Download or read book Song of the Shank written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.
Download or read book Dissonant Identities written by Barry Shank and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."
Download or read book Rails Under My Back written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Harvest Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling family saga that brilliantly reflects the reality of the African-American experience in the United States Hatch and Jesus Jones are cousins on their fathers' side and on their mothers' side, and you can't have a family much more bound than that. And family is the most important entity for these young men, even when family seems to be defined by abandonment. Rails Under My Back traces these two men from one form of bondage or freedom to another, from one job to another, as they face down danger and try to come to terms with their family's past. This ambitious novel, which has been hailed by critics nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, is the communal expression of a century of African-American life in America, with its imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny. It wields extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, and announces the triumphant debut of a most powerful and utterly original voice.
Download or read book Arnold Jacobs written by Brian Frederiksen and published by Windsong Press (IL). This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arnold Jacobs: Song and Wind is written by Mr. Jacobs' assistant, Brian Frederiksen, and edited by John Taylor. Material comes from masterclasses, private interviews, previously published writings and contributions from his students and colleagues.
Download or read book Black Celebrity written by Emily Ruth Rutter and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.
Download or read book The Political Force of Musical Beauty written by Barry Shank and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.
Download or read book Holding Pattern written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of Jeffery Renard Allen's stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human. The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other's resolve. In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.
Download or read book All Graceful Instruments written by Nicholas Meriwether and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon gathers thirteen representative essays from a wide array of fields into an interdisciplinary anthology that reveals the depth and extent of this fascinating, variegated cultural phenomenon. Contributors use the techniques of literary criticism, musicology, sociology, philosophy, business theory, and more to explore the meaning and significance of the music of the Grateful Dead, the implications of their artistic and commercial success, and the social dimensions of their following, the Deadheads. For scholars and students of American history and culture, this book makes a convincing case for why the Grateful Dead phenomenon is worthy of academic attention and what that study can offer. By focusing a wide array of critical approaches on a single, discrete subject, All Graceful Instruments provides a refreshing approach to interdisciplinary studies that should appeal to a wide audience.
Download or read book Child of the Mountains written by Marilyn Sue Shank and published by Yearling. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's about keeping the faith. Growing up poor in 1953 in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia doesn't bother Lydia Hawkins. She treasures her tight-knit family. There's her loving mama, now widowed; her whip-smart younger brother BJ, who has cystic fibrosis; and wise old Gran. But everything falls apart after Gran and BJ die and Mama is jailed unjustly. Suddenly Lydia has lost all those dearest to her. Moving to a coal camp to live with her uncle William and aunt Ethel Mae only makes Lydia feel more alone. She is ridiculed at her new school for her outgrown homemade clothes and the way she talks, and for what the kids believe her mama did. And to make matters worse, she discovers that her uncle has been keeping a family secret—about her. If only Lydia, with her resilient spirit and determination, could find a way to clear her mother's name. . . .
Download or read book Charles Ives my Father s Song written by Stuart Feder and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychoanalytic biography which examines the lives of Charles Ives and his father, George. It shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil is central to understanding Ives' work. Charles' music is shown as an unconscious collaboration between father and son.
Download or read book Cultures Of Popular Music written by Bennett, Andy and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a comprehensive cultural, social and historical overview of post-war popular music genres, from rock 'n' roll and psychedelic pop, through punk and heavy metal, to rap, rave and techno.
Download or read book Write in Tune Contemporary Music in Fiction written by Erich Hertz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Focusing on Anglo-American novels of the past two decades, Write in Tune explores the dynamic intersection between popular music and fiction"--
Download or read book Woody Guthrie written by Ronald D. Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Woody Guthrie is the most famous and influential folk music composer and performer in the history of the United States. His most popular song, "This Land is Your Land" has become the country's unofficial national anthem, known to every school child since the 1960s. His influence exceeded the realm of American music, reaching American politics. Guthrie’s music became the soundtrack to the Great Depression, and iconic of the Dust Bowl migrants. Guthrie and his music came to represent those disenfranchised people who remained committed to making better lives for themselves through the promise of the American Dream. Here, in a short, accessible biography, bolstered with primary documents, including letters, autobiographical excerpts, and reflections by Pete Seeger, Cohen introduces Guthrie’s life and music influence to students of American history and culture.
Download or read book The Tide Was Always High written by Josh Kun and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation"--Title page
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 1036 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Progressive Country written by Jason Mellard and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."
Download or read book Latin Music 2 volumes written by Ilan Stavans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 958 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive two-volume encyclopedia of Latin music spans 5 centuries and 25 countries, showcasing musicians from Celia Cruz to Plácido Domingo and describing dozens of rhythms and essential themes. Eight years in the making, Latin Music: Musicians, Genres, and Themes is the definitive work on the topic, providing an unparalleled resource for students and scholars of music, Latino culture, Hispanic civilization, popular culture, and Latin American countries. Comprising work from nearly 50 contributors from Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, this two-volume work showcases how Latin music—regardless of its specific form or cultural origins—is the passionate expression of a people in constant dialogue with the world. The entries in this expansive encyclopedia range over topics as diverse as musical instruments, record cover art, festivals and celebrations, the institution of slavery, feminism, and patriotism. The music, traditions, and history of more than two dozen countries—such as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Spain, and Venezuela—are detailed, allowing readers to see past common stereotypes and appreciate the many different forms of this broadly defined art form.
