Download or read book It Came From Memphis written by Robert Gordon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon's critically acclaimed and richly entertaining exploration of the birthplace of rock and roll is peopled with Delta bluesmen, manic deejays, matinee cowboys and Elvis.
Download or read book GHOSTS BEHIND THE SUN written by Tav Falco and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2013-11-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ghost Behind The Sun", Tav Falco's sprawling study of Memphis, begins with the Civil War massacre at Fort Pillow, the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878 and the grisly murders of the Harp Brothers. Falco traces these legends of Reconstruction-era Memphis to an equally brutal twentieth century underworld – Beale Street kingpin Jim Canaan, Edward Crump's political machine, the Dixie Mafia, and others. Also included are revelatory dialogues concerning the city’s many music legends, from rockabilly icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Feathers to more underground figures such as Jim Dickinson and country blues wailer Jessie Mae Hemphill. Interwoven with these accounts is an autobiographical history of Falco’s own time in Memphis, including his involvement with performance art ensemble Insect Trust, working with pop/rock maverick Alex Chilton, and the formation of his seminal rock and roll band, Panther Burns. Illustrated throughout.
Download or read book Memphis Rent Party written by Robert Gordon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Blues, being the wellspring of all American music for over a century, is always worth studying. Robert does it right." --Keith Richards "An emotional map of musical Memphis. If you don't know these characters, let Robert Gordon introduce you." --Elvis Costello "Robert Gordon's book is proof that Southern heritage is American heritage, and all sorts of people--black and white, familiar and strange, dead and alive--are what it is." --Greil Marcus Profiles and stories of Southern music from the acclaimed author of Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. The fabled city of Memphis has been essential to American music--home of the blues, the birthplace of rock and roll, a soul music capital. We know the greatest hits, but celebrated author Robert Gordon takes us to the people and places history has yet to record. A Memphis native, he whiles away time in a crumbling duplex with blues legend Furry Lewis, stays up late with barrelhouse piano player Mose Vinson, and sips homemade whiskey at Junior Kimbrough's churning house parties. A passionate listener, he hears modern times deep in the grooves of old records by Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. The interconnected profiles and stories in Memphis Rent Party convey more than a region. Like mint seeping into bourbon, Gordon gets into the wider world. He beholds the beauty of mistakes with producer Jim Dickinson (Replacements, Rolling Stones), charts the stars with Alex Chilton (Box Tops, Big Star), and mulls the tragedy of Jeff Buckley's fatal swim. Gordon's Memphis inspires Cat Power, attracts Townes Van Zandt, and finds James Carr always singing at the dark end of the street. A rent party is when friends come together to hear music, dance, and help a pal through hard times; it's a celebration in the face of looming tragedy, an optimism when the wolf is at the door. Robert Gordon finds mystery in the mundane, inspiration in the bleakness, and revels in the individualism that connects these diverse encounters.
Download or read book Memphis written by Tara M. Stringfellow and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. “A rhapsodic hymn to Black women.”—The New York Times Book Review “I fell in love with this family, from Joan’s fierce heart to her grandmother Hazel’s determined resilience. Tara Stringfellow will be an author to watch for years to come.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR, BuzzFeed, Glamour, PopSugar Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected. As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.
Download or read book Respect Yourself written by Robert Gordon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the rise and fall of the original Stax Records, touching upon the racial politics in Memphis in the 1960s, the personal histories of the sibling founders, and the prominent musicians they featured.
Download or read book Memphis Blues written by William Bearden and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blues was born in the Mississippi Delta, and since that fateful night in 1903 when W. C. Handy heard the mournful sound of a pocketknife sliding over the strings of an acoustic guitar and the plaintive song of a long-forgotten musician in the hot night of Tutwiler, Mississippi, the blues has been on a journey around the world. From the cotton fields and juke joints of the Delta, up Highway 61 to Memphis's Beale Street, St. Louis, the Southside of Chicago, England, and points beyond, the blues is America's unique form of music. Blues is incisive in its honesty, elemental in its rhythm, and powerful in its almost visceral sensation. Nearly every style of popular music has its roots in the blues. Muddy Waters said it best: "The blues had a baby, and they called it rock and roll." Memphis has become the heart of the blues world, with a re-born Beale Street acting as its spiritual center. People come from the world over to experience its beat, savor its emotion, and feel its power. In the end . . . "it ain't nothin' but the blues."
Download or read book Memphis 68 written by Stuart Cosgrove and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2018 In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city's most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the final days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding's label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Download or read book Memphis Mayhem written by David A. Less and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memphis gave birth to music that changed the world — Memphis Mayhem is a fascinating history of how music and culture collided to change the state of music forever “David Less has captured the essence of the Memphis music experience on these pages in no uncertain terms. There's truly no place like Memphis and this is the story of why that is. HAVE MERCY!” — Billy F Gibbons, ZZ Top Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. David Less constructs a fascinating narrative of the city that has produced a startling array of talent, including Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Al Green, Otis Redding, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Justin Timberlake, and so many more. Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W.C. Handy’s codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry. Memphis Mayhem explores the city’s entire musical ecosystem, which includes studios, high school band instructors, clubs, record companies, family bands, pressing plants, instrument factories, and retail record outlets. Lively and comprehensive, this is a provocative story of finding common ground through music and creating a sound that would change the world.
