Download or read book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life written by John Fahey and published by Drag City. This book was released on 2000 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fahey is feared and revered around the world as a guitar player and composer. His inventions for acoustic and electric strings are the stuff of legend. Known for his finger-picking finesse, Fahey's pen has the same world-gobbling ferocity as his guitar. Fahey's collection of short stories defy classification - part memoir, part personal essay, part fiction, part manifesto. It is a collection that makes an explosive selection of his work available for public consumption. What else is there to say, except 'Grab your ankles, dear readers. It's kingdom time!'

Download or read book Vampire Vultures written by John Fahey and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampire Vultures is an unexpected gift from the late music legend John Fahey. Originally a project of his own conception, it was to be an epic work that would expand on many of the character and experiences he introduced in How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life (2000). It is a unique volume that allows the reader to walk deep into the mind of its creator. Compiled from his private papers, it includes notebook entries, short stories, letters never sent, revealing the struggles and victories of a cult icon's life in modern America.

Download or read book The Portable Community written by Robert Owen Gardner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the various ways in which individuals use music and culture to understand and respond to changes in their natural and built environments. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation, the author develops the thesis that the relationships, networks, and intimate forms of social interaction in the “portable” community cultivated at bluegrass festival events are significant cultural formations that shape participants’ relationships to their localities. With specific attention to the ways in which the strength of these relationships are translated into meaningful sites of community identity, place, and action following devastating local floods that destroyed homes and businesses, displacing residents for years, The Portable Community: Place and Displacement in Bluegrass Festival Life sheds light on the strength of such communities when tested and under external threat. A study of the central role of arts and music in grappling with social and environmental change, including their role in facilitating disaster relief and recovery, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in symbolic interactionism, the sociology of music, culture, and the sociology of disaster.

Download or read book Dance of Death written by and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fahey hovers ghostlike in the sound of almost every acoustic guitarist who came after him. He was to the solo acoustic guitar what Hendrix was to the electric: the man whom all subsequent musicians had to listen to. Fahey made more than forty albums between 1959 and his death in 2001, fusing folk, blues, and experimental composition, taking familiar American sounds and making them new. Yet Fahey’s life and art remain largely unexamined. His memoir and liner notes were largely fiction. His real story has never been told—until now. Journalist Steve Lowenthal has spent years talking with Fahey’s producers, friends, peers, wives, business partners, and many others. He describes how Fahey introduced pre-war blues to a broader public; how his independent label, Takoma, set new standards; how he battled his demons, including stage fright, alcohol, and prescription pills; how he ended up homeless and mentally unbalanced; and how, despite his troubles, he managed to found a new record label, Revenant, that won Grammys and remains critically revered. This portrait of a troubled and troubling man in a constant state of creative flux is not only a biography, but also the compelling story of a great American outcast. Steve Lowenthal started and ran the music magazine Swingset; his writing has also been published in Fader, Spin, Vice, and the Village Voice. He lives in New York City. David Fricke is a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine.

Download or read book Charley Patton written by John Fahey and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of the music of blues legend Charley Patton. This new edition is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.

Download or read book Dust Grooves written by Eilon Paz and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.

Download or read book Czech Bluegrass written by Lee Bidgood and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music’s emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on “Americanist” musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic’s postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape.

Download or read book Blind Joe Death s America written by George Henderson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns. Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location—the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.

Download or read book I d Rather Be the Devil written by Stephen Calt and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skip James (1902–1969) was perhaps the most creative and idiosyncratic of all blues musicians. Drawing on hundreds of hours of conversations with James himself, Stephen Calt here paints a dark and unforgettable portrait of a man untroubled by his own murderous inclinations, a man who achieved one moment of transcendent greatness in a life haunted by failure. And in doing so, Calt offers new insights into the nature of the blues, the world in which it thrived, and its fate when that world vanished.

Download or read book What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life written by Bruce Frankel and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read Bruce Frankel's posts on the Penguin Blog "This wise and inspiring book hands down an important message: Happiness is abundant at any age, and only you can limit your options." -The Boston Globe In today's world, the question "What should I do with my life?" only scratches the surface. Now, more and more people-from baby boomers retiring from their "first act" to people in their forties and fifties reconsidering their careers in a recovering economy-are finding themselves wondering how to find new stimulation and meaningful work over a lifetime. Bringing together a diverse array of stories, veteran journalist Bruce Frankel brings to life a mesmerizing series of profiles of men and women who discovered a new calling, success, or purpose later in life. Brimming with inspiration and humanity, What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life? celebrates activists, artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and others who found extraordinary ways to experience true fulfillment in the second half of life. On these pages, readers will meet a civil servant, laid off at age fifty-two, who enrolled in graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in psychology; a former consultant who began a microfinance program in Africa; a longtime contact-lens grinder who has chiseled twelve hundred stone heads on a property now known as the "Easter Island of the Hudson"; and many others who proved that age is a spark-not a barrier. Full of spirit and plenty of chutzpah, this book shows that anything is possible in any stage of life.

