Download or read book When the Counterculture Picked Up a Southern Twang written by Xiang Xu and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My thesis is a cultural analysis of California-based country-rock movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Country rock is a hybrid music genre emerged during this period. Musicians active in the country-rock movement were mostly counterculture hippies, and they adopted country music to serve their own ends. There is no unified ideological thinking in this movement. Some musicians were political while others were not. Music critics generally agree that country rock was a cultural reaction to the cynicism and rootlessness of youth culture in the late sixties and early seventies. The counterculture looked to country music for inspiration because it provided the authenticity and roots for the contemporary music scene that was generally in bad shape. In my thesis, I focus on the music of three prominent country-rock musicians----Gram Parsons, The Band, and the Eagles. I will provide detailed analysis of how they borrowed country music elements to serve their own ends.
Download or read book The South of the Mind written by Zachary J. Lechner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This interdisciplinary work is driven by the question, 'What can imaginings of the South reveal about the recent American past?' In it, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post-World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, 'timeless' South shaped Americans' views of themselves and their society and served as a fantasied refuge from the era's political and cultural fragmentations, namely, the perceived problems associated with urbanization and 'rootlessness.' The book demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South"--
Download or read book The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan s Live Performances written by Erin C. Callahan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ephemeral by nature, the concert setlist is a rich, if underexplored, text for scholarly research. How an artist curates a show is a significant aspect of any concert’s appeal. Through the placement of songs, variations in order, or the omission of material, Bob Dylan’s setlists form a meta-narrative speaking to the power and significance of his music. These essays use the setlists from concerts throughout Dylan’s career to study his approach to his material from the 1960s to the 2020s. These chapters, from various disciplinary perspectives, illustrate how the concert setlist can be used as a source to explore many aspects of Dylan’s public life. Finally, this collection provides a new method to examine other musicians across genres with an interdisciplinary approach to setlists and the selectivity of performance. Unique in its approach and wide-ranging scholarly methodology, this book deepens our understanding of Bob Dylan, the performer.
Download or read book Reporting the Counterculture written by Richard P. Goldstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1989. Richard Goldstein, journalist with The Village Voice since the 1960s, has carefully selected some of his pieces for this book. Covering a varied range of topics (among the rock concerts, experimental theatre, political trials and cultural experiments) he has created a vivid cultural retrospective of a unique period. An introductory essay gives context to the articles and offers an assessment of the "new journalism" that sprang up in the 60s, and the role that journalism played in the social and cultural revolutions of the time.
Download or read book Jim Crow s Counterculture written by R. A. Lawson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form -- the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism -- even hedonism -- and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.
Download or read book Shelter from the Machine written by Jason G. Strange and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ”You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun.” That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back to-the-landers, though they may seek lives off the grid, remain connected to the most pressing questions confronting the United States today. Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society—only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.
Download or read book Pelosi written by Molly Ball and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A riveting inside account of the unprecedented rise to power and unmatched political legacy of the first woman Speaker of the House, by award-winning journalist Molly Ball Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to Donald Trump has made her an icon of the Resistance, featured in viral memes clapping sardonically at the president or ripping up his State of the Union address. But the real Nancy Pelosi is neither the shrill partisan featured in thousands of attack ads nor the cautious corporatist reviled by the far left. She’s the rare politician who still knows how to get big things done—a master of legislative power whose policy accomplishments have touched millions of American lives, from providing universal access to health care to reforming Wall Street to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. She’s done it all at a time of historic polarization and gridlock, despite being routinely underestimated by allies and opponents alike. Ball’s nuanced, page-turning portrait takes readers inside Pelosi’s life and times, from her roots in urban Baltimore to her formative years as a party activist and fundraiser, from the fractious politics of San Francisco to high-stakes congressional negotiations with multiple presidents. The result is a compelling portrait of a barrier-breaking woman that sheds new light on American political history. Based on exclusive interviews with the Speaker and deep background reporting, Ball shows Pelosi through a thoroughly modern lens to explain how this extraordinary woman has met her moment.
Download or read book Merle Haggard s Okie from Muskogee written by Rachel Lee Rubin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every now and then, a song inspires a cultural conversation that ends up looking like a brawl. Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee, released in 1969, is a prime example of that important role of popular music. Okie immediately helped to frame an ongoing discussion about region and class, pride and politics, culture and counterculture. But the conversation around the song, useful as it was, drowned out the song itself, not to mention the other songs on the live album-named for Okie and performed in Muskogee-that Haggard has carefully chosen to frame what has turned out to be his most famous song. What are the internal clues for gleaning the intended meaning of Okie? What is the pay-off of the anti-fandom that Okie sparked (and continues to spark) in some quarters? How has the song come to be a shorthand for expressing all manner of anti-working class attitudes? What was Haggard's artistic path to that stage in Oklahoma, and how did he come to shape the industry so profoundly at the moment when urban country singers were playing a major role on the American social and political landscape?
Download or read book Shout It Out Loud written by James Campion and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Book). How does an underground oddity become a cultural phenomenon? For over 40 years, the rock band Kiss has galvanized the entertainment world with an unparalleled blitz of bravado, theatricality, and shameless merchandizing, garnering generations of loyally rabid fans. But if not for a few crucial months in late 1975 and early 1976, Kiss may have ended up nothing more than a footnote. Shout It Out Loud is a serious examination of the circumstance and serendipity that fused the creation of the band's seminal work, Destroyer including the band's arduous ascent to the unexpected smash hit, Alive! , the ensuing lawsuits between its management and its label, the pursuit of the hot, young producer, a grueling musical "boot camp," the wildly creative studio abandon, the origins behind an iconic cover, the era's most outlandish tour, and the unlikely string of hit singles. Extensive research from the period and insights into each song are enhanced by hundreds of archived materials and dozens of interviews surrounding the mid-'70s-era Kiss and its zeitgeist. New interviews with major principals in the making of an outrageously imaginative rock classic animate this engaging tale.
