Taking its title from a lyric by Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton, "Seems Liks Murder Here" offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and "hard times", blues songs and literature emerge in this provocative work as vital responses to the violent realities and traumatic legacies of African American life in the Jim Crow South. Blues recording artist and critic Adam Gussow begins his story in the 1890s, when the spectacle lynching of blacks became an insidious part of Southern life. Although lynchings are seldom referred to directly in blues songs, veiled references to them abound, and Gussow identifies these scattered mentions, tying them to real-life incidents and historical events in the autobiographies of bluesmen and -women. Southern violence, he shows also enters the blues tradition through folklore about "badmen": African Americans who take the lives of white aggressors in self-defence. Blues songs and literature, meanwhile, teem with searing depictions of bloodshed, such as the cutting and shooting that blacks inflicted on one another in juke joints. For Gussow, such expressive acts of violence are the quintessential blues gesture - burning examples of racial and romantic anguish. As Langston Hughes once wrote, "My love might turn into a knife/instead of to a song". With interpretations of classic songs and writings, from the autobiographies of W.C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B.B. King to the poetry of Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, "Seems Like Murder Here" should reshape our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated public radio staple Blues before Sunrise, has spent over thirty years observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In Pioneers of the Blues Revival, he interviews many of the prominent white researchers and enthusiasts whose advocacy spearheaded the blues' crossover into the mainstream starting in the 1960s. Opinionated and territorial, the American, British, and French interviewees provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the era and movement. Experts including Paul Oliver, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sam Charters, Ray Flerledge, Paul Oliver, Richard K. Spottswood, and Pete Whelan chronicle in their own words their obsessive early efforts at cataloging blues recordings and retrace lifetimes spent loving, finding, collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They and nearly a dozen others recount relationships with blues musicians, including the discoveries of prewar bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, and the reintroduction of these musicians and many others to new generations of listeners. The accounts describe fieldwork in the South, renew lively debates, and tell of rehearsals in Muddy Waters's basement and randomly finding Lightning Hopkins's guitar in a pawn shop. Blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson provides a critical and historical framework for the interviews in an introduction.

Influenced at a young age by classic country, Tejano, western swing, and the popular music of wartime America, blues musician Delbert McClinton grew up with a backstage pass to some of the most significant moments in American cultural and music history. From his birth on the high plains of West Texas during World War II to headlining sold-out cruises on chartered luxury ships well into his seventies, McClinton admits he has been "One of the Fortunate Few." This book chronicles McClinton's path through a free-range childhood in Lubbock and Fort Worth; an early career in the desegregated roadhouses along Fort Worth's Jacksboro Highway, where he led the house bands for Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddly, and others while making a name for himself as a regional player in the birth of rock and roll; headlining shows in England with a little-known Liverpool quartet called The Beatles; and heading back to Texas in time for the progressive movement, kicking off Austin's burgeoning role in American music history. Today, more than sixty years after he first stepped onto a stage, Delbert McClinton shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to play sold-out concert and dance halls, theaters, and festival events across the nation. An annual highlight for his fans is the Delbert McClinton Sandy Beaches Cruise, the longest-running music-themed luxury cruise in history at more than twenty-five years of operation. More than the story of a rags-to-riches musician, Delbert McClinton: One of the Fortunate Few offers readers a soundtrack to some of the most pivotal moments in the history of American popular music-all backed by a cooking rhythm section and featuring a hot harmonica lead.

This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse elements of American popular music at large, and the visual art associated with this unique sound has been just as varied and dynamic. There is no better guide to this fascinating graphical world than Bill Dahl a longtime music journalist and historian who has written liner notes for countless reissues of classic blues, soul, R&B, and rock albums. With his deep knowledge and incisive commentary complementing more than three hundred and fifty lavishly reproduced images the history of the blues comes musically and visually to life. What will astonish readers who thumb through these pages is the amazing range of ways that the blues have been represented whether via album covers, posters, flyers, 78 rpm labels, advertising, or other promotional materials. We see the blues as it was first visually captured in the highly colorful sheet music covers of the early twentieth century. We see striking and hard-to-find label designs from labels big (Columbia) and small (Rhumboogie). We see William Alexander's humorous artwork on postwar Miltone Records; the cherished ephemera of concert and movie posters; and Chess Records' iconic early albums designed by Don Bronstein, which would set a new standard for modern album cover design. What these images collectively portray is the evolution of a distinctively American art form. And they do so in the richest way imaginable. The result is a sumptuous book, a visual treasury as alive in spirit as the music it so vibrantly captures.

