Download or read book Mister Satan s Apprentice written by Adam Gussow and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Gussow is a writer and blues harmonica player. He is associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
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 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 Journeyman s Road written by Adam Gussow and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee, and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition. At the heart of Gussow's story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling Mr. Satan Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities--black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship--but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds. Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York's mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman's Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues.
Download or read book Seems Like Murder Here written by Adam Gussow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.
Download or read book Deep Blues written by Mark Winborn and published by Fisher King Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep Blues explores the archetypal journey of the human psyche through an examination of the blues as a musical genre. The genesis, history, and thematic patterns of the blues are examined from an archetypal perspective and various analytic theories. Mythological and shamanistic parallels are used to provide a deeper understanding of the role of the bluesman, the blues performance, and the innate healing potential of the blues. Universal aspects of human experience and transcendence are revealed through the creative medium of the blues. The atmosphere of Deep Blues is enhanced by the black and white photographs of Tom Smith which capture striking blues performances in the Maxwell Street section of Chicago. Jungian analysts, therapists and psychoanalytic practitioners with an interest in the interaction between creative expression and human experience should find Deep Blues satisfying. Deep Blues should also appeal to enthusiasts of music, ethnomusicology, and the blues.
Download or read book Princeton Alumni Weekly written by and published by princeton alumni weekly. This book was released on 1998 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sweet Bitter Blues written by Phil Wiggins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC’s Homemade Blues depicts the life and times of harmonica player Phil Wiggins and the unique, vibrant music scene around him, as described by music journalist Frank Matheis. Featuring Wiggins’s story, but including information on many musicians, the volume presents an incomparable documentary of the African American blues scene in Washington, DC, from 1975 to the present. At its core, the DC-area acoustic “down home” blues scene was and is rooted in the African American community. A dedicated group of musicians saw it as their mission to carry on their respective Piedmont musical traditions: Mother Scott, Flora Molton, Chief Ellis, Archie Edwards, John Jackson, John Cephas, and foremost Phil Wiggins. Because of their love for the music and willingness to teach, these creators fostered a harmonious environment, mostly centered on Archie Edwards’s famous barbershop where Edwards opened his doors every Saturday afternoon for jam sessions. Sweet Bitter Blues features biographies and supporting essays based on Wiggins’s recollections and supplemented by Matheis’s research, along with a foreword by noted blues scholar Elijah Wald, historic interviews by Dr. Barry Lee Pearson with John Cephas and Archie Edwards, and previously unpublished and rare photographs. This is the story of an acoustic blues scene that was and is a living tradition.
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 Busker s Holiday written by Adam Gussow and published by Modern Blues Harmonica. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning blues scholar and musician Adam Gussow, a taut, sexy first novel about the summer busking scene in Europe and a pair of wild-hearted young men who make a pitch for fame and glory, finding a girl or two along the way. Busker's Holiday is the story of McKay Chernoff, a Columbia University grad student with a harmonica in his pocket and a blues band in his background. Desolate and despairing after a disastrous romantic breakup, McKay decides to fly off to Paris and reinvent himself as a street performer. What follows is an epic summer voyage into the busking life, propelled by the mad exploits of Billy Lee Grant, a fearless young guitar shredder whose Memphis-to-Mississippi pedigree and Dylanesque surrealism make him, when he explodes into view, precisely the partner McKay has been yearning for. Burning like a latter-day Dean Moriarty, Bill goads McKay into a sun-drenched, all-night bender, stoked by wine, women, mushrooms, and trains, that careens down out of Avignon and across the French Riviera. What happens next--in Florence, Solingen, Amsterdam, Paris--is a story of purgatory, redemption, and love regained. Hope, in a word, as a modern troubadour returns from his wanderings, reborn.
Download or read book Blues Funk Rhythm and Blues Soul Hip Hop and Rap written by Eddie S. Meadows and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the influence of African American music and study as a worldwide phenomenon, no comprehensive and fully annotated reference tool currently exists that covers the wide range of genres. This much needed bibliography fills an important gap in this research area and will prove an indispensable resource for librarians and scholars studying African American music and culture.
Download or read book Living Blues written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by M. Thomas Inge and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.
