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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Blues
For all of its apparent simplicity-a few chords, twelve bars, and a
supposedly straightforward American character-blues music is a
complex phenomenon with cultural significance that has varied
greatly across different historical contexts. One Sound, Two Worlds
examines the development of the blues in East and West Germany,
demonstrating the multiple ways social and political conditions can
shape the meaning of music. Based on new archival research and
conversations with key figures, this comparative study provides a
cultural, historical, and musicological account of the blues and
the impact of the genre not only in the two Germanys, but also in
debates about the history of globalization.
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.
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.
Bobby "Blue" Bland's silky-smooth vocal style and captivating live
performances helped propel the blues out of Delta juke joints and
into urban clubs and upscale theaters. Soul of the Man: Bobby
"Blue" Bland relates how Bland, along with longtime friend B. B.
King, and other members of the loosely knit group who called
themselves the Beale Streeters, forged a new electrified blues
style in Memphis in the early 1950s. Combining elements of Delta
blues, southern gospel, big-band jazz, and country and western
music, Bland and the Beale Streeters were at the heart of a
revolution. This biography traces how Bland scored hit after hit,
placing more than sixty songs on the R&B charts throughout the
1960s, '70s, and '80s. A four-time Grammy nominee, he received
Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Academy of Recording
Arts and Sciences and the Blues Foundation, as well as the Rhythm
& Blues Foundation's Pioneer Award. He was also inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Foundation's Hall of
Fame. This biography at last heralds one of America's great music
makers.
John Mayall is an icon in the world of blues music and the
Godfather of British blues. A pioneering musician, blues promoter
and talent scout for over 50 years, his uncanny knack of picking
young, talented musicians and then nurturing them in his bands is
the stuff of legend. Under his guidance as leader and sometimes
father figure, his groups developed into a blues school of learning
par excellence. Many young members became huge stars later on,
among them brilliant musicians such as Eric Clapton, Peter Green,
Jack Bruce, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Mick Taylor and drummer Jon
Hiseman. In Mayalls bands, an incredible 130 musicians have done
their apprenticeship and earned their spurs. Top bands like Cream,
Fleetwood Mac or Colosseum would never have existed without his
inspiration and guidance. Now 80 and showing no signs of slowing
down, John Mayall has an amazing back catalogue totalling some 86
albums, and has played over 5000 live concerts all over the world.
He is still rated as one of the most influential and respected
figures in the international blues and rock scene. This is the
first detailed biography of Mayall, illuminating not only his life
and career, but also providing deeper, more detailed insights into
the development of his many fellow musicians. It follows the young
Mayall from the early days of jamming in his tree house as a
teenager to the vast tours he undertakes today. Even die-hard blues
fans will find a lot of undiscovered anecdotes and stories here, as
the book covers all phases of the Mayalls career and not just the
60s.
Who was the greatest of all American guitarists? You probably
didn't name Gary Davis, but many of his musical contemporaries
considered him without peer. Bob Dylan called Davis "one of the
wizards of modern music." Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead - who took
lessons with Davis - claimed his musical ability "transcended any
common notion of a bluesman." And the folklorist Alan Lomax called
him "one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental
music." But you won't find Davis alongside blues legends Robert
Johnson and Muddy Waters in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Despite
almost universal renown among his contemporaries, Davis lives today
not so much in his own work but through covers of his songs by
Dylan, Jackson Browne, and many others, as well as in the untold
number of students whose lives he influenced. The first biography
of Davis, Say No to the Devil restores "the Rev's" remarkable
story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with many of
Davis' former students, Ian Zack takes readers through Davis'
difficult beginning as the blind son of sharecroppers in the Jim
Crow South to his decision to become an ordained Baptist minister
and his move to New York in the early 1940s, where he scraped out a
living singing and preaching on street corners and in storefront
churches in Harlem. There, he gained entry into a circle of
musicians that included, among many others, Lead Belly, Woody
Guthrie, and Dave Van Ronk. But in spite of his tremendous musical
achievements, Davis never gained broad recognition from an American
public that wasn't sure what to make of his trademark blend of
gospel, ragtime, street preaching, and the blues. His personal life
was also fraught, troubled by struggles with alcohol, women, and
deteriorating health. Zack chronicles this remarkable figure in
American music, helping us to understand how he taught and
influenced a generation of musicians.
A member of Muddy Waters' legendary late 1940s-1950s band, Jimmy
Rogers pioneered a blues guitar style that made him one of the most
revered sidemen of all time. Rogers also had a significant if
star-crossed career as a singer and solo artist for Chess Records,
releasing the classic singles "That's All Right" and "Walking By
Myself."
