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.

This compilation of essays takes the study of the blues to a welcome new level. Distinguished scholars and well-established writers from such diverse backgrounds as musicology, anthropology, musicianship, and folklore join together to examine blues as literature, music, personal expression, and cultural product. Ramblin' on My Mind contains pieces on Ella Fitzgerald, Son House, and Robert Johnson; on the styles of vaudeville, solo guitar, and zydeco; on a comparison of blues and African music; on blues nicknames; and on lyric themes of disillusionment. Contributors are Lynn Abbott, James Bennighof, Katharine Cartwright, Andrew M. Cohen, David Evans, Bob Groom, Elliott Hurwitt, Gerhard Kubik, John Minton, Luigi Monge, and Doug Seroff.

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.

(Book). Alcoholic. Epileptic. Technically challenged. Jimmy Reed nevertheless overcame these roadblocks to become perhaps the most successful R&B/pop cross-over artist of the '50s with songs like "Big Boss Man" and "Bright Lights, Big City." Musicians, family members, and those whose lives Reed touched offer revealing and heart-wrenching insights into this now-revered bluesman. While Reed's alcoholism was no secret, its effect on his musicianship is less understood. This engaging book tells the real story that until now has not been told.

Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international contributors to Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From explore this aspect of the blues and establish the significance of African American popular song as a neglected form of oral history. ""High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood,"" by David Evans, is the definitive study of songs about one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the United States. In ""Death by Fire: African American Popular Music on the Natchez Rhythm Club Fire,"" Luigi Monge analyzes a continuum of songs about exclusively African American tragedy. ""Lookin' for the Bully: An Enquiry into a Song and Its Story,"" by Paul Oliver traces the origins and the many avatars of the Bully song. In ""That Dry Creek Eaton Clan: A North Mississippi Murder Ballad of the 1930s,"" Tom Freeland and Chris Smith study a ballad recorded in 1939 by a black convict at Parchman prison farm. ""Coolidge's Blues: African American Blues from the Roaring Twenties"" is Guido van Rijn's survey of blues of that decade. Robert Springer's ""On the Electronic Trail of Blues Formulas"" presents a number of conclusions about the spread of patterns in blues narratives. In ""West Indies Blues: An Historical Overview 1920s-1950s,"" John Cowley turns his attention to West Indian songs produced on the American mainland. Finally, in ""Ethel Waters: 'Long, Lean, Lanky Mama,'"" Randall Cherry reappraises the early career of this blues and vaudeville singer. Robert Springer is a professor of English at the University of Metz in Longeville les Metz, France. Among other works, he is the author of Authentic Blues: Its History and Its Themes and the editor of The Lyrics in African American Popular Music.

(Book). Incurable Blues explores the life and genius of Hubert Sumlin, a highly influential guitarist who has survived cancer, alcoholism, and personal and professional tribulations to testify to the classic days of Chicago blues. Sumlin's incendiary guitar playing is heard on most of Howlin' Wolf's classic Chess sides. Sumlin's pick-less playing has inspired countless blues-rock luminaries. Author Will Romano places Hubert's playing and performing style in context, showing how it formed the basis of blues rock and rock n roll and how it bridges the gap between African folk; the work of early masters like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Peetie Wheatstraw; the revisionist British invasion guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards; and the modern-era blues styles of Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Mayer.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

In this unique guide to rhythm and blues vocal groups, Mitch Rosalsky has collected an abundance of information on individual groups. One of the first books to approach this subject from the groups' personnel standpoint, the Encyclopedia of R&B and Doo Wop Vocal Groups presents trivia about individual members as well as discographies for the groups, and many rare photographs. Over 1,000 groups are listed alphabetically with cross-referencing that allows readers to see when individuals have performed with multiple groups. With its easy-to-use alphabetical format, accurate and hard-to-find information, the Encyclopedia is an essential reference for deejays, collectors, and music historians. Assisted in his research by some of the very same authors of those famous biographies in those now famous but never forgotten magazines, this book is testimony of the need to give immortality to the individuals whose beautiful voices have thrilled us for years. Every effort has been made to present the most up-to-date and accurate information available.

Once a thriving body of innovative and fluid music, jazz is now the victim of destructive professional and artistic forces, says Eric Nisenson. Corruption by marketers, appropriation by the mainstream, superficial media portrayal, and sheer lack of skill have all contributed to the demise of this venerable art form. Nisenson persuasively describes how the entire jazz "industry" is controlled by a select cadre with a choke hold on the most vital components of the music. As the listening culture has changed, have spontaneity and improvisation been sacrificed? You can agree or disagree with Nisenson's thesis and arguments, but as "Booklist" says, "his passion is engrossing."

