Download or read book Big Mama Thornton written by Michael Spörke and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You ain't nothing but a "Hound Dog" ... with these words shouted into the microphone she will always be remembered: Big Mama Thornton. Who is this woman who sang the megahit "Hound Dog" before Elvis Presley and who wrote "Ball & Chain," the song that catapulted Janis Joplin to sudden fame? The story begins with her first musical attempts in the Hot Harlem Revue as a girl of 14. Then the book follows her journey into the Mecca of Texas Blues, Houston, where Big Mama Thornton met Johnny Otis, with whom she recorded her greatest success--"Hound Dog." With the slowdown of the blues in the early sixties this book follows Big Mama Thornton's way to California, discusses her struggle to survive and celebrates her impressive musical comeback in the course of the blues revival and the hippie movement. With the end of the sixties, facing a declining interest in the old school blues, the book shows how Big Mama Thornton found her niche in clubs and festivals in the U.S. and Europe. The book then follows Big Mama Thornton through the seventies and eighties until her untimely death.
Download or read book Big Mama Thornton written by Michael Spörke and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You ain't nothing but a "Hound Dog" ... with these words shouted into the microphone she will always be remembered: Big Mama Thornton. Who is this woman who sang the megahit "Hound Dog" before Elvis Presley and who wrote "Ball & Chain," the song that catapulted Janis Joplin to sudden fame? The story begins with her first musical attempts in the Hot Harlem Revue as a girl of 14. Then the book follows her journey into the Mecca of Texas Blues, Houston, where Big Mama Thornton met Johnny Otis, with whom she recorded her greatest success--"Hound Dog." With the slowdown of the blues in the early sixties this book follows Big Mama Thornton's way to California, discusses her struggle to survive and celebrates her impressive musical comeback in the course of the blues revival and the hippie movement. With the end of the sixties, facing a declining interest in the old school blues, the book shows how Big Mama Thornton found her niche in clubs and festivals in the U.S. and Europe. The book then follows Big Mama Thornton through the seventies and eighties until her untimely death.
Download or read book Black Diamond Queens written by Maureen Mahon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Hound Dog written by Jerry Leiber and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual portrait of the music team that shaped rock-and-roll music in the 1950s and 1960s describes their humble origins, their relationships with such performers as Elvis Presley and the Coasters, and their record-setting collaborative achievements.
Download or read book Cover Me written by Ray Padgett and published by Union Square + ORM. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A music-snob’s dream come true . . . One of the best multi-subject music books to come down the pike in years . . . a fresh and deeply informed approach.” —Variety A great cover only makes a song stronger. Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” The Beatles rocking out with “Twist and Shout.” Aretha Franklin demanding “Respect.” Without covers, the world would have lost many unforgettable performances. This is the first book to explore the most iconic covers ever, from Elvis’s “Hound Dog” and Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” to the Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” and Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love.” Written by the founder of the website covermesongs.com, each of the nineteen chapters investigates the origins of a classic cover—and uses it as a framework to tell the larger story of how cover songs have evolved over the decades. Cover Me is packed with insight, photography, and music history. “Delves into the complicated legacy of artists performing other people’s music . . . his research adds fresh context and intriguing background to many of these songs . . . Astute ruminations on evolving cultural perceptions of the cover’s place in the music canon.” —AV Club “This engaging nostalgia trip is sure to appeal to discophiles and cultural historians.” —Library Journal
Download or read book Janis written by Holly George-Warren and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence This blazingly intimate biography of Janis Joplin establishes the Queen of Rock & Roll as the rule-breaking musical trailblazer and complicated, gender-bending rebel she was. Janis Joplin’s first transgressive act was to be a white girl who gained an early sense of the power of the blues, music you could only find on obscure records and in roadhouses along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. But even before that, she stood out in her conservative oil town. She was a tomboy who was also intellectually curious and artistic. By the time she reached high school, she had drawn the scorn of her peers for her embrace of the Beats and her racially progressive views. Her parents doted on her in many ways, but were ultimately put off by her repeated acts of defiance. Janis Joplin has passed into legend as a brash, impassioned soul doomed by the pain that produced one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. But in these pages, Holly George-Warren provides a revelatory and deeply satisfying portrait of a woman who wasn’t all about suffering. Janis was a perfectionist: a passionate, erudite musician who was born with talent but also worked exceptionally hard to develop it. She was a woman who pushed the boundaries of gender and sexuality long before it was socially acceptable. She was a sensitive seeker who wanted to marry and settle down—but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was a Texan who yearned to flee Texas but could never quite get away—even after becoming a countercultural icon in San Francisco. Written by one of the most highly regarded chroniclers of American music history, and based on unprecedented access to Janis Joplin’s family, friends, band mates, archives, and long-lost interviews, Janis is a complex, rewarding portrait of a remarkable artist finally getting her due.
Download or read book How The Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll written by Elijah Wald and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll is an alternative history of American music that, instead of recycling the familiar cliches of jazz and rock, looks at what people were playing, hearing and dancing to over the course of the 20th century, using a wealth of original research, curious quotations, and an irreverent fascination with the oft-despised commercial mainstream.
