Download or read book Beyond the Crossroads written by Adam Gussow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as "the crossroads" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.
Download or read book Blues Before Sunrise written by Steve Cushing and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. The book focuses in particular on pre–World War II blues singers, performers active in 1950s Chicago, and nonperformers who contributed to the early blues world. Interviewees include Alberta Hunter, one of the earliest African American singers to transition from Chicago's Bronzeville nightlife to the international spotlight, and Ralph Bass, one of the greatest R&B producers of his era. Blues expert, writer, record producer, and cofounder of Living Blues Magazine Jim O'Neal provides the book's foreword.
Download or read book Pioneers of the Blues Revival written by Steve Cushing and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated public radio staple Blues before Sunrise, has spent over thirty years observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In Pioneers of the Blues Revival, he interviews many of the prominent white researchers and enthusiasts whose advocacy spearheaded the blues' crossover into the mainstream starting in the 1960s. Opinionated and territorial, the American, British, and French interviewees provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the era and movement. Experts including Paul Oliver, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sam Charters, Ray Flerledge, Paul Oliver, Richard K. Spottswood, and Pete Whelan chronicle in their own words their obsessive early efforts at cataloging blues recordings and retrace lifetimes spent loving, finding, collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They and nearly a dozen others recount relationships with blues musicians, including the discoveries of prewar bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, and the reintroduction of these musicians and many others to new generations of listeners. The accounts describe fieldwork in the South, renew lively debates, and tell of rehearsals in Muddy Waters's basement and randomly finding Lightning Hopkins's guitar in a pawn shop. Blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson provides a critical and historical framework for the interviews in an introduction.
Download or read book The Blues Come to Texas written by and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 1237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From October 1959 until the mid-1970s, Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick collaborated on what they hoped to be a definitive history and analysis of the blues in Texas. Both were prominent scholars and researchers—Oliver had already established an impressive record of publications, and McCormick was building a sprawling collection of primary materials that included field recordings and interviews with blues musicians from all over Texas and the greater South. Despite being eagerly awaited by blues fans, folklorists, historians, and ethnomusicologists who knew about the Oliver-McCormick collaboration, the intended manuscript was never completed. In 1996, Alan Govenar, a respected writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker, began a conversation with Oliver about the unfinished book on Texas blues. Subsequently, Oliver invited Govenar to assist him, and when Oliver became ill, Govenar enlisted folklorist and ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell to help him contextualize and document the existing manuscript for publication. The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book presents an unparalleled view into the minds and methods of two pioneering blues scholars.
Download or read book Country Music Records written by Tony Russell and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 1198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than twenty years in the making, Country Music Records documents all country music recording sessions from 1921 through 1942. With primary research based on files and session logs from record companies, interviews with surviving musicians, as well as the 200,000 recordings archived at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Frist Library and Archives, this notable work is the first compendium to accurately report the key details behind all the recording sessions of country music during the pre-World War II era. This discography documents--in alphabetical order by artist--every commercial country music recording, including unreleased sides, and indicates, as completely as possible, the musicians playing at every session, as well as instrumentation. This massive undertaking encompasses 2,500 artists, 5,000 session musicians, and 10,000 songs. Summary histories of each key record company are also provided, along with a bibliography. The discography includes indexes to all song titles and musicians listed.
Download or read book A Race of Singers written by Bryan K. Garman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-07-25 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring a "race of singers" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen both embraced and reconfigured Whitman's vision, Bryan Garman shows that Whitman succeeded. In doing so, Garman celebrates the triumphs yet also exposes the limitations of Whitman's legacy. While Whitman's verse propounded notions of sexual freedom and renounced the competitiveness of capitalism, it also safeguarded the interests of the white workingman, often at the expense of women and people of color. Garman describes how each of Whitman's successors adopted the mantle of the working-class hero while adapting the role to his own generation's concerns: Guthrie condemned racism in the 1930s, Dylan addressed race and war in the 1960s, and Springsteen explored sexism, racism, and homophobia in the 1980s and 1990s. But as Garman points out, even the Boss, like his forebears, tends to represent solidarity in terms of white male bonding and homosocial allegiance. We can hear America singing in the voices of these artists, Garman says, but it is still the song of a white, male America.
Download or read book Ninety Years of the Blues written by Ron Hockings and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book King of the Blues written by Daniel de Vise and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full and authoritative biography of an American—indeed a world-wide—musical and cultural legend “No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues.”—President Barack Obama “He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced.”—Eric Clapton Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge. King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)—in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color. Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King’s inner circle—family, band members, retainers, managers, and more—and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby “Blue” Bland simply called “the man.”
