Download or read book Memphis and the Paradox of Place written by Wanda Rushing and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated as the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll, Memphis, Tennessee, is where Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Johnny Cash, and other musical legends got their starts. It is also a place of conflict and tragedy--the site of Martin Luther

Download or read book Beale Black and Blue written by Margaret McKee and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. C. Handy, Furry Lewis, Booker White, Lillie May Glover, Roosevelt Sykes, Arthur Crudup, B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Muddy Waters -- these and other musicians, singers, and songwriters, including the young Elvis Presley, eventually went to Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, to learn, improve, and practice their art. "To Handy and untold other blacks, Beale became as much a symbol of escape from black despair as Harriet Tubman's underground railroad," says Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall. They present Beale as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change -- from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business center to its present-day languishing. Choosing the former newspaper columnist, disc jockey, and schoolteacher Nat. D. Williams, as their main authority for the first part of this volume -- the street's history -- the authors have selected an individual with wisdom, perspective, and a distinctive voice that speaks from a lifetime of experience on Beale. His radio show on WDIA, "Tan Town Jamboree," was heard by thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley. Nat D. said, "We had a boast that if you made it on Beale Street, you can make it anywhere. And Elvis Presley made it on Beale first." Another Beale Streeter recalls, "He got that shaking, that wiggle, from Charlie Burse -- Ukulele Ike we called him -- right there at the Gray Mule on Beale." The street's history is richly complemented by the rare, extensive interviews that constitute the second half of the volume. "We undertook our research," the authors tell us, "not as a study of the blues but of the blues musicians themselves. They were a dying breed, these wandering minstrels who had become the principal storytellers of their people." Most of the musicians interviewed grew up in the rural southern areas where the authors found them, sometimes not far from their early homes. They tell of the music that took them to Memphis' street of the living blues. All show a resilience to despair, despite life's harsh times. Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, who never received his accumulated royalties, shrugs, "I come here with nothing and I ain't going away with nothing, and it's no need worrying my life with it." In the life of Beale Street and in the conversations of its musicians, we experience with penetrating awareness a delicate balance of humor, courage, and pain.

Download or read book Cotton Row to Beale Street written by Robert Alan Sigafoos and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memphis' fascinating economic history overrides all matters of urban concern. It has influenced people and events and been influenced by them. Readers who have wondered how Memphis got to be what it is today will be helped by this book. It may also help them to be more constructive and forgiving critics of Memphis today.

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 2397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Blues Bibliography, Second Edition is a revised and enlarged version of the definitive blues bibliography first published in 1999. Material previously omitted from the first edition has now been included, and the bibliography has been expanded to include works published since then. In addition to biographical references, this work includes entries on the history and background of the blues, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional variations and lyric transcriptions and musical analysis. The Blues Bibliography is an invaluable guide to the enthusiastic market among libraries specializing in music and African-American culture and among individual blues scholars.

Download or read book The Blues written by Mary L. Hart and published by Garland Publishing. This book was released on 1989 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide to the literature is arranged by the following subject categories: background (black history and folklore); music of the blues; blues in American literature; blues interviews and biographies; blues in Great Britain; in Europe; how to play; discographies; filmography. Commentary by a blues scholar introduces each category. The guide selects books, journal articles, newspaper articles, dissertations, and phonograph record liner notes in English, French, German, Swedish, and Dutch. Coverage is through 1985. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Good Times and Growing Pains written by Carroll Dale Short and published by The Institute for Southern Studies. This book was released on with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue, which marks the beginning of our fifth year, combines a number of articles about the good times and growing pains of a South reaching national maturity. It seems appropriate for us to answer, at this time, some of our readers' questions about who we re and what Southern Exposure represents. Early observers thought we'd never make it this far with a regional journal so critical of the powers that be and so preoccupied with the lesser known people, with the struggles and heritage of a culture considered bankrupt by sophisticated America. But, like the South, we have attained a new stability, partly from the spin-off of the media search for Jimmy Carter's South (they have yet to find it) and partly from our appeal to the same hunger for connections to a past, a place, a people, that made Roots a meaningful event for so many.

Download or read book Blue Smoke written by Roger House and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary of blues greats Blind Blake, Tampa Red, and Papa Charlie Jackson, Chicago blues artist William "Big Bill" Broonzy influenced an array of postwar musicians, including Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, and J. B. Lenoir. In Blue Smoke, Roger House tells the extraordinary story of "Big Bill," a working-class bluesman whose circumstances offer a window into the dramatic social transformations faced by African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. One in a family of twenty-one children and reared by sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Broonzy seemed destined to stay on the land. He moved to Arkansas to work as a sharecropper, preacher, and fiddle player, but the army drafted him during World War I. After his service abroad, Broonzy, like thousands of other black soldiers, returned to the racism and bleak economic prospects of the Jim Crow South and chose to move North to seek new opportunities. After learning to play the guitar, he performed at neighborhood parties in Chicago and in 1927 attracted the attention of Paramount Records, which released his first single, "House Rent Stomp," backed by "Big Bill's Blues." Over the following decades, Broonzy toured the United States and Europe. He released dozens of records but was never quite successful enough to give up working as a manual laborer. Many of his songs reflect this experience as a blue-collar worker, articulating the struggles, determination, and optimism of the urban black working class. Before his death in 1958, Broonzy finally achieved crossover success as a key player in the folk revival movement led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, and as a blues ambassador to British musicians such as Lonnie Donegan and Eric Clapton. Weaving Broonzy's recordings, writings, and interviews into a compelling narrative of his life, Blue Smoke offers a comprehensive portrait of an artist recognized today as one of the most prolific and influential working-class blues musicians of the era.