Download or read book Writing Under written by Alan Sondheim and published by Center for Democracy/Citizenship. This book was released on 2012 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Sondheim's Writing Under explores and examines what happens to writing as it takes place on and through the networked computer. Sondheim began experimenting with artistic and philosophical writing using computers in the early 1970s. Since 1994, he has explored the possibilities of writing on the Internet, whether using blogs, web pages, e–mails, virtual worlds, or other tools. The sum total of Sondheim's writing online is entitled “The Internet Text.” Writing Under selects from this work to provide insight into how writing takes place today and into the unique practices of a writer. The selections range from philosophical musings, to technical explorations of writing practice, to poetic meditations on the writer online. This work expands our understanding of writing today and charts a path for writing's future.

Download or read book Blind Joe Death written by Andrew Lardner and published by Mel Bay Publications. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fahey transformed the world of acoustic flat-top steel-string guitar by bringing it to the concert stage as a respected, solo instrument. Blind Joe Death: Volume 1 looks at the important people and genres that shaped him as acomposer. This volume focuses on Side 1 of the original 1967 Blind Joe Death LP, a collection of mostly traditional music that was adapted for solo guitar. Hints of Fahey's early influences endured throughout his career as a composer, yet early on, and in Blind Joe Death, a unique voice is coming into focus-one that is not afraid to explore the avant-garde with journeys into collage and expressionism. Six extensively edited solos from Blind Joe Death are included in Volume 1: "On Doing an Evil Deed Blues," "St. Louis Blues," "Poor Boy a Long Ways from Home," "Uncloudy Day," "John Henry" and "In Christ There Is No East or West." Within these transcriptions, Andrew Lardner has provided admirers of John Fahey's body of work with the essential keys to launch their own journeys into replicating the sounds and style of Fahey's landmark solos from Blind Joe Death.

Download or read book Almost Heaven written by Chris Fabry and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy, a gifted mandolin player in Dogwood, West Virginia, lives his life as an offering to his divine creator, and when Malachi, an angel sent to observe Billy, begins to see the bigger picture of how each painful step Billy takes is a note added to a beautiful symphony, it will forever change the lives of those who hear it.

Download or read book American primitive guitar written by John Fahey and published by Stefan Grossman's Guitar Works. This book was released on 2002-03 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series for the intermediate guitarist, John Fahey teaches a wide variety of instrumental solos. Critics have called John's style American Primitive Guitar. The book includes tablature and notation with three compact discs featuring note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase instruction. LESSON ONE: A general discussion of pattern picking and the use of the alternate bass. In Christ There Is No East Or West, Take A Look At That Baby and Some Summer Day. LESSON TWO: One of John's most requested multi-sectioned composition is Indian Pacific Railroad Blues, also known as Beverley. This tune demonstrates how John composes in the fingerpicking idiom. Also taught is another very requested and imitated instrumental, John's The Last Steam Engine Train. LESSON THREE: When The Springtime Comes Again and The Approaching Of The Disco Void. A discussion of improvisational ideas in relationship to fingerstyle compositions concludes this lesson.

Download or read book Rhythm and Bluegrass written by Molly Harper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second e-novella in Molly Harper’s Bluegrass series of contemporary romances, two people determined to fulfill their own agendas come head to head—and find love in the process. Kentucky Tourism Commission employee Bonnie Turkle is up Mud Creek without a paddle. When she gets permission from the state historical society to restore McBride’s Music Hall in Mud Creek, Kentucky, to its former glory, she thinks the community will welcome her with open arms. Instead, her plans interfere with a proposal to sell the property to a factory that would bring much-needed jobs to the town. Even though Bonnie is trying to preserve mayor Will McBride’s family heritage, he is more concerned with the welfare of his people than memories of the past. Will finds her optimistic sentimentality extremely annoying—but that doesn’t stop him from kissing Bonnie senseless. With an inspection deadline looming and local saboteurs ruining her restoration, Bonnie must find a way to compromise with Will to save McBride’s and the town…while hopefully winning a few more kisses in the process!

Download or read book Guitar an American life written by Tim Brookes and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reunion is the awkward, tender meeting between a father and daughter after nearly twenty years separation. Dark Pony is the telling of a mythical story by a father to his young daughter as they drive home in the evening.

Download or read book Meet Me in the Bathroom written by Lizzy Goodman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR and GQ Joining the ranks of the classics Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, an intriguing oral history of the post-9/11 decline of the old-guard music industry and rebirth of the New York rock scene, led by a group of iconoclastic rock bands. In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem. Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.