Download or read book Robert Johnson Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture written by Patricia R. Schroeder and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004-06-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suddenly Robert Johnson is everywhere. Though the Mississippi bluesman died young and recorded only twenty-nine songs, the legacy, legend, and lore surrounding him continue to grow. Focusing on these developments, Patricia R. Schroeder's Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture breaks new ground in Johnson scholarship, going beyond simple or speculative biography to explore him in his larger role as a contemporary cultural icon. Part literary analysis, part cultural criticism, and part biographical study, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture shows the Robert Johnson of today to be less a two-dimensional character fixed by the few known facts of his life than a dynamic and contested set of ideas. Represented in novels, in plays, and even on a postage stamp, he provides inspiration for "highbrow" cultural artifacts--such as poems--as well as Hollywood movies and T-shirts. Schroeder's detailed and scholarly analysis directly engages key images and stories about Johnson (such as the Faustian crossroads exchange of his soul for guitar virtuosity), navigating the many competing interpretations that swirl around him to reveal the cultural purposes these stories and their tellers serve. Unprecedented in both range and depth, Schroeder's work is a fascinating examination of the relationships among Johnson's life, its subsequent portrayals, and the cultural forces that drove these representations. With penetrating insights into both Johnson and the society that perpetuates him, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is essential reading for cultural critics and blues fans alike.
Download or read book African American Folklore written by Anand Prahlad and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American folklore dates back 240 years and has had a significant impact on American culture from the slavery period to the modern day. This encyclopedia provides accessible entries on key elements of this long history, including folklore originally derived from African cultures that have survived here and those that originated in the United States. Inspired by the author's passion for African American culture and vernacular traditions, African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students thoroughly addresses key elements and motifs in black American folklore-especially those that have influenced American culture. With its alphabetically organized entries that cover a wide range of subjects from the word "conjure" to the dance style of "twerking," this book provides readers with a deeper comprehension of American culture through a greater understanding of the contributions of African American culture and black folk traditions. This book will be useful to general readers as well as students or researchers whose interests include African American culture and folklore or American culture. It offers insight into the histories of African American folklore motifs, their importance within African American groups, and their relevance to the evolution of American culture. The work also provides original materials, such as excepts from folktales and folksongs, and a comprehensive compilation of sources for further research that includes bibliographical citations as well as lists of websites and cultural centers.
Download or read book Hoodlums written by William L. Van Deburg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. When you think of African American history, you think of its heroes—individuals endowed with courage and strength who are celebrated for their bold exploits and nobility of purpose. But what of black villains? Villains, just as much as heroes, have helped define the black experience. Ranging from black slaveholders and frontier outlaws to serial killers and gangsta rappers, Hoodlums examines the pivotal role of black villains in American society and popular culture. Here, William L. Van Deburg offers the most extensive treatment to date of the black badman and the challenges that this figure has posed for race relations in America. He first explores the evolution of this problematic racial stereotype in the literature of the early Republic—documents in which the enslavement of African Americans was justified through exegetical claims. Van Deburg then probes antebellum slave laws, minstrel shows, and the works of proslavery polemicists to consider how whites conceptualized blacks as members of an inferior and dangerous race. Turning to key works by blacks themselves, from the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits—controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary. Ultimately, Van Deburg brings his story up-to-date with discussions of prison and hip-hop culture, urban rioting, gang warfare, and black-on-black crime. What results is a work of remarkable virtuosity—a nuanced history that calls for both whites and blacks to rethink received wisdom on the nature and prevalence of black villainy.
Download or read book Franchising Dreams written by Peter M. Birkeland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franchises have become an ever-present feature of American life, both in our landscapes and our economics. Peter M. Birkeland worked for three years in the front-line operations of franchise units for three companies, met with CEOs and executives, and attended countless trade shows, seminars, and expositions. Through this extensive fieldwork Birkeland not only discovered what makes franchisees succeed or fail, he uncovered the difficulties in running a business according to someone else's system and values. Bearing witness to a market flooded with fierce competitors and dependent on the inscrutable whims of consumers, he revealed the numerous challenges that franchisees face in making their businesses succeed. Book jacket.