Download or read book Facing South written by David Bowman and published by The Institute for Southern Studies. This book was released on with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the country, and even this region, people view the South through myth and stereotype. It's not surprising. If they turn to newspapers, to television and radio, to popular films and literature, to most history books and folklore, they encounter these distortions. They find insulting portraits of Southerners, whitewashed presentations of southern economics and politics, selective visions of history, misunderstandings of relationships between people, and between people and their land and work. Many trivial qualities are romanticized; other important ones are totally ignored. Blacks are presented only as victims of racism, and labor struggles are completely forgotten. This view is inevitable when people simply treat the South as an aberration of mainstream America, or a remnant of some past culture. We at Southern Exposure look at the South from another perspective. This is our home, we are of it and examine it that we may know more of ourselves and our neighbors. These are the politics and culture that surround us and affect us daily, that we must analyze, praise and attack so our lives can grow and prosper. And this is the ground from which we must view the larger world. By listening to local tobacco farmers discuss the pressures on them to expand or die, we can better understand Earl Butz's plan for US agribusiness. By hearing a bluesman's story, we come to appreciate how a particular culture evolves from material hardship and inspires immense creativity.

Download or read book The Mighty Mississippi written by Bern Keating and published by Caxton Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over 2,000 miles of the Mississippi River from its source just south of the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico described in touristic manner ... its ports, ships & people.

Download or read book Southern Exposure written by and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book 78 Blues written by John Minton and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-10-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When record men first traveled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of what constituted a musical performance. 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South covers a revolution in artist performance and audience perception through close examination of hundreds of key “hillbilly” and “race” records released between the 1920s and World War II. In the postwar period, regional strains recorded on pioneering 78 r.p.m. discs exploded into urban blues and R&B, honky-tonk and western swing, gospel, soul, and rock 'n' roll. These old-time records preserve the work of some of America's greatest musical geniuses such as Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Charlie Poole, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. They are also crucial mile markers in the course of American popular music and the growth of the modern recording industry. When these records first circulated, the very notion of recorded music was still a novelty. All music had been created live and tied to particular, intimate occasions. How were listeners to understand an impersonal technology like the phonograph record as a musical event? How could they reconcile firsthand interactions and traditional customs with technological innovations and mass media? The records themselves, several hundred of which are explored fully in this book, offer answers in scores of spoken commentaries and skits, in song lyrics and monologues, or other more subtle means.

Download or read book Memphis written by Beverly G. Bond and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a reputation as wide open as the waters of the Mississippi flowing past its bustling downtown district, Memphis is a city of contrasts and contradictions. From the darkness of epidemics and racial tension to its beacons of music and entreprenurial success, Memphis is a reflection of the true American experience. For many years it was a community functioning almost as two separate societies, yet the ties between the two create one resolute and dynamic city as it begins this new century.

Download or read book Connections written by Jim Burns and published by Dowden Hutchinson and Ross. This book was released on 1979 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Urban America M Z written by Neil L. Shumsky and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With many contributors and a significant number of entries, Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs details selected major cities, suburbs, people, places, concepts, contemporary issues, history, and development of urban America. Topics range from problems typically associated with urban life such as crime, pollution, and congestion to the arts and humanities, social concerns, religion, infrastructure, key individuals, and economic issues.

Download or read book America s Musical Pulse written by Kenneth J. Bindas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1992-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular music may be viewed as primary documents of society, and America's Musical Pulse documents the American experience as recorded in popular sound. Whether jazz, blues, swing, country, or rock, the music, the impulse behind it, and the reaction to it reveal the attitudes of an era or generation. Always a major preoccupation of students, music is often ignored by teaching professionals, who might profitably channel this interest to further understandings of American social history and such diverse fields as sociology, political science, literature, communications, and business as well as music. In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars, educators, and writers from a variety of fields and perspectives relate topics concerning twentieth-century popular music to issues of politics, class, economics, race, gender, and the social context. The focus throughout is to place music in societal perspective and encourage investigation of the complex issues behind the popular tunes, rhythms, and lyrics.

Download or read book Pan Am s World the USA written by Pan American World Airways, Inc and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Design Environment written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: