Howlin' Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires.
Born Chester Burnett in 1910, the Wolf survived a grim childhood and hardscrabble youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi. He began his career playing and singing with the first Delta blues stars for two decades in perilous juke joints. He was present at the birth of rock 'n' roll in Memphis, where Sam Phillips-who also discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis-called Wolf his "greatest discovery." He helped develop the sound of electric blues and vied with rival Muddy Waters for the title of king of Chicago blues. He ended his career performing and recording with the world's most famous rock stars. His passion for music kept him performing-despite devastating physical problems-right up to his death in 1976.
There's never been a comprehensive biography of the Wolf until now. Moanin' at Midnight is full of startling information about his mysterious early years, surprising and entertaining stories about his decades at the top, and never-before-seen photographs. It strips away all the myths to reveal-at long last-the real-life triumphs and tragedies of this blues titan.

An exciting lineage of women singers--originating with Ma Rainey and her protegee Bessie Smith--shaped the blues, launching it as a powerful, expressive vehicle of emotional liberation. Along with their successors Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Janis Joplin, they injected a dose of reality into the often trivial world of popular song, bringing their message of higher expectations and broader horizons to their audiences. These women passed their image, their rhythms, and their toughness on to the next generation of blues women, which has its contemporary incarnation in singers like Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams (with whom the author has done an in-depth interview). Buzzy Jackson combines biography, an appreciation of music, and a sweeping view of American history to illuminate the pivotal role of blues women in a powerful musical tradition. Musician Thomas Dorsey said, "The blues is a good woman feeling bad." But these women show by their style that he had it backward: The blues is a bad woman feeling good.

Description In When Your Way Gets Dark: A Rhetoric of the Blues, Jeffrey Carroll presents a cluster of rhetorical and literary theories that illuminate the blues' place in our social, political, and cultural traditions. Drawing from his 35 years of blues encounters, Carroll also analyzes performers and nine historic blues performances-including the blues of Charlie Patton, Skip James, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and others-as well as their own accounts of performances, to understand, paraphrasing Dylan Thomas, the force through which the blue fuse drives the music. When Your Way Gets Dark uncovers the rhetorical positions of the most significant writing and writers on the blues-Samuel Charters, Paul Oliver, Robert Palmer, William Ferris, David Evans, LeRoi Jones, Ralph Ellison, Larry Neal, Albert Murray-and seeks to find rhetorics there that may resolve or exacerbate the question of race, the blues, and audience. In When Your Way Gets Dark, Carroll also shows how teachers and students can-by reinventing its contexts, sound, and effects-recover the rhetorical power of the blues. What Others Have Said When Your Way Gets Dark presents a sustained look at how African-American art and performance has extended and shaped the American aesthetic and cultural landscape. Carroll shows that the blues are a legitimate art-form for sustained study, academic and otherwise; in so doing, he stretches our conceptions of what constitutes a text . . . and how we can explore text as performance in terms of theory, interpretation, and pedagogy-without reducing the blues to being only a literary object. . . . Carroll writes about the blues with grace, style, and insight. -Thomas Rickert, Purdue University About the Author Jeffrey Carroll is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where he teaches courses on the blues, rhetoric and composition, and the American novel. He is the author of two textbooks, Dialogs: Reading and Writing in the Disciplines and The Active Reader (with Anne Ruggles Gere), as well as a novel, Climbing to the Sun.

Elwood's Blues is an entertaining and informative collection of conversations with the legends and rising stars of blues and rock music, drawn from the popular syndicated radio series, The House of Blues Radio Hour. Host Dan Aykroyd, in character as Elwood Blues of the legendary Blues Brothers, has interviewed over 900 blues and rock greats since 1993. This book compiles the best of those, including discussions with living legends B.B. King and Buddy Guy, past masters John Lee Hooker and Stevie Ray Vaughan, rising stars Keb' Mo' and Susan Tedeschi, and blues-rooted rock stars such as Robert Plant and Bill Wyman.

Music history -- Blues -- R&B

Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Milton, and James Waller-all of these musical powerhouses furthered their recording careers at a little label on once-thriving Farish Street, the historic black district of Jackson, Mississippi.

These blues, gospel, and R&B all-stars are featured in "Trumpet Records: Diamonds on Farish Street," the detailed story of this thriving recording label of the mid-1950s.

What caused it to spring to life in Jackson? It began in 1949, when a white woman named Lillian McMurry and her husband purchased a hardware store on Farish Street, then a location on the boundary between the city's white and black business and entertainment districts. While taking inventory of the original stock and renovating the building, she discovered a stack of unsold records, including Wynonie Harris's recording of "All She Wants to Do Is Rock." Curious, Mrs. McMurry played it on the store's record player and became so inspired that she decided to record more music like it. Thus was born Trumpet Records.

