Download or read book Chasin that Devil Music written by Gayle Wardlow and published by Backbeat Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development and characteristics of the Delta blues, and describes the most influential blues musicians and recordings of the 1920s and 1930s
Download or read book In Search of the Blues written by Marybeth Hamilton and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight. In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music. Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America's south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America's ongoing love affair with racial difference.
Download or read book Searching for Robert Johnson written by Peter Guralnick and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly acclaimed biography from the author of Last Train to Memphis illuminates the extraordinary life of one of the most influential blues singers of all time, the legendary guitarist and songwriter whose music inspired generations of musicians, from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones and beyond. The myth of Robert Johnson’s short life has often overshadowed his music. When he died in 1938 at the age of just twenty-seven, poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he’d been flirting with at a dance, Johnson had recorded only twenty-nine songs. But those songs would endure as musical touchstones for generations of blues performers. With fresh insights and new information gleaned since its original publication, this brief biographical exploration brilliantly examines both the myth and the music. Much in the manner of his masterful biographies of Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips, and Sam Cooke, Peter Guralnick here gives readers an insightful, thought-provoking, and deeply felt picture, removing much of the obscurity that once surrounded Johnson without forfeiting any of the mystery. “I finished the book," declared the New York Times Book Review, "feeling that, if only for a brief moment, Robert Johnson had stepped out of the mists.”
Download or read book Searching for the Blues written by Richard Koechli and published by tredition. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Johnson did not sell his soul to the devil. But how did he crack the Blues code...? While modern music historians have now almost completely stripped the Blues of its myths, award-winning Swiss singer-songwriter, slide guitarist and book author Richard Koechli gives him back the soul in a philosophical way. With a mystical story that deeply explores the question of what exactly might be behind the legendary "mojo" of the great Blues masters. Koechli embarks on a trip to the temples of the African-American musical soul, gets involved in strange thought adventures, meets all kinds of stars of Blues and Rock history – and in the end is haunted in a dream by the most famous of all Blues figures, by Robert Johnson (1911-1938). Johnson 'tells' him what really happened in Mississippi back then, how he got the Blues secret – and whether the devil really played a role ... A stirring story for all Blues lovers; full of light-footed poetry, spiritual depth and music-historical precision. You can feel in every line that the author is not a theorist, but a Blues artist down to the core.
Download or read book Blue Chicago written by David Grazian and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer. For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest. From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.
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 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 Chasing the Blues written by Josephine Matyas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues---the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their shared experience of brutal oppression. They used the power of music to survive that oppression, creating a simple-in-structure, emotionally complex form that transformed and upended culture and became the bedrock of popular song. Tracing the music back to its geographical and cultural origins in the Delta is key to understanding how the blues were shaped. Over time, the Delta blues have touched virtually every form of popular music (rock and roll, soul, R&B, country-western, gospel), creating the soundscape of our lives. What makes this book unique? Fathoming how the music flowed from living and working conditions in the heart of the Deep South; appreciating how life-changing events like the Flood of 1927 sparked a mass migration away from plantation life, spreading the blues to the cities in the North and becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movement; how blues musicians interacted, "cross-fertilizing" their music by learning, influencing, and imitating each other. The habits of travel are shifting, and there is more interest and a larger market for diving deep into destinations closer to home. Interest in Black history and culture and the role Black Americans played in shaping America is at an all-time high. By appreciating the roots of this most American style of music, readers will have a richer experience listening to songs and visiting blues' holy and sacred sites.
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 Steppin on the Blues written by Jacqui Malone and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former dancer Jacqui Malone throws a fresh spotlight on the cultural history of black dance, the Africanisms that have influenced it, and the significant role that vocal harmony groups, black college and university marching bands, and black sorority and fraternity stepping teams have played in the evolution of dance in African American life.
Download or read book Getting the Blues written by Stephen J. Nichols and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid investigation of how blues music teaches listeners about sin, suffering, marginalization, lamentation, and worship.
Download or read book Crossroad Blues written by Ace Atkins and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-02-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... Ahmad has created a novel that looks at race and culture and the changing face of America. It's a story that's easy to devour but hard to forget... " - Richmond Times-DispatchRanjit Singh, a former Indian Army Captain trying to escape a shameful past, lives with his family among the migrant workers of Martha's Vineyard, working as a caretaker of the vacation homes of the rich and powerful. Needing a place to stay, Ranjit moves his family into an empty Senator's home. Happily, but illegally ensconced in the house, he tries to forget his brief affair with Anna, the wife of an African-American senator, and focus on providing for his family. But one night, their idyll is shattered when mysterious armed men break into the house, looking for an antique porcelain doll. Forced to flee, Ranjit is pursued and hunted by unknown forces, and becomes drawn into the Senator's shadowy world. To save his family and solve the mystery of the doll, he must join forces with Anna, who has her own dark secrets. As the past and present collide, Ranjit must finally confront the hidden event that destroyed his Army career and forced him to leave India.Tightly plotted, action-packed, smart and surprisingly moving, The Caretaker takes us from the desperate world of migrant workers to the elite African-American community of Martha's Vineyard, and a secret high-altitude war between India and Pakistan.
Download or read book So You Want to Sing the Blues written by Eli Yamin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So You Want to Sing the Blues: A Guide for Performers shines a light on the history and vibrant modern life of blues song. Eli Yamin explores those essential elements that make the blues sound authentic and guides readers of all backgrounds and levels through mastering this art form. He provides glimpses into the musical lives of the women and men who created the blues along with a listening tour of seminal recordings in the genre’s history. The blues presents many unique challenges for singers, who must shout, slide, and serenade around the accompanying music. By offering concrete explanations and exercises of key blues elements, this book guides singers to create authentic self-expressions informed by the style’s rich history and supported by strong technique. Teachers and singers of all levels will find this book a welcome guide to participating in this culturally diverse and uplifting style. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing the Blues features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.
Download or read book The Roots Of The Blues written by Samuel Charters and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1991-08-22 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I went to Africa to find the roots of the blues. So Samuel Charters begins the extraordinary story of his research. But what began as a study of how the blues was handed down from African slaves to musicians of today via the slave ships, became something much more complex. For in Africa Samuel Charters discovered a music which was not just a part of the past but a very vital living part of African culture. The Roots of the Blues not only reveals Charters's remarkable talent in discussing African folk music and its relationship with American blues; it demonstrates his power as a descriptive and narrative writer. Using extensive quotations of song lyrics and some remarkable photographs of the musicians, Charters has created a unique contribution to our understanding of both African and American cultures and their music.
Download or read book In Search of the Blues written by Bill Minutaglio and published by . This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning collection of stories about blues, African American life, and self-discovery in Texas by the award-winning author of First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty.
Download or read book Stone Butch Blues written by Leslie Feinberg and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.
Download or read book Cerulean Blues written by Katie Fallon and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cerulean Blues describes the plight of the cerulean warbler, a tiny migratory songbird, and its struggle to survive in ever-shrinking bands of suitable habitat. This elusive creature, a favorite among bird watchers and the fastest-declining warbler species in the United States, has lost 3 percent of its total population each year since 1966. This precipitous decline means that today there are 80 percent fewer ceruleans than 40 years ago, and their numbers continue to drop due to threats including deforestation, global warming, and an ecologically devastating practice -- mountaintop removal coal mining -- that affects not only the cerulean warbler but all residents of the Appalachian mountains, including humans.
