The author of "Women, Race and Class" suggests that "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday represent a black working-class, feminist ideology and historical consciousness. Davis' illuminating analysis of the songs performed by these artists provides readers with a compelling and transformative understanding of their musical and social contributions and of their relation to both the African-American community and American culture. of photos.

Blues is a language--one which has evolved its own rules and which is the sole property of a culture always forced to the periphery of white society. As such it is a political language. Whether it is passed as a legacy from African village to Mississippi farm, or from farm to Chicago ghetto, or from ghetto to Paris cafe, it is part of a larger oral heritage that is an expression of black America. Makeshift instruments, runaway slaves, railroads, prisons, empty rooms, work gangs, blindness, and pain have all been involved in the passing of this legacy, which has moved from hand to hand like a bottle of whiskey among friends and which now, for whatever reasons, seems faced with extinction. As Lightnin' Hopkins says: "I see a few young musicians coming along. But it's not many. It's not many at all, and the few that is--I'll tell you, you know what I mean, they don't have it. They just don't feel it. . . . I never had that trouble. I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer. I was born with the blues."With an awareness of the urgency involved, and with considerable devotion, Samuel Charters has chosen twelve major bluesmen, each whom represents a major facet of the blues, and has written about them. Rather than adopt the voyeuristic tone of the academician, he has used the direct visceral images that have always composed the blues. Also included are interviews, photographs, lyrics, and separate chapters on the black experience in America, and the evolution of the blues language from its African origins. Samuel Charters has renewed contact with the greatness of the blues legacy--from the haunting lyric songs of the bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams and Lightnin' Hopkins to the fiercely joyous shouts of Champion Jack Depree, Memphis Slim, and Mighty Joe Young.

"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.

Francis Davis's The History of the Blues is a ground-breaking rethinking of the blues that fearlessly examines how race relations have altered perceptions of the music. Tracing its origins from the Mississippi Delta to its amplification in Chicago right after World War II, Davis argues for an examination of the blues in its own right, not just as a precursor to jazz and rock'n' roll. The lives of major figures such as Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, and Leadbelly, in addition to contemporary artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray, are examined and skillfully woven into a riveting, provocative narrative.

Winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, a rollicking and unforgettable memoir by the man who helped bring the music of the blues into the mainstream "Without Lomax it's possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground." -Brian Eno A self-described "song-hunter," the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and '40s, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta's music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him. The Land Where the Blues Began is both a fascinating recollection of a pivotal time in American music history and an intimate portrait of the struggles blues musicians faced in the Jim Crow South. The blues were an organic expression of Black humanity in a place where slavery had been outlawed but where segregation, violence, and racial inequality were still the law of the land. Lomax's role as a liaison to white America, relating the emotion and musical virtuosity displayed by those musicians, would change American popular music forever. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax's "discerning reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know . . . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread" (The New York Times Book Review). Artistic expression has always been a way for oppressed peoples to speak truth to power, assert their dignity, and simply live in a world rife with injustice. The Land Where the Blues Began is an enthralling chronicle of the journey to bring this irrepressible art out of the Delta where it began and into the ears of every American.

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists.
There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom.
With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.

To fans of sassy and savvy urban music, the name Rick James will forever be associated with the mainstream emergence of funk--that bottom-heavy blend of rock and soul that sparked a multiracial musical revolution in the 1970s and 1980s and has since influenced everything from rap to raves, punk to progressive rock. Along with the fame, the Grammy Award, and superstardom came drug abuse and even felony convictions, all of which are chronicled in this gripping, posthumous tell-all of the funk revolution.

**As featured on Barack Obama's Summer 2022 Reading List** Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize Winner of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the Pen/Diamonstein-Spievogel Award for the Art of the Essay Shortlisted for the National Book Award 'Gorgeous' - Brit Bennett 'Pure genius' - Jacqueline Woodson 'One of the most dynamic books I have ever read' - Clint Smith At the March on Washington, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers in the world, but, she told the crowd, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too". Inspired by these words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a stirring meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide. With sharp insight, humour and heart, Abdurraqib explores a sequence of iconic and intimate performances that take him from mid-century Paris to the moon -- and back down again, to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. Each one, he shows, has layers of resonance across Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief -- whether it's the twenty-seven seconds of 'Gimme Shelter' in which Merry Clayton sings, or the magnificent hours of Aretha Franklin's homegoing; Beyonce's Super Bowl show or a schoolyard fistfight; Dave Chapelle's skits or a game of spades among friends.

Interdisciplinary articles bridge the gulf between classical and popular music. Modern musical-analytical techniques are applied to a wide range of Western music, disregarding barriers between different kinds of music. Topics discussed fall into three sections: compositional poietics (poietics being the pre-compositional activities of composer theorists); structuralist approaches, extending musical-theoretical research to new repertoires; and musical-analysis employing techniques from other disciplines. The essays in this volume present current research into a wide range of Western music, disregarding barriers between different kinds of music, and drawing on modern musical-analytical techniques to draw together the varied subjects they explore. Contributors: Jonathan D. Kramer, Robert Cogan, Robert D. Morris, Andrew Mead, Cynthia Folio, Elizabeth West Marvin, Walter Everett, Jane Piper Clendenning, Jonathan W. Bernard, Ellie M. Hisama, Dave Headlam, Richard Hermann, John Covach, Nicholas J. Cook. Elizabeth West Marvin is associate professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music. Richard Hermann is assistant professor of music, University of New Mexico.

