This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues
and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a
reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come.
Placing blues music within its historical context of the
post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights
era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical
representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls
out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment
constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of
African Americans. Surveying blues music from the 1920s to the
early twenty-first century, Simon’s analyses focus on economic
relations, such as sharecropping, house contract sales, debt
peonage, criminal surety, and convict lease. She demonstrates how
the music reflects this exploitative economic history and how it is
shaped by commodification under racialized capitalism. As Simon
assesses the lyrics, technique, and styles of a wide range of blues
musicians, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill
Broonzy, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Albert Collins, and Kirk
Fletcher, she argues forcefully that the call for racial justice is
at the heart of the blues. A highly sophisticated interpretation of
the blues tradition steeped in musicology, social history, and
critical-cultural hermeneutics, Debt and Redemption not only
clarifies blues as an aesthetic tradition but, more importantly,
proves that it advances a theory of social and economic development
and change.
General
Imprint: |
Pennsylvania State University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
American Music History |
Release date: |
April 2023 |
First published: |
2023 |
Authors: |
Julia Simon
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 25mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
254 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-271-09495-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-271-09495-8 |
Barcode: |
9780271094953 |
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