Download or read book The Power of Black Music written by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

Download or read book African Music Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe written by Mhoze Chikowero and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

Download or read book Party Music written by Rickey Vincent and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers' R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries. Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music—and created soul music.

Download or read book The Power of Black Music written by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-27 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

Download or read book Issues in African American Music written by Portia K. Maultsby and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation is a collection of twenty-one essays by leading scholars, surveying vital themes in the history of African American music. Bringing together the viewpoints of ethnomusicologists, historians, and performers, these essays cover topics including the music industry, women and gender, and music as resistance, and explore the stories of music creators and their communities. Revised and expanded to reflect the latest scholarship, with six all-new essays, this book both complements the previously published volume African American Music: An Introduction and stands on its own. Each chapter features a discography of recommended listening for further study. From the antebellum period to the present, and from classical music to hip hop, this wide-ranging volume provides a nuanced introduction for students and anyone seeking to understand the history, social context, and cultural impact of African American music.

Download or read book Race Music written by Guthrie P. Ramsey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-11-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the vast and various terrain of African American music, this text begins with an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago. It goes on to explore the global influence and social relevance of African American music.

Download or read book The Power of Black Music written by Samuel A. Floyd and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory.

Download or read book Move On Up written by Aaron Cohen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune Book of 2019, Notable Chicago Reads A Booklist Top 10 Arts Book of 2019 A No Depression Top Music Book of 2019 Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.

Download or read book Afro Latin Soul Music and the Rise of Black Power Cosmopolitanism written by Matti Steinitz and published by de Gruyter. This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas research on the global impact of US African American culture and politics and transnational connections in the African Diaspora has increased significantly since the release of Gilroy ́s Black Atlantic, the hemispheric dialogues between black communities in the US and Latin America have remained somewhat understudied until now. Focusing on the role of Soul music for the popularization of the Black Power movement in Afro-Latin American contexts in the 1960s and 1970s, this book aims to contribute to a better understanding of the networks of solidarity that connected geographically and linguistically distant afro-diasporic communities in their struggles for emancipation and against the diverse manifestations of white supremacy that have shaped societies throughout the Americas in the 20th century. Drawing on field research and interviews with musicians, DJs, and activists in New York, Rio de Janeiro and Panama, this multi-sited study traces the inter-American flows of Soul music in diverse Afro-Latin American contexts. Crossing boundaries between African American and Latin American Studies this book opens new perspectives to scholars of Black Transnationalism, music and social movements in the African diaspora of the Americas.

Download or read book May We Forever Stand written by Imani Perry and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life up through the present day. In this rich, poignant, and readable work, Imani Perry tells the story of the Black National Anthem as it traveled from South to North, from civil rights to black power, and from countless family reunions to Carnegie Hall and the Oval Office. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Perry uses "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a window on the powerful ways African Americans have used music and culture to organize, mourn, challenge, and celebrate for more than a century.

Download or read book Sound System written by Dave Randall and published by Left Book Club. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of one musician's journey to discover how music can be used as a political tool, for good and bad.

Download or read book Blues People written by Leroi Jones and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1999-01-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Download or read book A Power Stronger Than Itself written by George E. Lewis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

Download or read book Keep On Pushing written by Denise Sullivan and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The marriage of music and social change didn't originate with the movements for civil rights and Black Power in the 1950s and 1960s, but never before and never again was the relationship between the two so dynamic. In Keep On Pushing, author Denise Sullivan presents the voices of musician-activists from this pivotal era and the artists who followed in their footsteps to become the force behind contemporary liberation music. Joining authentic voices with a bittersweet narrative covering more than fifty years of fighting oppression through song, Keep On Pushing defines the soundtrack to revolution and the price the artists paid to create it. Exclusive interviews with Yoko Ono, Richie Havens, Len Chandler, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Michael Franti, Solomon Burke, Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Phranc, plus musician-activist Elaine Brown on the Black Panthers, Nina Simone collaborator Al Schackman, Penelope Houston and Debora Iyall on San Francisco punk rock, Ed Pearl on the L.A. folk scene and the Ash Grove, and other musical and political icons.

Download or read book Music Power and Politics written by Annie J. Randall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by scholars from around the world explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners has been used to advance agendas of power and protest.

Download or read book The Meaning of Soul written by Emily J. Lordi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.

Download or read book Free Jazz Black Power written by Philippe Carles and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound’s ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression. This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions—free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz / Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that zeitgeist.