With John Lee Hooker’s death in June 2001 the world lost one of the last great Mississippi Delta bluesmen. Acclaimed writer Charles Schaar Murray’s Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of this musician whose extraordinary career spanned over fifty years and included over one-hundred albums and five Grammy Awards. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and lets him tell his own story in his own words, from life in the Deep South to San Francisco, from the 1948 blues anthem “Boogie Chillen” to the Grammy-winning album The Healer nearly a half-century later. Boogie Man is far more than merely a brilliant biography of one man; it also gives the story of the music that inspired him. “When I die,” Hooker said, they’ll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.” Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.

This groundbreaking book, written by one of the foremost blues historians in the UK, is based on over 30 years' research, exploration and absolute passion for early blues music. It is the first ever comprehensive study of the enormous impact of the railroads on 19th and early 20th Century African American society and the many and varied references to this new phenomenon in early blues lyrics. The book is comprehensively annotated, and also includes a Discography at the end of each chapter.

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane. Tom Piazza's debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact. New to this volume is an introduction written by the author. Drawing themes, forms, and stylistic approaches from blues and country music, these stories present a tough, haunting vision of a landscape where the social and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot.

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.

(Harmonica Play-Along). The Harmonica Play-Along Series will help you play your favorite songs quickly and easily. Just follow the notation, listen to the CD to hear how the harmonica should sound, and then play along using the separate backing tracks. The melody and lyrics are also included in the book in case you want to sing, or to simply help you follow along. The audio CD is playable on any CD player, and also enhanced so PC and Mac users can adjust the recording to any tempo without changing pitch Volume 10 includes: Baby, Scratch My Back * Eyesight to the Blind * Good Morning Little Schoolgirl * Honest I Do * I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man * My Babe * Ride and Roll * Sweet Home Chicago.

A book showcasing the legendary Fleetwood Mac blues session at Chicago's Chess Studios in January 1969 Taken by the only photographer present, some of these photos were originally shown on the first release of the album recorded that day: Fleetwood Mac in Chicago. Now, for the first time, all of the color and black-and-white shots from that day are presented in one collection, including many that have never before been published. Along with founding Fleetwood Mac members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, Jeremy Spencer, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie, the major Chicago blues musicians featured at the session, including Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, and Buddy Guy, are shown in high-quality images, created directly from the author's original negatives. Forewords by both producers present at the session, Mike Vernon MBE, and Marshall Chess, provide the setting for the music created that day. Also featured throughout the book are recollections by many of Fleetwood Mac's contemporaries, such as Kim Simmonds, Aynsley Dunbar, and Martin Barre, as well as a new interview with Buddy Guy. The resulting volume is sure to be a must-have that belongs on every fan's and collector's bookshelf.

Can a type of music be "owned"? Examining how music is linked to racial constructs and how African American musicians and audiences reacted to white appropriation, "Blues Music in the Sixties" shows the stakes when whites claim the right to play and live the blues.
In the 1960s, within the larger context of the civil rights movement and the burgeoning counterculture, the blues changed from black to white in its production and reception, as audiences became increasingly white. Yet, while this was happening, blackness--especially black masculinity--remained a marker of authenticity. Crossing color lines and mixing the beats of B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Janis Joplin; the Newport Folk Festival and the American Folk Blues Festival; and publications such as Living Blues, Ulrich Adelt discusses these developments, including the international aspects of the blues. He highlights the performers and venues that represented changing racial politics and addresses the impact and involvement of audiences and cultural brokers.

This reference volume is intended for both the casual and the most avid blues fan. It is divided into five separately introduced sections and covers 50 artists with names like Muddy, Gatemouth and Hound Dog who helped shape 20th-century American music. Beginning with the pioneering Mississippi Delta bluesmen, the book then follows the spread of the genre to the city, in the section on the Chicago Blues School. The third segment covers the Texas blues tradition; the fourth, the great blueswomen; and the fifth, the genres development outside its main schools. The styles covered range from Virginia-Piedmont to Bentonia and from barrelhouse to boogie-woogie. The main text is augmented by substantial discographies and a lengthy bibliography.

