Download or read book Recording the Blues written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Recording the Blues written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 The New Paramount Book of Blues written by Alex van der Tuuk and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-eight biographies of Paramount blues artists with sensational new information based on years of research: Lovie Austin, Charles Avery, Viola Bartlette, Ed Bell, Eloise Bennett, Arthur "Blind" Blake, Lucille Bogan, Ardell Bragg, Henry Brown, Willie Brown, Hattie Burleson, Bob Call, Ben Covington, Ben Curry, Teddy Darby, Emmett Dickenson, Aletha Dickerson, Mattie Dorsey, Sally Duffie, Amos Easton, Bernice Edwards, Kid Edwards, Will Ezell, Leroy Roscoe Garnett, Clifford Gibson, Roosevelt Graves, Lee Green, George Hannah, Walter Hawkins, Bertha Henderson, Edna Hicks, Eddie House, James Jackson, Charlie Jackson, Louise Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Moses Mason, Hattie McDaniel, Charles McFadden, Sodarisa Miller, Marshall Owens, Charley Patton, Joe Reynolds, Elzadie Robinson, Isadore Rodgers, J.D. Short, Henry Sims, Danny Small, Bessie Mae Smith, Charlie Spand, Freddie Spruell, Frank Stokes, Joel Taggart, Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, Willard Thomas, Wesley Wallace, Nolan Welsh, "Jabo" Williams.

Download or read book All Music Guide to the Blues written by Vladimir Bogdanov and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2003 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews and rates the best recordings of 8,900 blues artists in all styles.

Download or read book The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings written by Tony Russell and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2006 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its roots in the American South to today's world stage, the journey of the blues has encompassed countless artists and recordings. But how can you find the best of them? The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordingsis a uniquely informative, insightful and easy-to-use guide through the jungles of the record shop and the online music store. It surveys the recorded work of more than a thousand blues artists, from towering figures of the past like Charley Patton, Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson to stars of the modern era such as B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan, providing crisp, expert and witty reviews of almost six thousand CDs. Whether you're a blues aficionado or just starting a collection, this is required reading.

Download or read book Bitten by the Blues written by Bruce Iglauer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It started with the searing sound of a slide careening up the neck of an electric guitar. In 1970, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Iglauer walked into Florence’s Lounge, in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, and was overwhelmed by the joyous, raw Chicago blues of Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. A year later, Iglauer produced Hound Dog’s debut album in eight hours and pressed a thousand copies, the most he could afford. From that one album grew Alligator Records, the largest independent blues record label in the world. Bitten by the Blues is Iglauer’s memoir of a life immersed in the blues—and the business of the blues. No one person was present at the creation of more great contemporary blues music than Iglauer: he produced albums by Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Professor Longhair, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Son Seals, Roy Buchanan, Shemekia Copeland, and many other major figures. In this book, Iglauer takes us behind the scenes, offering unforgettable stories of those charismatic musicians and classic sessions, delivering an intimate and unvarnished look at what it’s like to work with the greats of the blues. It’s a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary musicians and larger-than-life personalities who brought America’s music to life in the clubs of Chicago’s South and West Sides. Bitten by the Blues is also an expansive history of half a century of blues in Chicago and around the world, tracing the blues recording business through massive transitions, as a genre of music originally created by and for black southerners adapted to an influx of white fans and musicians and found a worldwide audience. Most of the smoky bars and packed clubs that fostered the Chicago blues scene have long since disappeared. But their soul lives on, and so does their sound. As real and audacious as the music that shaped it, Bitten by the Blues is a raucous journey through the world of Genuine Houserockin’ Music.

Download or read book Barrelhouse Blues written by Paul Oliver and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, Southern record companies ventured to cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans, where they set up primitive recording equipment in makeshift studios. They brought in street singers, medicine show performers, pianists from the juke joints and barrelhouses. The music that circulated through Southern work camps, prison farms, and vaudeville shows would be lost to us if it hadn't't been captured on location by these performers and recorders. Eminent blues historian Paul Oliver uncovers these folk traditions and the circumstances under which they were recorded, rescuing the forefathers of the blues who were lost before they even had a chance to be heard. A careful excavation of the earliest recordings of the blues by one of its foremost experts, Barrelhouse Blues expands our definition of that most American style of music.

Download or read book The Land where the Blues Began written by Alan Lomax and published by . This book was released on 1994-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, this mususical and cultural exploration of the rich, sorrow-laden birth of the blues is an intimate and respectful look at an integral part of African American culture--a master work that has been 60 years in the making. Photos.

Download or read book Escaping the Delta written by Elijah Wald and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.

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 King of the Blues written by Daniel de Vise and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full and authoritative biography of an American—indeed a world-wide—musical and cultural legend “No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues.”—President Barack Obama “He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced.”—Eric Clapton Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge. King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)—in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color. Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King’s inner circle—family, band members, retainers, managers, and more—and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby “Blue” Bland simply called “the man.”

