Download or read book Living Blues written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Brother Robert written by Annye C. Anderson and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 “[Brother Robert} book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth.”—Rolling Stone An intimate memoir by blues legend Robert Johnson's stepsister, including new details about his family, music, influences, tragic death, and musical afterlife Though Robert Johnson was only twenty-seven years young and relatively unknown at the time of his tragic death in 1938, his enduring recordings have solidified his status as a progenitor of the Delta blues style. And yet, while his music has retained the steadfast devotion of modern listeners, much remains unknown about the man who penned and played these timeless tunes. Few people alive today actually remember what Johnson was really like, and those who do have largely upheld their silence-until now. In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy. Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to Anderson by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Johnson back down to earth; they preserve both his memory and his integrity. For decades, Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Brother Robert is here to set the record straight. Featuring a foreword by Elijah Wald and a Q&A with Anderson, Wald, Preston Lauterbach, and Peter Guralnick, this book paints a vivid portrait of an elusive figure who forever changed the musical landscape as we know it.
Download or read book Whose Blues written by Adam Gussow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.
Download or read book Beyond the Crossroads written by Adam Gussow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as "the crossroads" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.
Download or read book I Ain t Studdin Ya written by Bobby Rush and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush. This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas, donning a fake mustache to trick club owners into thinking he was old enough to gain entry. He led his first band in Arkansas between Little Rock and Pine Bluff in the 1950s. It was there he first had Elmore James play in his band. Rush later relocated to Chicago to pursue his musical career and started to work with Earl Hooker, Luther Allison, and Freddie King, and sat in with many of his musical heroes, such as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter. Rush eventually began leading his own band in the 1960s, crafting his own distinct style of funky blues, and recording a succession of singles for various labels. It wasn't until the early 1970s that Rush finally scored a hit with "Chicken Heads." More recordings followed, including an album which went on to be listed in the Top 10 blues albums of the 1970s by Rolling Stone and a handful of regional jukebox favorites including "Sue" and "I Ain't Studdin' Ya." And Rush's career shows no signs of slowing down now. The man once beloved for performing in local jukejoints is now headlining major music/blues festivals, clubs, and theaters across the U.S. and as far as Japan and Australia. At age eighty-six, he is still on the road for over 200 days a year. His lifelong hectic tour schedule has earned him the affectionate title "King of the Chitlin' Circuit," from Rolling Stone. In 2007, he earned the distinction of being the first blues artist to play at the Great Wall of China. His renowned stage act features his famed shake dancers, who personify his funky blues and his ribald sense of humor. He was featured in Martin Scorcese's The Blues docuseries on PBS, a documentary film called Take Me to the River, performed with Dan Aykroyd on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and most recently had a cameo in the Golden Globe nominated Netflix film, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. He was recently given the highest Blues Music Award honor of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year. His songs have also been featured in TV shows and films including HBO's Ballers and major motion pictures like Black Snake Moan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Considered by many to be the greatest bluesman currently performing, this book will give readers unparalleled access into the man, the myth, the legend: Bobby Rush.
Download or read book Sunbelt Blues written by Andrew Ross and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World's backyard. Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida. Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the fifteen-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county’s affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods. Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America’s suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.
Download or read book Up Jumped the Devil written by Bruce Conforth and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Johnson is the subject of the most famous myth about the blues: he allegedly sold his soul at the crossroads in exchange for his incredible talent, and this deal led to his death at age 27. But the actual story of his life remains unknown save for a few inaccurate anecdotes. Up Jumped the Devil is the result of over 50 years of research. Gayle Dean Wardlow has been interviewing people who knew Robert Johnson since the early 1960s, and he was the person who discovered Johnson's death certificate in 1967. Bruce Conforth began his study of Johnson's life and music in 1970 and made it his mission to fill in what was still unknown about him. In this definitive biography, the two authors relied on every interview, resource and document, most of it material no one has seen before. As a result, this book not only destroys every myth that ever surrounded Johnson, but also tells a human story of a real person. It is the first book about Johnson that documents his years in Memphis, details his trip to New York, uncovers where and when his wife Virginia died and the impact this had on him, fully portrays the other women Johnson was involved with, and tells exactly how and why he died and who gave him the poison that killed him. Up Jumped the Devil will astonish blues fans who thought they knew something about Johnson.
Download or read book The Original Blues written by Lynn Abbott and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.
Download or read book Blues All Day Long written by Wayne Everett Goins and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-08-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A member of Muddy Waters' legendary late 1940s-1950s band, Jimmy Rogers pioneered a blues guitar style that made him one of the most revered sidemen of all time. Rogers also had a significant if star-crossed career as a singer and solo artist for Chess Records, releasing the classic singles "That's All Right" and "Walking By Myself." In Blues All Day Long, Wayne Everett Goins mines seventy-five hours of interviews with Rogers' family, collaborators, and peers to follow a life spent in the blues. Goins' account takes Rogers from recording Chess classics and barnstorming across the South to a late-in-life renaissance that included new music, entry into the Blues Hall of Fame, and high profile tours with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. Informed and definitive, Blues All Day Long fills a gap in twentieth century music history with the story of one of the blues' eminent figures and one of the genre's seminal bands.
