Dana Gillespie, the award-winning first lady of the Blues has enjoyed an incredible life and career. Now, she has chronicled her exploits, and as anyone who knows Dana would expect, it is intelligent, insightful, outrageous, and funny. Detailing high points, low points and everything in-between, the book covers, amongst many other things, liaisons with David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Keith Moon, and the cream of 1960's rock royalty; Recording with Jimmy Page and Elton John; Performing as Mary Magdalene in the original London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and as the Acid Queen in Tommy; Acting in films directed by Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell and Mai Zetterling; Performing Shakespeare with Sir John Gielgud and Arthur Lowe; Topping the pop charts across Europe; Performing to an audience of one million people in India; And... oh yes... Being British junior waterski champion for 4 years!

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today.