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

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.”

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.

The Music

Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The acclaimed author of Blues People and Black Music returns to the subject of music for the first time in two decades with this collection of essays on the history of jazz and blues, as well as critical comments on today's top performers. Black-and-white photographs.

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.

Stone Butch Blues

Author: Leslie Feinberg
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459608453
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Book Description
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.

Going to Cincinnati

Author: Steven C. Tracy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252067099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description

Kensington Blues

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

Book Description