Download or read book Southern Soul Blues written by David G. Whiteis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attracting passionate fans primarily among African American listeners in the South, southern soul draws on such diverse influences as the blues, 1960s-era deep soul, contemporary R & B, neosoul, rap, hip-hop, and gospel. Aggressively danceable, lyrically evocative, and fervidly emotional, southern soul songs often portray unabashedly carnal themes, and audiences delight in the performer-audience interaction and communal solidarity at live performances. Examining the history and development of southern soul from its modern roots in the 1960s and 1970s, David Whiteis highlights some of southern soul's most popular and important entertainers and provides first-hand accounts from the clubs, show lounges, festivals, and other local venues where these performers work. Profiles of veteran artists such as Denise LaSalle, the late J. Blackfoot, Latimore, and Bobby Rush--as well as contemporary artists T. K. Soul, Ms. Jody, Sweet Angel, Willie Clayton, and Sir Charles Jones--touch on issues of faith and sensuality, artistic identity and stereotyping, trickster antics, and future directions of the genre. These revealing discussions, drawing on extensive new interviews, also acknowledge the challenges of striving for mainstream popularity while still retaining the cultural and regional identity of the music and maintaining artistic ownership and control in the age of digital dissemination.
Download or read book Delta Blues The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music written by Ted Gioia and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-11-02 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The essential history of this distinctly American genre.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution In this “expertly researched, elegantly written, dispassionate yet thoughtful history” (Gary Giddins), award-winning author Ted Gioia gives us “the rare combination of a tome that is both deeply informative and enjoyable to read” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From the field hollers of nineteenth-century plantations to Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Delta Blues delves into the uneasy mix of race and money at the point where traditional music became commercial and bluesmen found new audiences of thousands. Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, interviews with living musicians, and first-person accounts with “his own calm, argument-closing incantations to draw a line through a century of Delta blues” (New York Times), this engrossing narrative is flavored with insightful and vivid musical descriptions that ensure “an understanding of not only the musicians, but the music itself” (Boston Sunday Globe). Rooted in the thick-as-tar Delta soil, Delta Blues is already “a contemporary classic in its field” (Jazz Review).
Download or read book I Don t Like the Blues written by B. Brian Foster and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn't like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: "How?" "Why not?" "Will it ever change?" This is the story of the answers to his questions. In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.
Download or read book Texas Blues written by Alan B. Govenar and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-09 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas Blues allows artists to speak in their own words, revealing the dynamics of blues, from its beginnings in cotton fields and shotgun shacks to its migration across boundaries of age and race to seize the musical imagination of the entire world. Fully illustrated with 495 dramatic, high-quality color and black-and-white photographs—many never before published—Texas Blues provides comprehensive and authoritative documentation of a musical tradition that has changed contemporary music. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author Alan Govenar here builds on his previous groundbreaking work documenting these musicians and their style with the stories of 110 of the most influential artists and their times. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Aaron “T-Bone” Walker of Dallas, to Delbert McClinton in Fort Worth, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins in East Texas, Baldemar (Freddie Fender) Huerta in South Texas, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin, Texas Blues shows the who, what, where, and how of blues in the Lone Star State.
Download or read book The Voice of the Blues written by Jim O'Neal and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some voices you will hear in The Voice of the Blues: "I sing blues for some money and I sing because I love 'em. They tried to put me over in another bag but I just don't fit no other bag. Exactly I fits one shoe, and that is the blues."-Muddy Waters "I never did name one of my records 'the blues' . . . Everybody else called my sounds what I made 'the blues.' But I always just felt good behind 'em; I didn't feel like I was playin' no blues. I felt like it sound just as good to the spiritual people as it would to somebody in a bar. . ."-Jimmy Reed "The Voice of the Blues" brings together lengthy interviews with pioneering blues performers including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, B. B. King, and many others. Each interview captures the "voice" of the blues performer, reflecting life experiences, musical influences, and achievements. Illustrations include rare archival photographs and documents. A must for fans of the blues-both traditional and electric.
Download or read book The Voice of the Blues written by Jim O'Neal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Voice of the Blues brings together interviews with many pioneering blues men including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and many others.
Download or read book Blues with a Feeling written by Tony Glover and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whenever 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.
Download or read book I m Feeling the Blues Right Now written by Stephen A. King and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta, Stephen A. King reveals the strategies used by blues promoters and organizers in Mississippi, both African American and white, local and state, to attract the attention of tourists. In the process, he reveals how promotional materials portray the Delta’s blues culture and its musicians. Those involved in selling the blues in Mississippi work to promote the music while often conveniently forgetting the state’s historical record of racial and economic injustice. King’s research includes numerous interviews with blues musicians and promoters, chambers of commerce, local and regional tourism entities, and members of the Mississippi Blues Commission. This book is the first critical account of Mississippi’s blues tourism industry. From the late 1970s until 2000, Mississippi’s blues tourism industry was fragmented, decentralized, and localized, as each community competed for tourist dollars. By 2003–2004, with the creation of the Mississippi Blues Commission, the promotion of the blues became more centralized as state government played an increasing role in promoting Mississippi’s blues heritage. Blues tourism has the potential to generate new revenue in one of the poorest states in the country, repair the state’s public image, and serve as a vehicle for racial reconciliation.
