One of the greats of blues music, Willie Dixon was a recording artist whose abilities extended beyond that of bass player. A singer, songwriter, arranger, and producer, Dixon's work influenced countless artists across the music spectrum. In Willie Dixon: Preacher of the Blues, Mitsutoshi Inaba examines Dixon's career, from his earliest recordings with the Five Breezes through his major work with Chess Records and Cobra Records. Focusing on Dixon's work on the Chicago blues from the 1940s to the early 1970s, this book details the development of Dixon's songwriting techniques from his early professional career to his mature period and compares the compositions he provided for different artists. This volume also explores Dixon's philosophy of songwriting and its social, historical, and cultural background. This is the first study to discuss his compositions in an African American cultural context, drawing upon interviews with his family and former band members. This volume also includes a detailed list of Dixon's session work, in which his compositions are chronologically organized.

Guitarist Michael Bloomfield shot to stardom in the '60s with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band Bob Dylan the Electric Flag and on Al Kooper's Super Session. His story is told in the words of his brother musicians such as B.B. King producer Paul Rothchild and dozens of others a including Bloomfield himself. Features a foreword by Carlos Santana and access to online audio of unreleased early studio tracks.TH (This book) is a look inside the psyche of a musical innovator who deserves a posthumous Nobel Prize and a statue on Rush Street in Chicago. If you love his blues you'll love this book. THa Al Kooper

Transatlantic Roots Music presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. These essays originated in an international conference on the Transatlantic paths of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, be it black or white, American or British. While the central theme of the collection is musical influences, issues of national, local, and racial identity are also recurring subjects. Were these identities invented, imagined, constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded the music for posterity?The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain. And there are new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects. The book draws on the work of eminent, established scholars and emerging, young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.

Huey "Piano" Smith's musical legacy stands alongside that of fellow New Orleans legends Dr. John, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, and Allen Toussaint. His 1957 classic, "Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu," made Billboard's top R&B singles chart, and hundreds of artists including Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, Johnny Rivers, and Chubby Checker have recorded his songs.

The first biography of the artist responsible for hits "Don't You Just Know It," "High Blood Pressure," and "Sea Cruise," Huey "Piano" Smith and the Rocking Pneumonia Blues follows the musician's extraordinary life from his Depression-era childhood to his teen years as a pianist for blues star Guitar Slim to his mainstream success in the 1950s and '60s. Drawing from extensive interviews and court records, author and journalist John Wirt also provides new insights on Smith's professional disappointments and financial struggles in the 1980s and '90s as he battled over royalties from his most successful and profitable work.

An enigmatic and guarded personality in a profession of extroverted performers, Smith made farreaching contributions to the New Orleans music scene as a songwriter, pianist, and producer. Wirt reveals that Smith's numerous collaborations with other artists -- including the Clowns, the Pitter Pats, the Hueys, and Shindig Smith and the Soul Shakers -- served as vehicles for his creative vision rather than simply as an anonymous backup for a leading front man.

Throughout this intimate account, Wirt details Smith's significant impact on rock and roll history and underscores both the longevity of his music -- which has entertained and inspired for over five decades -- and the musician's personal endurance in the face of hardship and opposition.

In I'm Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta, Stephen A. King reveals the strategies used by blues promoters and organizers in Mississippi, both African American and white, local and state, to attract the attention of tourists. In the process, he reveals how promotional materials portray the Delta's blues culture and its musicians. Those involved in selling the blues in Mississippi work to promote the music while often conveniently forgetting the state's historical record of racial and economic injustice. King's research includes numerous interviews with blues musicians and promoters, chambers of commerce, local and regional tourism entities, and members of the Mississippi Blues Commission. This book is the first critical account of Mississippi's blues tourism industry. From the late 1970s until 2000, Mississippi's blues tourism industry was fragmented, decentralized, and localized, as each community competed for tourist dollars. By 2004, with the creation of the Mississippi Blues Commission, the promotion of the blues became more centralized as state government played an increasing role in promoting Mississippi's blues heritage. Blues tourism has the potential to generate new revenue in one of the poorest states in the country, repair the state's public image, and serve as a vehicle for racial reconciliation.