Download or read book Love Me Tender written by Max Cryer and published by Exisle Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the world’s best-loved songs have had remarkable origins. Had Robert Burns not heard an old man sing a quavering version of an ancient Scottish country song, we would never have had ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Miss Jane Ross wrote down the tune she heard played by a piper at an Irish village fair in 1855. Had she not done so, the rest of the world would not have heard ‘Danny Boy’. Marie Antoinette heard a peasant nurse sing an obscure lullaby to her princely son. The empress’s unexpected promotion of the song resulted in its now being listed by The Guinness Book of Records as one of the three most familiar songs in the world.Love Me Tender tells the remarkable stories behind 40 popular and traditional songs. Some evolved from folksongs, some are from musical theatre, while others hit the mark because a particular recording appeared at just the right time. In some cases, one word made all the difference: Paul McCartney composed a tune but could only think of the words ‘scrambled eggs’ to fit it, but fortunately he later came up with the perfect solution – ‘Yesterday’. In a book full of surprises and curiosities, Max Cryer reveals stories from all around the world, and from artists as diverse as Marlene Dietrich, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Elton John. This truly fascinating book makes enthralling reading.
Download or read book Midnight at the Barrelhouse written by George Lipsitz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010-03-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.” Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton. Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians. Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.
Download or read book Fictional Blues written by Kimberly Mack and published by African American Intellectual. This book was released on 2020 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression. Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.
Download or read book The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R B to Rock n Roll written by James M. Salem and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Elvis Presley was a white man who sang in a predominantly black style, Johnny Ace was a black man who sang in a predominantly white one. This title presents a treatment of this influential performer taking the reader to Beale Street in Memphis and to Houston's Fourth Ward, both vibrant black communities where the music never stopped.
Download or read book Black Music Is written by Marcus Amaker and published by . This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaves poetry and pop-surrealist illustration, teaching readers about icons like Big Mama Thornton, BB King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Max Roach, Prince and Alice Coltrane. It also mentions modern-day musicians Our Native Daughters, Saba, Rapsody, Big Joanie, Black Thought, and more. Bebop, the cat, plays records by Black musicians in five genres: blues, hip-hop, rock, bluegrass, and jazz. Follow Bebop on a journey through American music history. Every record takes the cat to a different colorful sonic world.
Download or read book Upside Your Head written by Johnny Otis and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing memoir by the legendary bandleader.
Download or read book Roadrunner written by Joshua Clover and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world.
Download or read book Handbook of Texas Music written by Laurie E. Jasinski and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-22 with total page 2008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The musical voice of Texas presents itself as vast and diverse as the Lone Star State’s landscape. According to Casey Monahan, “To travel Texas with music as your guide is a year-round opportunity to experience first-hand this amazing cultural force….Texas music offers a vibrant and enjoyable experience through which to understand and enjoy Texas culture.” Building on the work of The Handbook of Texas Music that was published in 2003 and in partnership with the Texas Music Office and the Center for Texas Music History (Texas State University-San Marcos), The Handbook of Texas Music, Second Edition, offers completely updated entries and features new and expanded coverage of the musicians, ensembles, dance halls, festivals, businesses, orchestras, organizations, and genres that have helped define the state’s musical legacy. · More than 850 articles, including almost 400 new entries· 255 images, including more than 170 new photos, sheet music art, and posters that lavishly illustrate the text· Appendix with a stage name listing for musicians Supported by an outstanding team of music advisors from across the state, The Handbook of Texas Music, Second Edition, furnishes new articles on the music festivals, museums, and halls of fame in Texas, as well as the many honky-tonks, concert halls, and clubs big and small, that invite readers to explore their own musical journeys. Scholarship on many of the state’s pioneering groups and the recording industry and professionals who helped produce and promote their music provides fresh insight into the history of Texas music and its influence far beyond the state’s borders. Celebrate the musical tapestry of Texas from A to Z!
Download or read book A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs Vol 1 written by Andrew Hickey and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-08 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series of books, based on the hit podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey analyses the history of rock and roll music, from its origins in swing, Western swing, boogie woogie, and gospel, through to the 1990s, grunge, and Britpop. Looking at five hundred representative songs, he tells the story of the musicians who made those records, the society that produced them, and the music they were making. Volume one looks at fifty songs from the origins of rock and roll, starting in 1938 with Charlie Christian's first recording session, and ending in 1956. Along the way, it looks at Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, the Ink Spots, Fats Domino, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jackie Brenston, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and many more of the progenitors of rock and roll.
Download or read book Shout Sister Shout written by Gayle Wald and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before "women in rock" became a media catchphrase, Rosetta Tharpe proved in spectacular fashion that women could rock. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, she was gospel's first superstar and the preeminent crossover figure of its "golden age" (1945-1965). Everyone who saw her perform said she could "make that guitar talk." Shout, Sister, Shout! is the first biography of this trailblazing performer who influenced scores of popular musicians, from Elvis Presley and Little Richard to Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt. An African American guitar virtuoso, Tharpe defied categorization. Blues singer, gospel singer, folk artist, and rock-and-roller, she "went electric" in the late 1930s, amazing northern and southern, U.S. and international, and white and black audiences with her charisma and skill. Ambitious and relentlessly public, Tharpe even staged her own wedding as a gospel concert-in a stadium holding 20,000 people! Wald's eye-opening biography, which draws on the memories of over 150 people who knew or worked with Tharpe, introduces us to this intriguing and forgotten musical heavyweight, forever altering our understanding of both women in rock and U.S. popular music.