In Blues All Day Long, Wayne Everett Goins mines seventy-five
hours of interviews with Rogers' family, collaborators, and peers
to follow a life spent in the blues. Goins' account takes Rogers
from recording Chess classics and barnstorming across the South to
a late-in-life renaissance that included new music, entry into the
Blues Hall of Fame, and high profile tours with Eric Clapton and
the Rolling Stones. Informed and definitive, Blues All Day Long
fills a gap in twentieth century music history with the story of
one of the blues' eminent figures and one of the genre's seminal
bands.
Over the course of his long career, legendary bluesman William
""Big Bill"" Broonzy (1893@-1958) helped shape the trajectory of
the genre, from its roots in the rural Mississippi River Delta,
through its rise as a popular genre in the north, to its eventual
international acclaim. Along the way, Broonzy adopted an evolving
personal and professional identity, tailoring his self-presentation
to the demands of the place and time. His remarkable professional
fluidity mirrored the range of expectations from his audiences,
whose ideas about race, national belonging, identity, and the blues
were refracted through Broonzy as if through a prism. Kevin D.
Greene argues that Broonzy's popular success testifies to his
ability to navigate the cultural expectations of his different
audiences. However, this constant reinvention came at a personal
and professional cost. Using Broonzy's multifaceted career, Greene
situates blues performance at the center of understanding African
American self-presentation and racial identity in the first half of
the twentieth century. Through Broonzy's life and times, Greene
assesses major themes and events in African American history,
including the Great Migration, urbanization, and black expatriate
encounters with European culture consumers. Drawing on a range of
historical source materials as well as oral histories and personal
archives held by Broonzy's son, Greene perceptively interrogates
how notions of race, gender, and audience reception continue to
shape concepts of folk culture and musical authenticity.
At a time when ideas like "post-racial society" and
"#BlackLivesMatter" occupy the same space, scholars of black
American faith are provided a unique opportunity to regenerate and
imagine theological frameworks that confront the epistemic effects
of racialization and its confluence with the theological
imagination. Decolonizing Revelation contributes to this task by
rethinking or "taking a second look" at the cultural production of
the blues. Unlike other examinations of the blues that privilege
the hermeneutic of race, this work situates the blues spatially,
offering a transracial interpretation that looks to establish an
option for disentangling racial ideology from the theological
imagination. This book dislocates race in particular, and modernity
in general, as the primary means by which God's self-disclosure is
read across human history. Rather than looking to the experience of
antiblack racism as revelational, the work looks to a people group,
blues people, and their spatial, sonic, and sensual activities.
Following the basic theological premise that God is a God of life,
Burnett looks to the spaces where blues life occurs to construct a
decolonial option for a theology of revelation.
Contributions by Luther Allison, John Broven, Daniel Droixhe, David
Evans, William Ferris, Jim O'Neal, Mike Rowe, Robert Sacre, Arnold
Shaw, and Dick Shurman Fifty years after Charley Patton's death in
1934, a team of blues experts gathered five thousand miles from
Dockery Farms at the University of Liege in Belgium to honor the
life and music of the most influential artist of the Mississippi
Delta blues. This volume brings together essays from that
international symposium on Charley Patton and Mississippi blues
traditions, influences, and comparisons. Originally published by
Presses Universitaires de Liege in Belgium, this collection has
been revised and updated with a new foreword by William Ferris, new
images added, and some essays translated into English for the first
time. Patton's personal life and his recorded music bear witness to
how he endured and prevailed in his struggle as a black man during
the early twentieth century. Within this volume, that story offers
hope and wonder. Organized in two parts--""Origins and Traditions""
and ""Comparison with Other Regional Styles and Mutual
Influence""--the essays create an invaluable resource on the life
and music of this early master. Written by a distinguished group of
scholars, these pieces secure the legacy of Charley Patton as the
fountainhead of Mississippi Delta blues.
Beginning in the late 1950s, an influential cadre of young, white,
mostly middle-class British men were consuming and appropriating
African-American blues music, using blues tropes in their own music
and creating a network of admirers and emulators that spanned the
Atlantic. This cross-fertilization helped create a commercially
successful rock idiom that gave rise to some of the most famous
British groups of the era, including The Rolling Stones, The
Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin. What empowered these
white, middle-class British men to identify with and claim aspects
of the musical idiom of African-American blues musicians? The
British Blues Network examines the role of British narratives of
masculinity and power in the postwar era of decolonization and
national decline that contributed to the creation of this network,
and how its members used the tropes, vocabulary, and mythology of
African-American blues traditions to forge their own musical
identities.
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