In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form the blues. In Jim Crow s Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism even hedonism and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn t merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The me -centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became we -centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow s Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.

The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives, edited by Helmut Staubmann, draws from a broad spectrum of sociological perspectives to contribute both to the understanding of the phenomenon Rolling Stones and to an in-depth analysis of contemporary society and culture that takes The Stones a starting point. Contributors approach The Rolling Stones from a range of social science perspectives including cultural studies, communication and film studies, gender studies, and the sociology of popular music. The essays in this volume focus on the question of how the worldwide success of The Rolling Stones over the course of more than half a century reflects society and the transformation of popular culture.

Art Pepper (1925-1982) was called the greatest alto saxophonist of the post-Charlie Parker generation. But his autobiography, "Straight Life," is much more than a jazz book--it is one of the most explosive, yet one of the most lyrical, of all autobiographies. This edition is updated with an extensive afterword by Laurie Pepper covering Art Pepper's last years, and a complete and up-to-date discography by Todd Selbert.

"Kennedy's Blues: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on JFK" collects in a single volume the blues and gospel songs written by African Americans about the presidency of John F. Kennedy and offers a close analysis of Kennedy's hold upon the African American imagination. These blues and gospel songs have never been transcribed and analyzed in a systematic way, so this volume provides a hitherto untapped source on the perception of one of the most intriguing American presidents.

After eight years of Republican rule the young Democratic president received a warm welcome from African Americans. However, with the Cold War military draft and the slow pace of civil rights measures, inspiration temporarily gave way to impatience.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, the groundbreaking civil rights bill--all found their way into blues and gospel songs. The many blues numbers devoted to the assassination and the president's legacy are evidence of JFK's near-canonization by African Americans. Blues historian Guido van Rijn shows that John F. Kennedy became a mythical hero to blues songwriters despite what was left unaccomplished.

Guido van Rijn is teacher of English at Kennemer Lyceum in Overveen, the Netherlands. His previous books include "The Truman and Eisenhower Blues: African American Blues and Gospel Songs, 1945-1960."

This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.

Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn

Neil A. Wynn is professor of twentieth-century American history at the University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of "Historical Dictionary from Great War to Great Depression," "From Progressivism to Prosperity: American Society and the First World War," and "The Afro-American and the Second World War."

In "Getting the Blues," Stephen Nichols shows how blues music offers powerful insight into the biblical narrative and the life of Jesus. Weaving Bible stories together with intriguing details of the lives of blues musicians, he leads readers in a vivid exploration of how blues music teaches about sin, suffering, alienation, and worship. Nichols unpacks the Psalms, portions of the prophets, and Paul's writings in this unique way, revealing new facets of Scripture.
"Getting the Blues" will resonate with all readers interested in Christianity and culture. In the end they will emerge with a greater understanding of the value of "theology in a minor key"--a theology that embraces suffering as well as joy.
EXCERPT
This book attempts a theology in a minor key, a theology that lingers, however uncomfortably, over Good Friday. It takes its cue from the blues, harmonizing narratives of Scripture with narratives of the Mississippi Delta, the land of cotton fields and Cyprus swamps and the moaning slide guitar. This is not a book by a musician, however, but by a theologian. And so I offer a theological interpretation of the blues. Cambridge theologian Jeremy Begbie has argued for music's intrinsic ability to teach theology. As an improvisation on Begbie's thesis, I take the blues to be intrinsically suited to teach a particular theology, a theology in a minor key. This is not to suggest that a theology in a minor key, or the blues for that matter, utterly sounds out despair like the torrents of a spinning hurricane. A theology in a minor key is no mere existential scream. In fact, a theology in a minor key sounds a rather hopeful melody. Good Friday yearns for Easter, and eventually Easter comes. Blues singers, even when groaning of the worst of times, know to cry out for mercy because they know that, despite appearances, Sunday's coming. . . . The blues, like the writings of Flannery O'Connor, need not mention him Christ] in every line, or in every song, but he haunts the music just the same. At the end of the day, he serves as the resolution to the conflict churning throughout the blues, the conflict that keeps the music surging like the floodwaters of the Mississippi River.

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake-as willing deception and passive fate-Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope.