Blues People

Author: Leroi Jones
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 068818474X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
"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.

Beyond the Crossroads

Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633671
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
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.

Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction

Author: A. Yemisi Jimoh
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572331723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Digging

Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520943090
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane—and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados—Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

Bluespeople Illustrated

Author: Corey Harris
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
Which bluesman once played baseball for the Negro League? Which bluesman was once the sparring partner for the great Joe Louis? Which famous blues woman got her first job as a dancer for the great Ma Rainey? How much do we really know the blues? Welcome to the world of Blues People: Legends of the Blues...a brand new e-book of drawings, biographies and discographies of some of the greatest traditional blues players who ever lived, meticulously drawn and written by world-renowned blues musician and MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient Corey Harris.This book is the first of its kind: an illustrated, in depth biography of the greatest blues players of the 20th century by a practicing African American blues musician. This monumental work includes in-depth biographies and discographies as well as his personal experiences with some of the most influential blues artists of our times.

Urban Blues

Author: Charles Keil
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226429601
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
"Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life." -- Amazon.com.

Really the Blues

Author: Mezz Mezzrow
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590179455
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
Hailed as an “American counter-culture classic,” this “funny” and candid musical memoir offers a delicious glimpse into the 1930s jazz scene (The Wall Street Journal) Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues—the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe—is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”

Steppin' on the Blues

Author: Jacqui Malone
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
Former dancer Jacqui Malone throws a fresh spotlight on the cultural history of black dance, the Africanisms that have influenced it, and the significant role that vocal harmony groups, black college and university marching bands, and black sorority and fraternity stepping teams have played in the evolution of dance in African American life.

Kensington Blues

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692753330
Category : Drug addicts
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description

Blues Vision

Author: Alexs D. Pate
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
ISBN: 0873519744
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
"A rich Minnesota literary tradition is brought into the spotlight in this groundbreaking collection of incisive prose and powerful poetry by forty- three black writers who educate, inspire, and reveal the unabashed truth. Historically significant figures tell their stories, demonstrating how much and how little conditions have changed: Gordon Parks hitchhikes to Bemidji, Taylor Gordon describes his first day as a chauffeur in St. Paul, and Nellie Stone Johnson insists on escaping the farm for high school in Minneapolis. A profusionof modern voices-- poet Tish Jones, playwright Kim Hines, and memoirist Frank Wilderson-- reflect the dizzying, complex realities of the present. Showcasing the unique vision and reality of Minnesota's African American community from the Harlem renaissance through the civil rights movement, from the black power movement to the era of hip- hop and the time of America's first black president, this compelling anthology provides an explosion of artistic expression about what it means to be a Minnesotan. Alexs Pate, an award- winning novelist, playwright, and writing professor, is the president of Innocent Technologies, LLC. Pamela R. Fletcher is associate professor of English at St. Catherine University. J. Otis Powell!? is a poet, performance artist, and curator working in an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentric lore and culture"--