or read book The Resort written by Sol Stein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cliffhaven--Magnificent new resort near Big Sur. Surrounded by redwoods. Guarded by Oceanside cliffs. Protected from prying eyes. By reservation only. Cliffhaven--Founded by a man with very special interests, catering to a very special clientele. Margaret and Henry Brown, vacationing New Yorkers innocently driving down the sea-washed coast of California, are just the right sort of people. Cliffhaven--It has a spectacular entrance, a three-star restaurant, lavish accommodations--and no exit! "This novel should do for California vacation retreats what jaws did for swimming in the Atlantic."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "A thrilling nightmare...A Dante's Inferno...more than fulfills the remark "I read it all in one nail-biting session."--Eli Wallach "Not only a thriller...a parable and a warning to all who say 'It can't happen here.'"--Jewish Post and Opinion
Download or read book The Rudder written by Thomas Fleming Day and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