Download or read book Historic Photos of Memphis written by Gina Cordell and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HISTORIC PHOTOS OF MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE captures the remarkable journey of this city and her people with still photography from the finest archives of city, state and private collecions. From the Civil War through Reconstruction, the rise of industry, World Wars and into the modern era, Memphis has remained a city of change and innovation. With hundreds of archival photos reproduced in stunning duotone on heavy art paper, this book is the perfect addition to any historican's collection.
Download or read book Beale Street Dynasty Sex Song and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis written by Preston Lauterbach and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vivid history of Beale Street—a lost world of swaggering musicians, glamorous madams, and ruthless politicians—and the battle for the soul of Memphis. Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life. Robert Church, who would become “the South’s first black millionaire,” was a mulatto slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and—shockingly—white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man who claimed to have invented the blues. In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early twentieth century. Robert and his son, Bob Jr., bought and sold property, founded a bank, and created a park and auditorium for their people finer than the places whites had forbidden them to attend. However, the Church family operated through a tense arrangement with the Democrat machine run by the notorious E. H. “Boss” Crump, who stole elections and controlled city hall. The battle between this black dynasty and the white political machine would define the future of Memphis. Brilliantly researched and swiftly plotted, Beale Street Dynasty offers a captivating account of one of America’s iconic cities—by one of our most talented narrative historians.
Download or read book Memphis Boys written by Roben Jones and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-11-12 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memphis Boys chronicles the story of the rhythm section at Chips Moman's American Studios from 1964, when the group began working together, until 1972, when Moman shut down the studio and moved the entire operation to Atlanta. Utilizing extensive interviews with Moman and the group, as well as additional comments from the songwriters, sound engineers, and office staff, author Roben Jones creates a collective biography combined with a business history and a critical analysis of important recordings. She reveals how the personalities of the core group meshed, how they regarded newcomers, and how their personal and musical philosophies blended with Moman's vision to create timeless music based on themes of suffering and sorrow. Recording sessions with Elvis Presley, the Gentrys, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, the Box Tops, Joe Tex, Neil Diamond, B. J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick, and many others come alive in this book. Jones provides the stories behind memorable songs composed by group writers, such as "The Letter," "Dark End of the Street," "Do Right Woman," "Breakfast in Bed," and "You Were Always on My Mind." Featuring photographs, personal profiles, and a suggested listening section, Memphis Boys details a significant phase of American music and the impact of one studio.
Download or read book Last Train To Memphis written by Peter Guralnick and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first of two volumes that make up what is arguably the definitive Elvis biography. Rich in documentary and interview material, this volume charts Elvis' early years and his rise to fame, taking us up to his departure for Germany in 1958. Of all the biographies of Elvis - this is the one you will keep coming back to.
Download or read book Pharaoh s Son written by D M Wilder and published by D M Wilder. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The White Rose of Memphis written by William Clark Falkner and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here is a story of the Mississippi River South in its great days of the steamboat era, by one of its most distinguished citizens. Colonel Falkner, great-grandfather of William Faulkner, Nobel-prize novelist of our time, was a plantation owner, railroad builder, Civil War hero, writer and founder of schools. The White Rose of Memphis, first published in 1881, was the Gone with the Wind of that period; edition after edition kept appearing until about the time of World War I, when it went out of print; since then it has been unobtainable and legendary."--Publishers's description
Download or read book Soul Memphis Original Sound written by Thom Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book's mission is to document the legends of the Memphis soul music business. Photographer Thom Gilbert set up a photo studio at Royal Studios in Memphis, home of the famed Hi Records that launched the careers of Al Green, Ann Peebles, and dozens of others. The studio's "green room" was filled with soul music royalty: Bobby "Blue" Bland in his signature nautical cap, several of the Hodges brothers who make up the incomparable Hi Rhythm Section were on hand, Stax Records musicians Bobby Manuel, Lester Snell were there actually working on a recording, but pausing to have their portraits taken. Gilbert has captured images of what seems like every living person related to Memphis soul music. From Rev. Jesse Jackson, who recorded spoken word albums on Stax's Respect Records label, to Sam Moore of the indelible soul duo Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Steve Cropper, B.B. King, Bobby Rush, and many others, including the lesser known but equally vital session players, writers, engineers, publicists who contributed to what is now world renowned as The Memphis Sound.
Download or read book Can t Be Satisfied written by Robert Gordon and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can't Be Satisfied is that rare thing in musical biographies: a book that maps out not just a single, extraordinary life but the cultural forces that shaped it' Sean O'Hagan, Observer Muddy Waters was the greatest blues musician ever, and the most influential. He invented electric blues, inspired the Rolling Stones and created the template for the rock 'n' roll band and its wild lifestyle. Robert Gordon's definitive biography vividly chronicles the extraordinary life and personality of the musical legend who changed the course of modern popular music.
Download or read book Close to Famous written by Joan Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel full of heart, humor, and charm from Newbery Honor winner Joan Bauer! When twelve-year-old Foster and her mother land in the tiny town of Culpepper, they don't know what to expect. But folks quickly warm to the woman with the great voice and the girl who can bake like nobody's business. Soon Foster - who dreams of having her own cooking show one day - lands herself a gig baking for the local coffee shop, and gets herself some much-needed help in overcoming her biggest challenge - learning to read . . . just as Foster and Mama start to feel at ease, their past catches up to them. Thanks to the folks in Culpepper, though Foster and her mama find the strength to put their troubles behind them for good.