Download or read book The History of Texas Music written by Gary Hartman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The richly diverse ethnic heritage of the Lone Star State has brought to the Southwest a remarkable array of rhythms, instruments, and musical styles that have blended here in unique ways and, in turn, have helped shape the music of the nation and the world. Historian Gary Hartman writes knowingly and lovingly of the Lone Star State’s musical traditions. In the first thorough survey of the vast and complex cultural mosaic that has produced what we know today as “Texas music,” he paints a broad, panoramic view, offers analysis of the origins of and influences on specific genres, profiles key musicians, and provides guidance to additional sources for further information. A musician himself, Hartman draws on both academic and non-academic sources to give a more complete understanding of the state’s remarkable musical history and ethnic community studies with his first-hand knowledge of how important music is as a cultural medium through which human beings communicate information, ideas, emotions, values, and beliefs, and bond together as friends, families, and communities. The History of Texas Music incorporates a selection of well-chosen photographs of both prominent and less-well-known artists and describes not only the ethnic origins of much of Texas music but also the cross-pollination among various genres. Today, the music of Texas—which includes Native American music, gospel, blues, ragtime, swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, conjunto, Tejano, Cajun, zydeco, western swing, honky tonk, polkas, schottsches, rock & roll, rap, hip hop and more—reflects the unique cultural dynamics of the Southwest.
Download or read book Oblivion Banjo written by Charles Wright and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The selected works of one of our finest American poets The thread that dangles us between a dark and a darker dark, Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided. Don’t touch it here, and don’t touch it there. Don’t touch it, in fact, anywhere— Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing. —from “Scar Tissue” Over the course of his work—more than twenty books in total—Charles Wright has built “one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century” (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright’s poetry: “language, landscape, and the idea of God.” No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality. The recipient of almost every honor in poetry—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, to name a few—and a former poet laureate of the United States, Wright is an essential voice in American letters. Oblivion Banjo is the perfect distillation of his inimitable career—for devout fans and newcomers alike.
Download or read book The Voices that Are Gone written by Jon W. Finson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-07-03 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique and readable study, Jon Finson views the mores and values of nineteenth-century Americans as they appear in their popular songs. The author sets forth lyricists' and composers' notions of courtship, technology, death, African Americans, Native Americans, and European ethnicity by grouping songs topically. He goes on to explore the interaction between musical style and lyrics within each topic. The lyrics and changing musical styles present a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century America. The composers discussed in the book range from Henry Russell ("Woodman, Spare That Tree"), Stephen Foster ("Oh! Susanna"), and Dan Emmett ("I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land"), to George M. Cohan and Maude Nugent ("Sweet Rosie O'Grady"), and Gussie Lord Davis ("In the Baggage Coach Ahead"). Readers will recognize songs like "Pop Goes the Weasel," "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Fountain in the Park," "After the Ball," "A Bicycle Built for Two," and many others which gain significance by being placed in the larger context of American history.
Download or read book 1968 in America written by Charles Kaiser and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From assassinations to student riots, this is “a splendidly evocative account of a historic year—a year of tumult, of trauma, and of tragedy” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.). In the United States, the 1960s were a period of unprecedented change and upheaval—but the year 1968 in particular stands out as a dramatic turning point. Americans witnessed the Tet offensive in Vietnam; the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; and the chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At the same time, a young generation was questioning authority like never before—and popular culture, especially music, was being revolutionized. Largely based on unpublished interviews and documents—including in-depth conversations with Eugene McCarthy and Bob Dylan, among many others, and the late Theodore White’s archives, to which the author had sole access—1968 in America is a fascinating social history, and the definitive study of a year when nothing could be taken for granted. “Kaiser aims to convey not only what happened during the period but what it felt like at the time. Affecting touches bring back powerful memories, including strong accounts of the impact of the Tet offensive and of the frenzy aroused by Bobby Kennedy’s race for the presidency.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Sounds of Capitalism written by Timothy D. Taylor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred. Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar upsurge in consumerism, and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The Sounds of Capitalism is the first book to tell truly the history of music used in advertising in the United States and is an original contribution to this little-studied part of our cultural history.
Download or read book Bridger written by Bobby Bridger and published by . This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book that spans many worlds, Bridger is both the story of one man's artistic journey in creating a new art form and a revelatory overview of American popular culture since the 1950s.
Download or read book Split written by Lisa Michaels and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "disarmingly amiable reminiscence" (The Atlantic Monthly) that "may be the best argument for the left since Marx" (The New Yorker), poet and writer Lisa Michaels blends memoir with social commentary to tell a remarkable tale of growing up as a child of political activists during the early seventies. Michaels's upbringing was marked by communes, rallies, and road trips; as a young girl she traveled across the country with her mother and stepfather in a customized mail truck, complete with a wood stove, while her father spent two years in jail for his part in an antiwar protest. Raised in a rural California town, Michaels craved conformity, but eventually she came to share many of her parents' long-held values. By a writer of uncommon perception, SPLIT offers "a rare glimpse of a life that embodies a time" (Vogue).
Download or read book Aquarius Revisited written by Peter O. Whitmer and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines America in the sixties through the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Mailer, Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Leary, and Robins.
