The Blues As Musical Legacy Of African American History

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The Original Blues

Author : Lynn Abbott
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496810031
Total Pages : 866 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis The Original Blues by : Lynn Abbott

Download or read book The Original Blues written by Lynn Abbott and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

Blues Legacy

Author : David Whiteis
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252051742
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Blues Legacy by : David Whiteis

Download or read book Blues Legacy written by David Whiteis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

Blues People

Author : Leroi Jones
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 068818474X
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (881 download)

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Book Synopsis Blues People by : Leroi Jones

Download or read book Blues People written by Leroi Jones and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1999-01-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

The Gospel Sound

Author : Anthony Heilbut
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN 13 : 0879100346
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (791 download)

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Book Synopsis The Gospel Sound by : Anthony Heilbut

Download or read book The Gospel Sound written by Anthony Heilbut and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1985 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spotlights the careers of the gospel singers who have made a distinctive contribution to the world of music

Hidden in the Mix

Author : Diane Pecknold
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822351633
Total Pages : 391 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Hidden in the Mix by : Diane Pecknold

Download or read book Hidden in the Mix written by Diane Pecknold and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

Paris Blues

Author : Andy Fry
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022613895X
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Paris Blues by : Andy Fry

Download or read book Paris Blues written by Andy Fry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-07-04 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene. In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France’s complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Author : Angela Y. Davis
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030757444X
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by : Angela Y. Davis

Download or read book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.

Willie Dixon

Author : Mitsutoshi Inaba
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 0810869934
Total Pages : 503 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Willie Dixon by : Mitsutoshi Inaba

Download or read book Willie Dixon written by Mitsutoshi Inaba and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

A Right to Sing the Blues

Author : Jeffrey Melnick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674040902
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis A Right to Sing the Blues by : Jeffrey Melnick

Download or read book A Right to Sing the Blues written by Jeffrey Melnick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Slave Songs of the United States

Author : William Francis Allen
Publisher : Applewood Books
ISBN 13 : 1557094349
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (57 download)

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Book Synopsis Slave Songs of the United States by : William Francis Allen

Download or read book Slave Songs of the United States written by William Francis Allen and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1867, this book is a collection of songs of African-American slaves. A few of the songs were written after the emancipation, but all were inspired by slavery. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull, daily misery, which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in the life after, to which their eyes seem constantly turned.

Going Through the Storm

Author : Sterling Stuckey
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 019508604X
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis Going Through the Storm by : Sterling Stuckey

Download or read book Going Through the Storm written by Sterling Stuckey and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the conjunction of art and history as demonstrated in dance, music, poetry, and novels.

Country Soul

Author : Charles L. Hughes
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469622440
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Country Soul by : Charles L. Hughes

Download or read book Country Soul written by Charles L. Hughes and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.

Your Legacy

Author : Schele Williams
Publisher : Abrams
ISBN 13 : 1647000726
Total Pages : 40 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Your Legacy by : Schele Williams

Download or read book Your Legacy written by Schele Williams and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proud, empowering introduction to African American history that celebrates and honors enslaved ancestors Your story begins in Africa. Your African ancestors defied the odds and survived 400 years of slavery in America and passed down an extraordinary legacy to you. Beginning in Africa before 1619, Your Legacy presents an unprecedentedly accessible, empowering, and proud introduction to African American history for children. While your ancestors’ freedom was taken from them, their spirit was not; this book celebrates their accomplishments, acknowledges their sacrifices, and defines how they are remembered—and how their stories should be taught.

A City Called Heaven

Author : Robert M. Marovich
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252097084
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis A City Called Heaven by : Robert M. Marovich

Download or read book A City Called Heaven written by Robert M. Marovich and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

Kennedy's Blues

Author : Guido van Rijn
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604731591
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Kennedy's Blues by : Guido van Rijn

Download or read book Kennedy's Blues written by Guido van Rijn and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, and 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.

Escaping the Delta

Author : Elijah Wald
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062018442
Total Pages : 510 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Escaping the Delta by : Elijah Wald

Download or read book Escaping the Delta written by Elijah Wald and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.

King of the Blues

Author : Daniel de Vise
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 0802158072
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis King of the Blues by : Daniel de Vise

Download or read book King of the Blues written by Daniel de Vise and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full and authoritative biography of an American—indeed a world-wide—musical and cultural legend “No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues.”—President Barack Obama “He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced.”—Eric Clapton Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge. King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)—in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color. Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King’s inner circle—family, band members, retainers, managers, and more—and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby “Blue” Bland simply called “the man.”