Download or read book Debt and Redemption in the Blues written by Julia Simon and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come. Placing blues music within its historical context of the post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of African Americans. Surveying blues music from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century, Simon’s analyses focus on economic relations, such as sharecropping, house contract sales, debt peonage, criminal surety, and convict lease. She demonstrates how the music reflects this exploitative economic history and how it is shaped by commodification under racialized capitalism. As Simon assesses the lyrics, technique, and styles of a wide range of blues musicians, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Albert Collins, and Kirk Fletcher, she argues forcefully that the call for racial justice is at the heart of the blues. A highly sophisticated interpretation of the blues tradition steeped in musicology, social history, and critical-cultural hermeneutics, Debt and Redemption not only clarifies blues as an aesthetic tradition but, more importantly, proves that it advances a theory of social and economic development and change.
Download or read book British Sport Local histories written by Richard William Cox and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume three of a bibliography documenting all that has been written in the English language on the history of sport and physical education in Britain. It lists all secondary source material including reference works, in a classified order to meet the needs of the sports historian.
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.
Download or read book Contemporary British and Irish Fiction Volume 3 written by Jeff Soloway and published by Infobase Holdings, Inc. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, Volume 3 is a collection of scholarly essays and recent reviews of the best of contemporary British and Irish literary fiction, including the following titles: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi Swing Time by Zadie Smith Transit: A Novel by Rachel Cusk White Tears by Hari Kunzru Winter by Ali Smith.
Download or read book Blues Gospel Records 1890 1943 written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its first edition, in 1964, Dixon and Godrich's Blues and Gospel Records has been dubbed 'the bible' for collectors of pre-war African-American music. It provides an exhaustive listing of all recordings made up to the end of 1943 in a distinctively African-American musical style,excluding those customarily classed as jazz (which are the subject of separate discographies). The book covers recordings made for the commercial market (whether issued at the time or not) and also recordings made for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song and similar bodies -- about 20,000titles in all, by more than 3,000 artists. For each recording session, full details are given of: artist credit, accompaniment, place and date of recording, titles, issuing company and catalogue numbers, matrix numbers and alternate takes. There are also short accounts of the major 'race labels',which recorded blues and gospel material, and a complete list of field trips to the south by travelling recording units. Howard Rye has joined the original compilers for this thoroughly revised fourth edition. The scope has been enlarged by the addition of about 150 new artists, in addition tonewly discovered recordings by other artists. Early cylinder recordings of gospel music, from the 1890s, are also included for the first time. Previous editions of this work were applauded for their completeness, accuracy, and reliability. This has now been enhanced by the addition of newinformation from record labels and from record company files, and by listening to a wide selection of titles, and detailed cross-checking.
Download or read book Jimmie Rodgers written by Nolan Porterfield and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Encyclopedia of South Carolina Jazz Blues Musicians written by Benjamin Franklin and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive A-to-Z reference is “an impressive contribution to jazz history and surprisingly good reading” (Michael Ullman, author of Jazz Lives). This informative bookdocuments the careers of South Carolina jazz and blues musicians from the nineteenth century to the present. The musicians range from the renowned (James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie), to the notable (Freddie Green, Josh White), the largely forgotten (Fud Livingston, Josie Miles), the obscure (Lottie Frost Hightower, Horace “Spoons” Williams), and the unknown (Vince Arnold, Johnny Wilson). Though the term “jazz” is commonly understood, if difficult to define, “blues” has evolved over time to include R&B, doo-wop, and soul. Performers in these genres are also represented, as are members of the Jenkins Orphanage bands of Charleston. Also covered are nineteenth-century musicians who performed what might be called proto-jazz or proto-blues in string bands, medicine shows, vaudeville, and the like. Organized alphabetically, from Johnny Acey to Webster Young, the entries include basic biographical information, South Carolina residences, career details, compositions, recordings as leaders and as band members, films, awards, websites, and lists of resources for additional reading. Former host of Jazz in Retrospect on NPR Benjamin Franklin V has ensured biographical accuracy to the greatest degree possible by consulting numerous public documents, and information in these records permitted him to dispel myths and correct misinformation that have surrounded South Carolina’s musical history for generations. “Elucidates South Carolina as a profoundly crucial puzzle piece alongside New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City and New York.” —Harry Skoler, professor, Berklee College of Music Includes photos
Download or read book 100 Ways to Beat the Blues written by Tanya Tucker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you beat the blues? We all have moments in life when we're down, lonely, or just plain sad. It's part of being human. Just as everyone is different, everyone has a unique way of beating the blues.
Download or read book Truth written by and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 1716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
