Author: Zeth LundyPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0826419267
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Stevie Wonder's album, Songs in the Key of Life, came out in 1976.
Songs in the Key of My Life
Author: Ferentz LafarguePublisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 030749795X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” —Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke” In 2003, young professor Ferentz LaFargue traveled to Paris, where his fiancée, Tricia, declared she wasn’t happy with their relationship, ending what he thought was a wonderful engagement. After days of “craying”—“that sorrow-laden blend of crying and praying delivered in perfect pitch by those in mourning”—Ferentz happened upon Stevie Wonder’s 1976 classic double album Songs in the Key of Life. Listening to it anew was a healing, spiritual trip down memory lane, helping him to come to terms with his breakup and reflect on how songs in general have been linked to his life. In this book, Ferentz invites us to get cozy and listen as he hits PLAY on meaningful tracks from Wonder and others, including Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, LL Cool J, Beenie Man, Sheryl Crow, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, and Black Sabbath. He recalls: How the fusion of rock and rap in the breakthrough Run-D.M.C./Aerosmith video “Walk This Way” helped to change an adolescent Ferentz from outcast to authority figure How Michael Jackson’s Thriller brought back a traumatic childhood experience How Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” speaks to the tension between his Christian beliefs and his need to rip it up in clubs as a hip-hop head In the tradition of Nick Hornby’s Songbook¸ these words paint a portrait of a life framed by sounds, allowing all of us to think about what songs have been key in our own lives.
Stevie Wonder - Greatest Hits
Author: Stevie WonderPublisher: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780634066603
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
(E-Z Play Today). 26 of Stevie Wonder's best songs arranged in our world-famous, easy-to-play notation that features large notes with the note names in the note heads. Includes: For Once in My Life * Higher Ground * I Just Called to Say I Love You * My Cherie Amour * Overjoyed * Part Time Lover * Ribbon in the Sky * Send One Your Love * Sir Duke * Superstition * That Girl * more.
This Day in Music
Author: Neil CossarPublisher:
ISBN: 9781783055104
Category : Rock music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Births, deaths and marriages, No1 singles, drug busts and arrests, famous gigs and awards... all these and much more appear in this fascinating 50 year almanac.Using a page for every day of the calendar year, the author records a variety of rock and pop events that took place on a given day of the month across the years.This Day in Music is fully illustrated with hundreds of pictures, cuttings and album covers, making this the must-have book for any pop music fan.
The Sound of Stevie Wonder
Author: James E. PeronePublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313051089
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
Since his professional debut in 1962, Stevie Wonder has recorded sixty-four singles that have made the Billboard top 100, including ten that reached number one. Wonder was one of the first Motown artists to have complete control over the writing, arranging, and recording of his songs, and achieved that stature before he was 20 years old. He has won 17 Grammy awards, was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and earned the Grammy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Equally important, his work as a producer, arranger, and instrumentalist on other artists' recordings has put him in the highest rank of musical collaborators. This is the first work of criticism on this important documentarian of American life, as well as the introductory volume in The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection. Through a combination of biography and critical analysis, James Perone's groundbreaking new book reveals the many ways in which Stevie Wonder's body of work emerged, developed, reflected its time, and influenced myriad other artists. After revealing the social, cultural, and political context of Wonder's work, the book provides detailed analysis of his compositions and recordings, with a focus on both his well-known songs and those known only to his hardcore fans. The volume also contains discussions of cover versions of Wonder's compositions, a discography of his recordings, a song title index, an annotated bibliography, and a general index.
Higher Ground
Author: Craig WernerPublisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0307420876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
An insightful music writer brilliantly reinterprets the lives of three pop geniuses and the soul revolution they launched. Soul music is one of America's greatest cultural achievements, and Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield are three of its most inspired practitioners. In midcentury America it was soul music—particularly the dazzling stream of recordings made by these three stars—that helped bring the gospel vision of the black church into the mainstream, energizing the era’s social movements and defining a new American gospel where the sacred and the secular met. What made this gospel all the more amazing was that its most influential articulators were the sons and daughters of sharecroppers, storefront preachers, and single parents in the projects, whose genius gave voice to a new vision of American possibility. Higher Ground seamlessly weaves the specific and intensely personal narratives of Stevie, Aretha, and Curtis’s lives into the historical fabric of their times. The three shared many similarities: They were all children of the great migration and of the black church. But Werner goes further and ties them together with a provocative thesis about American history and culture that compels us to reconsider both the music and the times. And aside from the personalities and the history, he writes beautifully about music itself, the nuts and bolts of its creation and performance, in a way that brings a new awareness and understanding to the most familiar music, forcing you to listen to songs you've heard a thousand times with fresh ears. In Higher Ground, Werner illuminates the lives of three unparalleled American artists, reminding us why their music mattered then and still resonates with us today.
Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life
Author: Zeth LundyPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 144117012X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Like all double albums, Songs in the Key of Life is imperfect but audacious. If its titular concern - life - doesn't exactly allow for rigid focus, it's still a fiercely inspired collection of songs and one of the definitive soul records of the 1970s. Stevie Wonder was unable to control the springs of his creativity during that decade. Upon turning 21 in 1971, he freed himself from the Motown contract he'd been saddled with as a child performer, renegotiated the terms, and unleashed hundreds of songs to tape. Over the next five years, Wonder would amass countless recordings and release his five greatest albums - as prolific a golden period as there has ever been in contemporary music. But Songs in the Key of Life is different from the four albums that preceded it; it's an overstuffed, overjoyed, maddeningly ambitious encapsulation of all the progress Stevie Wonder had made in that short space of time. Zeth Lundy's book, in keeping with the album's themes, is structured as a life cycle. It's divided into the following sections: Birth; Innocence/Adolescence; Experience/Adulthood; Death; Rebirth. Within this framework, Zeth Lundy covers Stevie Wonder's excessive work habits and recording methodology, his reliance on synthesizers, the album's place in the gospel-inspired progression of 1970s R'n'B, and many other subjects.
Author: Tony BennettJust Around Midnight
Author: Jack HamiltonPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674416597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become “white”? Just around Midnight reveals the interplay of popular music and racial thought that was responsible for this shift within the music industry and in the minds of fans. Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by black musicians, 1950s rock and roll was racially inclusive and attracted listeners and performers across the color line. In the 1960s, however, rock and roll gave way to rock: a new musical ideal regarded as more serious, more artistic—and the province of white musicians. Decoding the racial discourses that have distorted standard histories of rock music, Jack Hamilton underscores how ideas of “authenticity” have blinded us to rock’s inextricably interracial artistic enterprise. According to the standard storyline, the authentic white musician was guided by an individual creative vision, whereas black musicians were deemed authentic only when they stayed true to black tradition. Serious rock became white because only white musicians could be original without being accused of betraying their race. Juxtaposing Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, and many others, Hamilton challenges the racial categories that oversimplified the sixties revolution and provides a deeper appreciation of the twists and turns that kept the music alive.
Boy @ the Window
Author: Donald Earl CollinsPublisher:
ISBN: 9780989256131
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past. "Boy @ The Window" is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite-or because of-the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success-for a life worth living. "Boy @ The Window" is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.
