Download or read book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life written by John Fahey and published by Drag City. This book was released on 2000 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fahey is feared and revered around the world as a guitar player and composer. His inventions for acoustic and electric strings are the stuff of legend. Known for his finger-picking finesse, Fahey's pen has the same world-gobbling ferocity as his guitar. Fahey's collection of short stories defy classification - part memoir, part personal essay, part fiction, part manifesto. It is a collection that makes an explosive selection of his work available for public consumption. What else is there to say, except 'Grab your ankles, dear readers. It's kingdom time!'
Download or read book Dance of Death written by and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fahey hovers ghostlike in the sound of almost every acoustic guitarist who came after him. He was to the solo acoustic guitar what Hendrix was to the electric: the man whom all subsequent musicians had to listen to. Fahey made more than forty albums between 1959 and his death in 2001, fusing folk, blues, and experimental composition, taking familiar American sounds and making them new. Yet Fahey’s life and art remain largely unexamined. His memoir and liner notes were largely fiction. His real story has never been told—until now. Journalist Steve Lowenthal has spent years talking with Fahey’s producers, friends, peers, wives, business partners, and many others. He describes how Fahey introduced pre-war blues to a broader public; how his independent label, Takoma, set new standards; how he battled his demons, including stage fright, alcohol, and prescription pills; how he ended up homeless and mentally unbalanced; and how, despite his troubles, he managed to found a new record label, Revenant, that won Grammys and remains critically revered. This portrait of a troubled and troubling man in a constant state of creative flux is not only a biography, but also the compelling story of a great American outcast. Steve Lowenthal started and ran the music magazine Swingset; his writing has also been published in Fader, Spin, Vice, and the Village Voice. He lives in New York City. David Fricke is a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
Download or read book Blind Joe Death s America written by George Henderson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns. Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location—the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.
Download or read book Vampire Vultures written by John Fahey and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampire Vultures is an unexpected gift from the late music legend John Fahey. Originally a project of his own conception, it was to be an epic work that would expand on many of the character and experiences he introduced in How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life (2000). It is a unique volume that allows the reader to walk deep into the mind of its creator. Compiled from his private papers, it includes notebook entries, short stories, letters never sent, revealing the struggles and victories of a cult icon's life in modern America.
Download or read book I d Rather Be the Devil written by Stephen Calt and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skip James (1902–1969) was perhaps the most creative and idiosyncratic of all blues musicians. Drawing on hundreds of hours of conversations with James himself, Stephen Calt here paints a dark and unforgettable portrait of a man untroubled by his own murderous inclinations, a man who achieved one moment of transcendent greatness in a life haunted by failure. And in doing so, Calt offers new insights into the nature of the blues, the world in which it thrived, and its fate when that world vanished.
Download or read book Charley Patton written by John Fahey and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of the music of blues legend Charley Patton. This new edition is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.
Download or read book Dust Grooves written by Eilon Paz and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.
Download or read book The Life and Music of Booker Bukka White written by David W. Johnson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-11-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booker “Bukka” White (1905–1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker “Bukka” White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White’s life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee. For years only a name on old 78 records—and believed by some to be dead—White was “rediscovered” by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album. In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of “slavery time,” White told the author, “. . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now—something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on.” The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker “Bukka” White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B. B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century—the grandson of a slave—found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.
Download or read book What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life written by Bruce Frankel and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read Bruce Frankel's posts on the Penguin Blog "This wise and inspiring book hands down an important message: Happiness is abundant at any age, and only you can limit your options." -The Boston Globe In today's world, the question "What should I do with my life?" only scratches the surface. Now, more and more people-from baby boomers retiring from their "first act" to people in their forties and fifties reconsidering their careers in a recovering economy-are finding themselves wondering how to find new stimulation and meaningful work over a lifetime. Bringing together a diverse array of stories, veteran journalist Bruce Frankel brings to life a mesmerizing series of profiles of men and women who discovered a new calling, success, or purpose later in life. Brimming with inspiration and humanity, What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life? celebrates activists, artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and others who found extraordinary ways to experience true fulfillment in the second half of life. On these pages, readers will meet a civil servant, laid off at age fifty-two, who enrolled in graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in psychology; a former consultant who began a microfinance program in Africa; a longtime contact-lens grinder who has chiseled twelve hundred stone heads on a property now known as the "Easter Island of the Hudson"; and many others who proved that age is a spark-not a barrier. Full of spirit and plenty of chutzpah, this book shows that anything is possible in any stage of life.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Rock written by Peter Buckley and published by Rough Guides. This book was released on 2003 with total page 1234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles career biographies of over 1,200 artists and rock music reviews written by fans covering every phase of rock from R & B through punk and rap.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Blues A J index written by Edward M. Komara and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2006 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Writing Under written by Alan Sondheim and published by Center for Democracy/Citizenship. This book was released on 2012 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Sondheim's Writing Under explores and examines what happens to writing as it takes place on and through the networked computer. Sondheim began experimenting with artistic and philosophical writing using computers in the early 1970s. Since 1994, he has explored the possibilities of writing on the Internet, whether using blogs, web pages, e–mails, virtual worlds, or other tools. The sum total of Sondheim's writing online is entitled “The Internet Text.” Writing Under selects from this work to provide insight into how writing takes place today and into the unique practices of a writer. The selections range from philosophical musings, to technical explorations of writing practice, to poetic meditations on the writer online. This work expands our understanding of writing today and charts a path for writing's future.
Download or read book The Bohemian South written by Shawn Chandler Bingham and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.
Download or read book Poetic Song Verse written by Mike Mattison and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.
Download or read book Mystery Train written by Greil Marcus and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 1525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now Available as an eBook Catch a train to the heart of rock ‘n’ roll with this essential study of the quintessential American art form. First published in 1975, Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train remains a benchmark study of rock ‘n’ roll and a classic in the field of music criticism. Focusing on six key artists--Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley--Marcus explores the evolution and impact of rock ‘n’ roll and its unique place in American culture. This sixth edition of Mystery Train includes an updated and rewritten Notes and Discographies section, exploring the evolution and continuing impact of the recordings featured in the book.
Download or read book Charley Patton written by John Fahey and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of the music of blues legend Charley Patton. This new edition is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.
Download or read book The Blues Encyclopedia written by Edward Komara and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 1274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blues Encyclopedia is the first full-length authoritative Encyclopedia on the Blues as a musical form. While other books have collected biographies of blues performers, none have taken a scholarly approach. A to Z in format, this Encyclopedia covers not only the performers, but also musical styles, regions, record labels and cultural aspects of the blues, including race and gender issues. Special attention is paid to discographies and bibliographies.
