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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Blues
Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the
pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market
for "race records". Not long after, such records also brought black
blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century
later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a
multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far
beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody
is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the
blues", as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people
hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural
appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep
in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music",
as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the
vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of
nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues
scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging
questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural
anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues
for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major
writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the
blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts
a long overdue conversation.
This acclaimed travel guide, hailed as the bible of blues travelers
throughout the world, will shepherd the faithful to such shrines as
the intersection where Robert Johnson might have made his deal with
the devil and the railroad tracks that inspired Howlin' Wolf to
moan ""Smokestack Lightnin'."" Blues Traveling was the first and is
the indisputably essential guidebook to Mississippi's musical
places and its blues history. For this new fourth edition, Steve
Cheseborough returned once again to the Delta, revisited all of the
locales featured in previous editions of the book, and uncovered
fresh destinations. He includes updated material on new festivals,
state blues markers, club openings and closings, and many other
transformations in the Delta's ever-lively blues scene. The fourth
edition also features new information on the Mississippi Blues
Trail, updated information on the many blues sites throughout the
Delta, and twenty new photographs. With photographs, maps,
easy-to-follow directions, and an informative, entertaining text,
this book will lead the reader in and out of Clarksdale, Greenwood,
Helena (Arkansas), Rolling Fork, Jackson, Memphis, Natchez,
Bentonia, Rosedale, Itta Bena, and dozens of other locales where
generations of blues musicians have lived, traveled, and performed.
Showcasing American music and music making during the Great
Depression, "Hard Luck Blues" presents more than two hundred
photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration
photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the
local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the
regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work
camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to
organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and
community festivals. Captured across the nation from the northeast
to the southwest, the images document the last generation of
musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded
sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene
and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual
representation of American roots music performance during the
Depression era, "Hard Luck Blues" features photographs by Jack
Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn,
Marion Post Wolcott, and others. Photographer and image researcher
Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual
details about the persons and events captured, in some cases
drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also
included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an
afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik. "Published in
association with the Library of Congress."
Through revealing portraits of selected local artists and
slice-of-life vignettes drawn from the city's pubs and lounges,
Chicago Blues encapsulates the sound and spirit of the blues as it
is lived today. As a committed participant in the Chicago blues
scene for more than a quarter century, David Whiteis draws on years
of his observations and extensive interviews to paint a full
picture of the Chicago blues world, both on and off the stage. In
addition to portraits of blues artists he has personally known and
worked with, Whiteis takes readers on a tour of venues like East of
Ryan and the Starlight Lounge, home to artists such as Jumpin'
Willie Cobbs, Willie D., and Harmonica Khan. He tells the stories
behind the lives of past pioneers including Junior Wells, pianist
Sunnyland Slim, and harpist Big Walter Horton, whose music reflects
the universal concerns with love, loss, and yearning that continue
to keep the blues so vital for so many.
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Chicago Blues
Wilbert Jones
Hardcover
R781
R686
Discovery Miles 6 860
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