Al Rose has known virtually every noteworthy jazz musician of this century. For many of them he has organized concerts, composed songs that they later played or sang, and promoted their acts. He has, when called upon, bailed them out of jail, straightened out their finances, stood up for them at their weddings, and eulogized them at their funerals. He has caroused with them in bars and clubs from New Orleans to New York, from Paris to Singapore -- and survived to tell the story. The result has been a lifetime of friendship with some of the music world's most engaging and rambunctious personalities. In I Remember Jazz, Rose draws on this unparallelled experience to recall, through brief but poignant vignettes, the greats and the near-greats of jazz. In a style that is always entertaining, unabashedly idiosyncratic, and frequently irreverent, he writes about Jelly Roll Morton and Bunny Berigan, Eubie Blake and Bobby Hackett, Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, and more than fifty others.

Rose was only twenty-two when he was first introduced to Jelly Roll Morton. He quickly discovered that they had more in common than a love of music. Something of a peacock at that age, Rose was dressed in a "polychromatic, green-striped suit, pink shirt with a detachable white collar, dubonnet tie, buttonhole, and handkerchief" -- and so was Jelly Roll. About Eubie Blake, Rose notes that he was not only a superb musician but also a notorious ladies' man. Rose recalls asking the noted pianist when he was ninety-seven, "How old do you have to be before the sex drive goes?" Blake's reply: "You'll have to ask someone older than me." Once in 1947, Rose was asked to assemble a group of musicians to play at a reception to be hosted by President Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C. The musicians included Muggsy Spanier, George Brunies, Pee Wee Russell, Pops Foster, and Baby DOdds. But the hit of the evening was President Truman himself, who joined the group on the piano to play "Kansas City Kitty" and the "Missouri Waltz."

I Remember Jazz is replete with such amusing and affectionate anecdotes -- vignettes that will delight all fans of the music. Al Rose does indeed remember jazz. And for that we can all be grateful.

Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949), known to millions of fans simply as Leadbelly, was arguably the most famous black singer in American history. His close musical associations included such towering figures as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and John and Alan Lomax. He helped lay the foundations for blues, modern folk music, and rock 'n' roll. This definitive biography draws on a wealth of new archival material, interviews, and previously unknown recordings to detail Leadbelly's proud, tumultuous, and often violent life.

Congratulations on a much needed book on the Big Band era, especially from the viewpoint of the 'side man'. Having been one for about eight years before becoming a 'leader' I can really appreciate your approach. A bandleader is no better than the men behind him and I have had some great ones, including of course Drew Page."" - Freddy Martin Having lived behind the scenes during the Big Band era of the thirties and forties, Page invites us to share that era with him. An instrumentalist or sideman, in many touring bands, he recounts friendships with now-famous as well as unknown musicians who made American dance music. Like them, Drew Page loved his music and the road. He did not want to stay in one place and one job for thirty years, repeating one year or experience thirty times. He wanted to see things, to observe people and places. After a lifetime of traveling and music, ""every town began to seem like home."" Page's life was touched with humor, disappointment, triumph, and some tragedy. "" Perhaps it's the variety of my experiences, none seeming to relate to the others, that has given my life its discontinuity."" Certainly, discontinuity characterized his daily life, but continuity- his music- characterized its essence. Brought together by their art, the traveling bandmembers were apt to encounter each other any place, any time, and so they avoided goodbyes. ""I'll be seeing you.' That's the way I left Harry James and the boys in the band,"" recalls Page. In this well-illustrated autobiography, he tells us what it was like to travel in the days before paved roads, and how the Great Depression, the death of vaudeville, and World War II affected the music business. He gives us anecdotes about the famous musicians he worked with- Harry James, Red Nichols, Freddy Martin among others- and he talks about his fellow sidemen. His narrative unrolls like a scroll inscribed with the names of those who made American dance music and jazz famous. Every music lover, nostalgia seeker, and student of American culture will want to own this book.

The most significant factor in the career of Aaron ""T-Bone"" Walker was his ability to bridge the worlds of blues and jazz. The guitar artistry of this early exponent of urban blues was not only admired by blues musicians like B.B. King, Gatemouth Brown, Albert King, and Albert Collins, and rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but by such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and many others with whom he recorded. Stormy Monday is the first biography of T-Bone Walker to be published. Using dozens of interviews with Walker, as well as with members of his family, close friends, fellow musicians, and business associates, the book offers a remarkable frank insider's account of the life of a blues musician and compulsive gambler, from the wild living and hard drinking on the road to a solid and contented family life at home. ""In a very real sense the modern blues is largely his creation."" blues authority Pete Welding has written about T-Bone Walker. ""The blues was different before he came on the scene, and it hasn't been the same since, and few men can lay claim to that kind of distinction. No one has contributed as much, as long, or as variously to the blues.