Download or read book Father Of The Blues written by W. C. Handy and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1991-03-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. C. Handy's blues—“Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"—changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy presents his own story: a vivid picture of American life now vanished. W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a sensitive child who loved nature and music; but not until he had won a reputation did his father, a preacher of stern Calvinist faith, forgive him for following the "devilish" calling of black music and theater. Here Handy tells of this and other struggles: the lot of a black musician with entertainment groups in the turn-of-the-century South; his days in minstrel shows, and then in his own band; how he made his first 100 from "Memphis Blues"; how his orchestra came to grief with the First World War; his successful career in New York as publisher and song writer; his association with the literati of the Harlem Renaissance.Handy's remarkable tale—pervaded with his unique personality and humor—reveals not only the career of the man who brought the blues to the world's attention, but the whole scope of American music, from the days of the old popular songs of the South, through ragtime to the great era of jazz.

Download or read book 100 Books Every Blues Fan Should Own written by Edward Komara and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Search the Internet for the 100 best songs or best albums. Dozens of lists will appear from aficionados to major music personalities. But what if you not only love listening to the blues or country music or jazz or rock, you love reading about it, too. How do you separate what matters from what doesn’t among the hundreds—sometimes thousands—of books on the music you so love? In the Best Music Books series, readers finally have a quick-and-ready list of the most important works published on modern major music genres by leading experts. In 100 Books Every Blues Fan Should Own, Edward Komara, former Blues Archivist of the University of Mississippi, and his successor Greg Johnson select those histories, biographies, surveys, transcriptions and studies from the many hundreds of works that have been published about this vital American musical genre. Komara and Johnson provide a short description of the contents and the achievement of each title selected for their “Blues 100.” Entries include full bibliographic citations, prices of copies in print, and even descriptions of specific editions for book collectors. 100 Books Every Blues Fan Should Own also includes suggested blues recordings to accompany each recommended work, as well as a concluding section on key reference titles—or as Komara and Johnson phrase it: “The Books behind the Blues 100.” 100 Books Every Blues Fan Should Own serves as a guide for any blues fan looking for a road map through the history of—and even history of the scholarship on—the blues. Here Komara and Johnson answer the question of not only what is a “blues” book, but which ones are worth owning.

Download or read book Blues Gospel Records 1890 1943 written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its first edition, in 1964, Dixon and Godrich's Blues and Gospel Records has been dubbed 'the bible' for collectors of pre-war African-American music. It provides an exhaustive listing of all recordings made up to the end of 1943 in a distinctively African-American musical style,excluding those customarily classed as jazz (which are the subject of separate discographies). The book covers recordings made for the commercial market (whether issued at the time or not) and also recordings made for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song and similar bodies -- about 20,000titles in all, by more than 3,000 artists. For each recording session, full details are given of: artist credit, accompaniment, place and date of recording, titles, issuing company and catalogue numbers, matrix numbers and alternate takes. There are also short accounts of the major 'race labels',which recorded blues and gospel material, and a complete list of field trips to the south by travelling recording units. Howard Rye has joined the original compilers for this thoroughly revised fourth edition. The scope has been enlarged by the addition of about 150 new artists, in addition tonewly discovered recordings by other artists. Early cylinder recordings of gospel music, from the 1890s, are also included for the first time. Previous editions of this work were applauded for their completeness, accuracy, and reliability. This has now been enhanced by the addition of newinformation from record labels and from record company files, and by listening to a wide selection of titles, and detailed cross-checking.

Download or read book The Blues written by Chris Thomas King and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fresh new perspective that will be a true revolution to readers and will open new lines of discussion on . . . the importance of the city of New Orleans for generations to come." —Dr. Michael White, jazz clarinetist, composer, and Keller Endowed Chair at Xavier University of LA An untold authentic counter-narrative blues history and the first written by an African American blues artist All prior histories on the blues have alleged it originated on plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Not true, says author Chris Thomas King. In The Blues, King present facts to disprove such myths. This book is the first to argue the blues began as a cosmopolitan art form, not a rural one. As early as 1900, the sound of the blues was ubiquitous in New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, was an unpopulated sportsman's paradise—the frontier was still in the process of being cleared and drained for cultivation.? Expecting these findings to be controversial in some circles, King has buttressed his conclusions with primary sources and years of extensive research, including a sojourn to West Africa and interviews with surviving folklorists and blues researchers from the 1960s folk-rediscovery epoch.? New Orleans, King states, was the only place in the Deep South where the sacred and profane could party together without fear of persecution, creating the blues.

Download or read book Barrelhouse Blues written by Paul Oliver and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering scholar of the blues explores the folk traditions that predated and shaped this uniquely American music as we know it.