Gene Lees, author of the highly acclaimed Singers and the Song, offers, in Meet Me at Jim and Andy's, another tightly integrated collection of essays about post-War American music. This time he focuses on major jazz instrumentalists and bandleaders.
Jim and Andy's, on 48th Street just west of Sixth Avenue, was one of four New York musicians' haunts in the 1960s--the others being Joe Harbor's Spotlight, Charlie's, and Junior's. "For almost every musician I knew," Lees writes, " it was] a home-away-from-home, restaurant, watering hole, telephone answering service, informal savings (and loan) bank, and storage place for musical instruments."
In a vivid series of portraits, we meet its clientele, an unforgettable gallery of individualists who happen to have been major artists--among them Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond. We share their laughter and meet their friends, such as the late actress Judy Holliday, their wives, even their children (as in the tragic story of Frank Rosolino). We learn about their loves, loyalties, infidelities, and struggles with fame and, sometimes alcohol and drug addiction. The magnificent pianist Bill Evans, describing to Lees his heroin addiction, says, "It's like death and transfiguration. Every day you wake in pain like death, and then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all of life in microcosm."
Himself a noted songwriter, Lees writes about these musicians with vividness and intimacy. Far from being the inarticulate jazz musicians of legend, they turn out to be eloquent indeed, and the inventors of a colorful slang that has passed into the American language.
And of course there was the music. A perceptive critic with enormous respect for the music he writes about, Lees notes the importance and special appeal of each artist's work, as in this comment about Artie Shaw's clarinet: "A fish, it has been said, is unaware of water, and Shaw's music so permeated the very air that it was only too easy to overlook just how good a player and how inventive and significant an improviser he was."

This latest entry in Backbeat's bestselling handbook series starts by exploring the humble beginnings of blues guitar through the early decades of the 20th century, including profiles of such players as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Son House. As the story moves into the '40s and '50s, and blues players migrate to major urban centers, author Adam St. James follows the evolution of the music at the hands of such electric blues kingpins as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King. Then it's the blues-rockers of the '60s, '70s, and '80s (including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Stevie Ray Vaughan) before the story comes up to date, with blues flame-keepers such as Keb Mo' or Duke Robillard, and some not-quite-traditionalists, such as Robben Ford or Derek Trucks. A comprehensive section for mastering electric and acoustic blues follows this historic overview. Starting from the very basics, it leads you into more advanced rhythm and lead techniques before examining four key styles: acoustic blues, classic electric blues, blues rock, and jazz blues. The many exercises in the book are supported by specially recorded audio tracks accessed online using the unique code inside each book. The audio files include PLAYBACK+, a multi-functional audio player that allows you to slow down audio without changing pitch, set loop points, change keys, and pan left or right.

In this "expertly researched, elegantly written, dispassionate yet thoughtful history" (Gary Giddins), award-winning author Ted Gioia gives us "the rare combination of a tome that is both deeply informative and enjoyable to read" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From the field hollers of nineteenth-century plantations to Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Delta Blues delves into the uneasy mix of race and money at the point where traditional music became commercial and bluesmen found new audiences of thousands. Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, interviews with living musicians, and first-person accounts with "his own calm, argument-closing incantations to draw a line through a century of Delta blues" (New York Times), this engrossing narrative is flavored with insightful and vivid musical descriptions that ensure "an understanding of not only the musicians, but the music itself" (Boston Sunday Globe). Rooted in the thick-as-tar Delta soil, Delta Blues is already "a contemporary classic in its field" (Jazz Review).

(Piano Instruction). Expand your keyboard knowledge with the Keyboard Lesson Goldmine series The series contains four books: Blues, Country, Jazz, and Rock. Each volume features 100 individual modules that cover a giant array of topics. Each lesson includes detailed instructions with playing examples. You'll also get extremely useful tips and more to reinforce your learning experience, plus two audio CDs featuring performance demos of all the examples in the book 100 Blues Lessons includes 12-bar blues, 8-bar blues, 16-bar blues; right-hand fills, left-hand patterns; stylings of the great blues pianists; chord voicings; dominant 7th chords, dominant 9th chords; and much more

From Queen Latifah to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, "Hole in our soul: the loss of beauty and meaning in American popular music" traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock'n'roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigour and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses. Bayles defended the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls"perverse". She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical. Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility", Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant moods".

"New Musical Figurations" exemplifies a dramatically new
way of configuring jazz music and history. By relating
biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary
American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part
of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture--a
culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz
and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by
analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the
most emblematic figures of this cultural crisis.
Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz
saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of
experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the
conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge
the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz,"
"black music," "popular music," and "art music" are founded.
"New Musical Figurations" gives the richest view
available of this many-sided artist. Radano examines
Braxton's early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose
vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new
avenues of expression. Here is the first detailed history of
Braxton's central role in the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians, the principal musician-run institution
of free jazz in the United States. After leaving Chicago,
Braxton was active in Paris and New York, collaborating with
Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and other
composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement.
From 1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz
performer and recording artist. Since then he has taught at
Mills College and Wesleyan University, given lectures on his
theoretical musical system, and written works for chamber
groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces.
The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton
in standard histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the
innovative voice of the African-American musical tradition.
Refreshingly free of technical jargon, "New Musical Figurations"
is more than just another variation on the same jazz theme.
Rather, it is an exploratory work as rich in theoretical
vision as it is in historical detail.