Although now sometimes called "America's classical music," jazz has not always been accorde favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious history of jazz's reception in the U. S. Developing out of the African American cultural tradition, jazz has always been variously understood by black and white audiences. This penetrating study of America's attitudes toward jazz focuses on a momentous period in postwar history -- from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Black Power Movement. Exploring the diverse representations of jazz and jazz musicians in literature and popular culture, it connects this uneven reception, and skewed use of jazz with the era's debates about race and racial difference. Its close scrutiny of literature, music criticism, film, and television reveals fundamental contrasts between black and white cultures as they regard jazz. To the detriment of concepts of community and history, white writers focus on the individualism that they perceive in jazz. Black writers emphasize the aspects of musicianship, performance, and improvisation. White approaches to jazz tend to be individualistic and ahistorical, and their depictions of musicians accent the artist's suffering and victimization. Black texts treating similar subject matter stress history, communitarianism, and socio-personal experience. This study shows as well how black and white dissenters such as the Beats and various African-American writers have challenged the mainstreams's definition of this African-American resource. It explores such topics as racial politics in bohemian Greenwich Village, the struggle of the image of Charlie Parker, the cultural construction of jazz performance, and literature imitation of jazz improvisation. As a cultural history with relevance for contemporary discussions of race and representation, The Color of Jazz offers an innovative and compelling perspective on diverse, well-known cultural materials.

Jon Panish is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.

Music of Louisiana was at the heart of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. Most fans know that Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the icons, sprang out of Ferriday, Louisiana, in the middle of delta country and that along with Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley he was one of the very first of these "white boys playing black music." The genre was profoundly influenced by New Orleans, a launch pad for major careers, such as Little Richard's and Fats Domino's.The untold "rest of the story" is the story of swamp pop, a form of Louisiana music more recognized by its practitioners and their hits than by a definition. What is it? What true rock enthusiasts don't know some of its most important artists? Dale and Grace ("I'm leaving It Up to You"), Phil Phillips ("Sea of Love"), Joe Barry ("I'm a Fool to Care"), Cooke and the Cupcakes ("Mathilda"), Jimmy Clanton ("Just a Dream), Johnny Preston ("Runnin' Bear"), Rod Bernard ("This Should Go on Forever"), and Bobby Charles ("Later, Alligator")? There were many others just as important within the region.Drawing on more than fifty interviews with swamp pop musicians in South Louisiana and East Texas, "Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues" finds the roots of this often overlooked, sometimes derided sister genre of the wildly popular Cajun and zydeco music. In this first book to be devoted entirely to swamp pop, Shane K. Bernard uncovers the history of this hybrid form invented in the 1950s by teenage Cajuns and black Creoles.They put aside the fiddle and accordion of their parents' traditional French music to learn the electric guitar and bass, saxophone, upright piano, and modern drumming trap sets of big-city rhythm-and-blues. Their new sound interwove country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues with the exciting elements of their rural Cajun and Creole heritage. In the 1950s and 1960s American juke boxes and music charts were studded with swamp pop favorites.

This comprehensive study of jazz singing is a revelation to anyone who owns at least one jazz recording and a must for the serious jazz enthusiast. Friedwald traces the growth and development of jazz, discusses performers who have never been thought of as jazz singers, and looks at contemporary artists who have incorporated jazz into their music. 16-page insert.

The best biography of any jazz musician that we have. Bird Lives! will stand for a long time as a major source of information and illumination not only of the great musician with whom it deals but of the entire jazz life in this society.--Ralph Gleason Inspired by great affection and dedication, Bird Lives! provides a vivid and accurate picture not only of the saxophonist-composer as artist and human being but of his zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him. Parker was an immensely complex personality; saint and satyr, loving father and footloose vagabond, with a limitless appetite for sex, music, food, pills, heroin, liquor, life. A man of vast influence, the most admired and imitated creator of the mid-1940s bop revolution, he was forced to work in dives, reduced to bumming dollars when he should have been respected as a reigning virtuoso. . . . A sensitive, penetrating portrait.--Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times One of the very few jazz books that deserve to be called literature . . . perhaps the finest writing on jazz to be found anywhere. . . . Those aware of Parker's genius cannot do without this book.--Grover Sales, Saturday Review