In The Heart of Rock & Soul, veteran rock critic Dave Marsh offers a polemical guide to the 1,001 greatest rock and soul singles ever made, encompassing rock, metal, R&B, disco, folk, funk, punk, reggae, rap, soul, country, and any other music that has made a difference over the past fifty years. The illuminating essays,complete with music history, social commentary, and personal appraisals,double as a mini-history of popular music. Here you will find singles by artists as wide-ranging as Aretha Franklin, George Jones, Roy Orbison, the Sex Pistols, Madonna, Run-D.M.C., and Van Halen. Featuring a new preface that covers the hits,and misses,of the'90s, The Heart of Rock & Soul remains as provocative, passionate, and timeless as the music it praises.

Traditional jazz studies have tended to see jazz in purely musical terms, as a series of changes in rhythm, tonality, and harmony, or as a parade of great players. But jazz has also entered the cultural mix through its significant impact on novelists, filmmakers, dancers, painters, biographers, and photographers. Representing Jazz explores the "other" history of jazz created by these artists, a history that tells us as much about the meaning of the music as do the many books that narrate the lives of musicians or describe their recordings. Krin Gabbard has gathered essays by distinguished writers from a variety of fields. They provide engaging analyses of films such as Round Midnight, Bird, Mo' Better Blues, Cabin in the Sky, and Jammin' the Blues; the writings of Eudora Welty and Dorothy Baker; the careers of the great lindy hoppers of the 1930s and 1940s; Mura Dehn's extraordinary documentary on jazz dance; the jazz photography of William Claxton; painters of the New York School; the traditions of jazz autobiography; and the art of "vocalese." The contributors to this volume assess the influence of extramusical sources on our knowledge of jazz and suggest that the living contexts of the music must be considered if a more sophisticated jazz scholarship is ever to evolve. Transcending the familiar patterns of jazz history and criticism, Representing Jazz looks at how the music actually has been heard and felt at different levels of American culture. With its companion anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses, this volume will enrich and transform the literature of jazz studies. Its provocative essays will interest both aficionados and potential jazz fans.Contributors. Karen Backstein, Leland H. Chambers, Robert P. Crease, Krin Gabbard, Frederick Garber, Barry K. Grant, Mona Hadler, Christopher Harlos, Michael Jarrett, Adam Knee, Arthur Knight, James Naremore

Focusing on blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, this text explores the rich musical heritage of African-Americans in California. The contributors describe in detail the individual artists, locales, groups, musical styles and regional qualities, and the result is a book which seeks to lay the groundwork for a whole new field of study. The essays draw from oral histories, music recordings, newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as population statistics to provide insightful discussions of topics such as the Californian urban milieu's influence on gospel music, the development of the West Coast blues style, and the significance of Los Angeles's Central Avenue in the early days of jazz. Other esays offer perspectives on how individual musicians have been shaped by their African-American heritage and on the role of the record industry and radio in the making of music. In addition to the diverse range of essays, the book includes a bibliography of African-American music and culture in California.

From the field cries and work chants of Southern Negroes emerged a rich and vital music called the country blues, an intensely personal expression of the pains and pleasures of black life. This music- recorded during the twenties by men like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, and Robert Johnson- had all but disappeared from memory until the folk music revival of the late 1950's created a new and appreciable audience for the country blues.On of the pioneering studies of this unjustly-neglected music was Sam Charter's The Country Blues. In it, Charters recreates the special world of the country bluesman- that lone black performer accompanying himself on the acoustic guitar, his music a rich reflection of his own emotional life.Virtually rewriting the history of the blues, Charters reconstructs its evolution and dissemination, from the first tentative soundings on the Mississippi Delta through the emergence, with Elvis Presley, of rock and roll. His carefully-researched biographies of near-legendary performers like Lonnie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, and Tampa Red- coupled with his perceptive discussions of their recordings- pay tribute to a kind of artistry that will never be seen or heard again. And his portraits of the still-strumming Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, and Lightnin' Hopkins- point up the undying strength and vitality of the country blues.

This text, the first of its kind, deals with some of the problems to be faced. It discusses the new trend of musical thought that jazz has brought about--the new combinations of instruments, a different harmonic and melodic language, a new and an intriguing approach to ensemble writing.

A contribution to the history of the blues in particular and of Afro-American culture in general, new information about a remarkable set of assertive, creative women as well as new insights into the musical heritage they have left behind. Sippie Wallace, Edith Wilson, Victoria Spivey and Alberta Hunter are the collective focus of this work - four influential blues singers with diverse styles, who were big in the 1920s and were still performing in the 1980s. Writing from a firm black/feminist standpoint, Harrison shows the joys, trials, and heartbreaks in the lives of the first popular women blues artists.

Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.