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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.
The philosophy of the blues From B.B. King to Billie Holiday, Blues music not only sounds good, but has an almost universal appeal in its reflection of the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Its ability to powerfully touch on a range of social and emotional issues is philosophically inspiring, and here, a diverse range of thinkers and musicians offer illuminating essays that make important connections between the human condition and the Blues that will appeal to music lovers and philosophers alike.
Discusses the development of Tucson, Arizona, and its impact on local environment, describes the beauty and fragility of the Catalina Mountains, and argues that they must be protected
Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall is an historical, cultural, and analytical study of the album by the same name. Recorded in 1957, but lost until 2005, it is a particularly interesting lens through which to view jazz both as a historical tradition and as a contemporary cultural form.
Even with just forty-one recordings to his credit, Robert Johnson (1911-38) is a towering figure in the history of the blues. His vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, still encourage the speculation and myth that have long obscured the facts about his life. The most famous legend depicts a young Johnson meeting the Devil at a dusty Mississippi crossroads at midnight and selling his soul in exchange for prodigious guitar skills. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch examine the full range of writings about Johnson and weigh the conflicting accounts of Johnson's life story against interviews with blues musicians and others who knew the man. Their extensive research uncovers a life every bit as compelling as the fabrications and exaggerations that have sprung up around it. In examining the bluesman's life and music, and the ways in which both have been reinvented and interpreted by other artists, critics, and fans, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found charts the cultural forces that have mediated the expression of African American artistic traditions.
Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.
This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era.
How does popular music produce its subject? How does it produce us as subjects? More specifically, how does it do this through voice--through "giving voice"? And how should we understand this subject--"the people"--that it voices into existence? Is it singular or plural? What is its history and what is its future? Voicing the Popular draws on approaches from musical interpretation, cultural history, social theory and psychoanalysis to explore key topics in the field, including race, gender, authenticity and repetition. Taking most of his examples from across the past hundred years of popular music development--but relating them to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "pre-history"--Richard Middleton constructs an argument that relates "the popular" to the unfolding of modernity itself. Voicing the Popular renews the case for ambitious theory in musical and cultural studies, and, against the grain of much contemporary thought, insists on the progressive potential of a politics of the Low.
This book seeks to trace the rise of popular music, identify its key figures and track the origins and development of its multiple genres and styles, all the while seeking to establish historical context. It is, fundamentally, a ready reference guide to the broad field of popular music over the past two centuries. It has become a truism that popular music, so pervasive in the modern world, constitutes a soundtrack to our lives – a constant though changing presence as we cross thresholds and grow from children to teenagers to adults. But it has become more than a soundtrack; it has become a narrative. Not just an accompaniment to our daily lives but incorporating our lives, our sense of identity, our lived experiences, into it. We have become part of the music just as the music has become part of us. The Historical Dictionary of Popular Music contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on major figures across genres, definitions of genres, technical innovations and surveys of countries and regions. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about popular music.
This book is great for keyboardists who have learned the basics of jazz harmony and improvisation. Topics include a brief review of concepts and skills from Beginning Jazz Keyboard, and continue with the modes of the major scale, chord extensions, making the changes, using chromatic tones and guide tones, chord substitution, ""rhythm changes,"" the blues, altered dominant chords and more. Continuing the format of Beginning Jazz Keyboard, new concepts are reinforced by etudes and songs for practice. Packed with hundreds of harmony and improvisation ideas, this book is essential for any serious student of jazz keyboard.