From 1975 to 1981 the jazz giant Miles Davis temporarily retired from music. Almost completely reclusive, nobody outside of a very close circle knew what was happening to him. Rumors abounded: he was sick, he was dying, he was healthy; he was playing the trumpet, the organ, nothing at all. Only one jazz writer was able to get close to him during this time: Eric Nisenson. From 1978 to 1981 Nisenson conducted dozens of interviews with Miles Davis and his associates. The result was 'Round About Midnight, an engaging firsthand account of Miles's fascinating and difficult career. From his recordings with Charlie Parker and the Birth of the Cool nonet, through the Coltrane quintet, the Gil Evans-arranged masterpieces of the sixties, the landmark Kind of Blue album, the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams group, and the success of his fusion recordings of the seventies, Miles's personality - contemplative, abruptly defiant, strong, elegant - meshed with his art to form one of the most compelling legends in the history of American music. While actively disdaining his audience, he sought to broaden it by incorporating elements of other musics - classical, flamenco, rock, funk - into his uncompromising jazz. This contradictory combination of contempt and a desire for recognition fueled controversy in both his public and private lives, and resulted in Miles's lengthy self-imposed isolation. Nisenson broke through that isolation, and his biographical portrait is vivid and telling. This updated edition features a new preface, new material covering Miles in the eighties, and a new recommended listening section.

Fifty years after hearing Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) in 1923, Duke Ellington recalled, "I have never forgotten the power and imagination with which he played". The first great jazz soloist, Bechet was a genius of the clarinet and the notoriously difficult soprano saxophone. In a career that spanned five decades and two continents he worked with Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong. Bechet was a giant in early New Orleans jazz and a pioneer of improvisation whose contribution to the music, from the traditional to the avant-garde, has been a vital and lasting one. This biography reveals with insight and precision the man and his music, and illuminates the many events obscured by Bechet's own highly readable but factually suspect autobiography, Treat It Gentle.

Celebrating the Duke offers readers a perceptive, panoramic survey of jazz as revealed, in illuminating detail, through the lives and music of its heroes (and heroines), from its founding fathers to the post-bebop generation, including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Lunceford, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and a rich cache of writings on "America's greatest composer", the Duke himself.

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

One of the twentieth century's greatest composers, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) led a fascinating life. Beyond Category, the first biography to draw on the vast Duke Ellington archives at the Smithsonian Institution, recounts his remarkable career: his childhood in Washington, D.C., and his musical apprenticeship in Harlem his long engagement at the Cotton Club the challenging years of the depression his tours to Europe and into America's deep South, where he helped lower racial barriers the postwar years when television and bebop threatened to eclipse the big bands Ellington's own triumphant comeback at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival his collaborations with Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges, and Ella Fitzgerald as well as five decades of hits and masterpieces that constantly broke new ground.The art of Duke Ellington was a musical expression of the African-American experience, in all its pain, pride, and glory. He composed his music as he composed his life,with flair, passion, and individuality,and no book reveals the man and his artistic evolution more brilliantly than Beyond Category.

Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks, Max Roach, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, and Jack DeJohnette,these are just a few of the jazz musicians whose conversations with Ben Sidran are recorded in this volume. In stimulating, personal, and informative discussions, they not only reveal their personalities, but also detail aspects of the performance, technique, business, history, and emotions of jazz. Newly expanded with previously unpublished dialogues with David Murray, Dr. John, and Mose Allison, Talking Jazz is undoubtedly the best oral history of recent and contemporary jazz.

Notes and Tones is one of the most controversial, honest, and insightful books ever written about jazz. As a black musician himself, Arthur Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs. Notes and Tones consists of twenty-nine no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with the most influential jazz musicians of the '60s and '70s,including:

Eddie Condon (1905-1973) pioneered a kind of jazz popularly known as Chicago-Dixieland, though musicians refer to it simply as Condon style. Played by small ensembles with driving beat, it was and is an informal, exciting music, slightly disjointed and often mischievous. The same could be said of Condon's autobiography, We Called It Music, a book widely celebrated for capturing the camaraderie of early jazz. Condon's wit was as legendary as the music he boosted. Here is Condon on modern jazz: "The boopers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Bix Beiderbecke: "The sound came out like a girl saying yes." On the New York subway: "It was my first ride in a sewer." When his memoir was first published,to great acclaim,in 1947, he was well known as a newspaper columnist, radio personality, saloon keeper, guitarist, and bandleader. He was the ideal man to come up with an insightful portrait of the early days of white jazz, and his book offers nonpareil accounts of many of the jazz greats of that era, including Beiderbacke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby.These were the days when jazz was popularly associated with Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin. Condon considered true jazz an outlaw music and himself an outlaw. He and his cohorts tried to get as close as possible to the black roots of jazz, a scandalous thing in the'20s. Along the way he facilitated one of the first integrated recording sessions. We Called It Music, now published with an introduction by Gary Giddins that places the book in historical context, remains essential reading for anyone interested in the wild and restless beginnings of America's great musical art, or in the wit and vinegar of Eddie Condon.