The life of the studio was brief, and this book, in careful detail, covers its short history (1951-1956) and includes accounts of recording sessions with its roster of gospel groups, blues musicians, and R&B singers, almost all of them African American. The book also documents McMurry's attempts to fuse country and African American popular music into what would become rock 'n' roll.

From interviews, archival recordings, company documents, reviews, photographs, and the assistance of the founder, Marc W. Ryan has compiled the fascinating history of this short-lived but influential company.

This new edition of a work recognized in 1993 by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections features an updated discography and bibliography, extensive new documentation, and additional insights into the operations of Trumpet Records.

Marc W. Ryan is an independent music scholar living in North San Juan, California. His work has been published in "Rolling Stone," "Discoveries," and "Blues and Rhythm."

Guide van Rijn presents a fascinating and exhaustive account of the gospel and blues music of the immediate postwar period, shedding much light on the civil rights situation of the time and the experience of segregation as well as events such as the Atom Bomb, the Cold War, Korea and of course the Republican victory in 1956. He concentrates on songs that comment on contemporary political events and issues during this crucial time in the shaping of black consciousness in America. In doing so, he uncovers a hidden black history on the eve of the emergence of the civil rights movement--a deep insight into the lives and opinions of people who had few other outlets of expression. Also available, from the author's own website, is a CD containing recordings of the songs discussed in the text, such as Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb, I'm a Democrat Man, and The Alabama Bus.

Transcribed from 78 rpm recordings and preserved here long after many of the records have disappeared, this collection of nearly three hundred songs from more than one hundred singers celebrates the diversity of feeling and form that defines the blues. Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters are represented with their lesser-known contemporaries-Barefoot Bill, Barbecue Bob, Bumble Bee Slim, and Black Ivory King. This complete anthology also features lyrics by Blind Blake, Victoria Spivey, Blind Willie Johnson, "Funny Paper" Smith, Texas Alexander, Lightning Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Ma Yancey, King Solomon Hill, Skip James, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Son House, Willie Brown, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis, Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson, Kokomo Arnold, Tampa Red, Howlin'Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Patton, and more than 100 others. Dozens of illustrations are included.

"They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad/Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's also sad." There's a lot more to the blues than three chords played on an old beat-up guitar. Squeeze My Lemon is a collection of some of the best bluues lines ever recorded. From birth ("Born under a bad sign/I've been down since I began to crawl") to death ("Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants tto die") and everything in between, this volume quotes classic blues phrases by ssongwriter/artists B.B. King, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Robert JJohnson and many, many others. Compiled by award-winning author/Grammy-nominated record producer Randy Poe, Squeeze My Lemon: A Collection of Classic Blues Lyriics features classic photos of many leading blues artists. A great gift book, itt is highly entertaining not only for blues lovers, but for anyone who appreciatees great lyrics. Categorized by subject matter (Love - Or the Lack Thereof, Bluess and Booze, Blues Behind Bars, Make Mine a Double Entendre, etc.), Squeeze My Lemmon is a book you'll return to - and quote from - again and again.

Here's the powerful story of a woman's life--a lonesome sojourn through a labyrinth in pursuit of love and strength. The path twists and turns through time, and upon encountering David Ruffin, lead singer of The Temptations, her destiny is met.

Where did Charlie Parker first play with Dizzy Gillespie? What are the coolest clubs in Chicago? Which city has the largest jazz museum? Where is Howlin' Wolf buried? The answers can be found in The Da Capo Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. , an insiders look at all the places where jazz and blues live, from national clubs to unmarked holes in the wall, in twenty-five cities and the Mississippi Delta. With the most up-to-date listings for festivals, historic theatres, record stores, and radio stations-plus anecdotes from club owners and musicians,this is the essential "where-to" for jazz and blues fans everywhere.

The embattled R&B star R. Kelly was arrested on a fugitive nationwide warrant issued as he was preparing to leave a rented vacation home where he had lived for more than a year with his wife and three children charged with 21 counts of child pornography. In Your Body's Calling Me: Music, Love, Sex and Money - The Story of the Life and Times of "Robert" R. Kelly, author Jake Brown explores the past to uncover the truth behind the crooner's celebrated, yet conflicted life, including: His childhood and impoverished upbringing, His abuse as a child, Experiences that molded him into both the man and celebrity, His collaboration with and marriage to Aaliyah, Child porn allegations filed against him, His haunting past and God-fearing, Soul, and Rhythm and Blues sounds that led him to a chart-topping career. R. Kelly's distinct sound has an ability to blend cutting edge, street-wise Hip-Hop music and storytelling with smooth love songs. His role as collaborative composer and producer with other artists expanded outside of his R&B genre, reflecting the diversity of his talents, as he crafted hits for many of the world's biggest Pop stars, including Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Notorious BIG, Puffy, Janet Jackson, Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige, NAS, Maxwell, Kirk Franklin, and KC & Jo Jo. R. Kelly, musical genius, racked up numerous Top 40 and Top Ten smashes hits in Billboard's Top 200 list. R. Kelly's music has topped Billboard's R & B Album, Adult Contemporary, Hot 100 Singles, Top 200 Album and the R & B/Hip Hop Charts. R. Kelly has been nominated for and received numerous awards including: Grammys for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group; Soul Train Music Awards for Best R&B/Soul Album, Male (R.); NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Male Artist and Music Video, and was the American Music Award's Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist and Sammy Davis Jr. Entertainer of the Year. In an instant, R. Kelly would go from a revered global superstar to a man" whose freedom and security..whose very foundation. was being threatened. Your Body's Calling Me reveals all the details about how R. Kelly became the 'Prince of Pillowtalk' and how that title would come back to haunt him.again.and again

This is a story of sacrifice and dedication, of being disappointed but bouncing back. It is the coming-of-age story of a young artist who became a major force in music and acting. Aaliyah had something extra that super successful people have, the ability to 'Dust Herself Off and Try Again' which is the title of one of her #1 hit songs. Although the sun has set on this magnificent young woman, Aaliyah lives forever in the hearts of her fans worldwide.

This book offers first-person recollections from a new generation of artists who applied the musical and life lessons of the fathers of the blues, stoking the 1960s blues revival that continues today. Some of these musicians, like John Hammond, Rory Block and Taj Mahal, sought out the rediscovered 1930s bluesmen at the Newport Folk Festivals. Others, like Robert Cray and Junior Watson, soaked up the west coast sounds of T-Bone Walker and Big Joe Turner in the storied ghetto clubs of Watts. Charlie Musselwhite came up on Memphis and Chicago blues, while Stevie Ray Vaughan and Marcia Ball went for the Texas grit of Albert Collins and Gatemouth Brown. By 1967, these and other young musicians were poised to breathe new life into the blues. Duke Robillard had formed the initial Roomful of Blues band. Bob Margolin was about to become Muddy Waters' guitarist. Joe Louis Walker was living with Michael Bloomfield in San Francisco. Tommy Shannon played Woodstock behind Johnny Winter. Some of the artists are actual blues offspring - Bernard Allison, Ronnie and Wayne Brooks, Kenny Neal, Shemekia Copeland, Lucky Peterson, and Jimmy D. Lane embody the traditions of their real fathers' pasts. Along with newcomer and Delta bluesman-searcher Keb' Mo,' they stand at the vanguard of the next blues evolution. Genetic or not, the musicians featured here have strengthened and energized a timeless American art form and culture - becoming caretakers and innovators of all that is the blues.

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.

Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour Europe and to play blues festivals in the United States.

In "Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell," Richard Congress delivers the first biography of a family man whose playing inspired and energized the likes of David Honeyboy Edwards, Sleepy John Estes, and Henry Townsend. No other biography discusses the mandolin's influence and role in the blues.

Guitar great Ry Cooder said, "Yank's style fascinated me because it had a lot of power and it's very raw-and what a great thing to do, just attack this little instrument like that."

Charlie Musselwhite, the noted harp player, worked with Rachell and club hopped in Chicago with the elder bluesman. "He just had a great spirit about him," Musselwhite said of Rachell's playing and singing, "really just shouting it out. If the world was made up of people like Yank Rachell it would be a wonderful place to live."

"Blues Mandolin Man" chronicles the life, times, and music of a man who was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1910 in rural western Tennessee. An active musician for 75 years, Rachell mastered several musical instruments and first recorded for Victor in Memphis in 1929. Through the blues, Rachell's world expanded to include Chicago, New York, recording studios and, after the sixties, radio, TV, and national and European tours.

Yank's recollections reveal new information about personalities and events that will delight blues history buffs. Rich appendixes detail Yank's mandolin and guitar style and his place in the blues tradition.

For this book Richard Congress, who reissued two of Rachell's old LPs in CD format, worked closely with him to record memories spanning decades of blues playing. Congress tells a compelling and engaging story about a colorful and thoughtful character who as a child picked cotton and plowed a field behind a mule, who grew to manhood coping with the southern Jim Crow system, and who participated in the creation and perpetuation of the blues.

Richard Congress is the owner of Random Chance Records, a record company based in New York City.

Making it in Hell, says Bruce Jackson, is the spirit behind the sixty-five work songs gathered in this eloquent dispatch from a brutal era of prison life in the Deep South. Through engagingly documented song arrangements and profiles of their singers, Jackson shows how such pieces as "Hammer Ring," "Ration Blues," "Yellow Gal," and "Jody's Got My Wife and Gone" are like no other folk music forms: they are distinctly African in heritage, diminished in power and meaning outside their prison context, and used exclusively by black convicts.

The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting, logging, and cotton picking. Perhaps most important, they helped resolve the men's hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle outlet for grievances they could never voice when face-to-face with their jailers.

This text tells the tale of the high times and hard times of six of the greatest living rhythm and blues artists. The author profiles Ruth Brown, the most popular female black singer of the early 1950s; La Vern Baker, who succeeded Brown; Little Jimmy Scott, whom Madonna calls the only singer who ever really made her cry; Charles Brown, master of the club blues style he popularized; Floyd Dixon, a more rambunctious fellow traveler; and Jimmy Witherspoon, whose blend of earthiness and urbanity helped earn him as big an r&b hit as was ever recorded. Chip Deffaa deals not only with the performers' music, but also with their struggles against racism and financial exploitation.

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a "cipendani," a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues.

Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for "Africa and the Blues." In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt.

Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions.

With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world.

Gerhard Kubik is a professor in the department of ethnology and African studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Since 1983 he has been affiliated with the Center for Social Research of Malawi, Zomba. He is a permanent member of the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London.

The Blues, that unique form of African-American music, continues to hold a fascination with each successive generation of young people. Scots-born Londoner Robert Nicholson is just one such person. Grabbed first as a teenager by the white blues sounds of the Rolling Stones and George Thorogood, he quickly became aware of the real roots of the Blues. Inspired by the great Chicago musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B.B. King, and the Mississippi Blues originators Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton, the author embarked on a journey to trace the roots of the electric sounds of Chicago's Chess record label back to the Mississippi Delta itself, the birthplace of the Blues.

Together with Memphis-based photographer Logan Young, Robert Nicholson has conducted a series of extended field trips to the South. Their travels have brought them into contact with the Blues musicians of today. This book presents in words and images a behind-the-scenes, often intimate, portrait of the main players on the current Delta Blues scene, including Lonnie Pitchford, Booba Barnes, Scott Dunbar, Son Thomas, and others.

This important book gives a vivid account of an economically impoverished people and examines the often brittle conviviality, hidden racial tensions, and undercurrents of violence from which the Blues has grown and in which it continues to thrive. The stunning, original photographs by Logan Young enhance Nicholson's informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking text. Together they present a unique sociological and musical picture of the Mississippi Blues, and of the ways it has endured and evolved in contemporary America.

My Life in E-flat is the memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians. Chan Parker was born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age. Her father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods. In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s. Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).

In Roosevelt's Blues Guido van Rijn documents more than a hundred blues and gospel lyrics that contain direct political comment about FDR. Altogether, they convey the thought, spirit, and history of the African-American population during the Roosevelt era. Included in the book are recorded sermons by Rev. J.M. Gates and lyrics to songs recorded by such notable musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, Big Bill Broonzy, "Champion" Jack Dupree, Sonny Boy Williamson, Josh White, the Mississippi Sheiks, and many others. Using these sources, which have been neglected by historians, van Rijn documents Roosevelt's vast popularity among blacks.

Jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and bassoonist Garvin Bushell (1902-1991) performed with many of the twentieth century's greatest jazz musicians,from Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway to Eric Dolphy, Gil Evans, and John Coltrane,during his remarkable career that spanned from 1916 to the 1980s. Although best known as a jazz soloist and sideman, Bushell also played oboe and bassoon with symphony orchestras and was a highly regarded instructor of woodwinds. In Jazz from the Beginning , Bushell vividly recounts his musical experiences, featuring candid assessments of the legends with whom he performed as well as eye-opening accounts of the early days of jazz and the racism that he encountered on the road. Based on a series of interviews conducted by jazz scholar Mark Tucker, these memoirs provide a colourful account of Bushell's extraordinary life and career as well as an important record of seventy years of America's musical history.

With The Jazz Poetry Anthology, this volume offers a comprehensive exploration of the history of jazz poetry. The Second Set gathers many poets omitted from The Jazz Poetry Anthology, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Brown, Diane di Prima, Henry Dumas, Nikki Giovanni, David Henderson, Anselm Hollo, Haki Madhubuti, Michael McClure, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Eugene B. Redmond, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Ntozake Shange, A. B. Spellman, and Jay Wright. The Second Set fills out the history of jazz poetry with poems written before World War II, as well as those from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and includes contemporary writers from a range of cultural backgrounds, including Ai, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, Joy Harjo, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michael Longley, Mwatabu Okantah, Charles Simic, Lorenzo Thomas, Derek Walcott, Ron Welburn, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Embracing a wide variety of poems informed by jazz, The Second Set also includes statements of poetics by many of the poets anthologized."