Blues People

Blues People
Author: Leroi Jones
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-01-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 068818474X
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"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.

Digging

Digging
Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2009-05-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520943090
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For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane—and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados—Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

Whose Blues?

Whose Blues?
Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1469660377
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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.

Beyond the Crossroads

Beyond the Crossroads
Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1469633671
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The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as "the crossroads" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.

Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction

Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction
Author: A. Yemisi Jimoh
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781572331723
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Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Bluespeople Illustrated

Bluespeople Illustrated
Author: Corey Harris
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre:
ISBN:
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Which bluesman once played baseball for the Negro League? Which bluesman was once the sparring partner for the great Joe Louis? Which famous blues woman got her first job as a dancer for the great Ma Rainey? How much do we really know the blues? Welcome to the world of Blues People: Legends of the Blues...a brand new e-book of drawings, biographies and discographies of some of the greatest traditional blues players who ever lived, meticulously drawn and written by world-renowned blues musician and MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient Corey Harris.This book is the first of its kind: an illustrated, in depth biography of the greatest blues players of the 20th century by a practicing African American blues musician. This monumental work includes in-depth biographies and discographies as well as his personal experiences with some of the most influential blues artists of our times.

Urban Blues

Urban Blues
Author: Charles Keil
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 1991
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226429601
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"Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life." -- Amazon.com.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
Author: Kim Michele Richardson
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1492671533
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RECOMMENDED BY DOLLY PARTON IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE! A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A USA TODAY BESTSELLER A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER The bestselling historical fiction novel from Kim Michele Richardson, this is a novel following Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian and her quest to bring books to the Appalachian community she loves, perfect for readers of William Kent Kreuger and Lisa Wingate. The perfect addition to your next book club! The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything—everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter. Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else. Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble. If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she's going to have to confront prejudice as old as the Appalachias and suspicion as deep as the holler. Inspired by the true blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse library service of the 1930s, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman's belief that books can carry us anywhere—even back home. Look for The Book Woman's Daughter, the new novel from Kim Michele Richardson, out now! Other Bestselling Historical Fiction from Sourcebooks Landmark: The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict The Engineer's Wife by Tracey Enerson Wood Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris

Really the Blues

Really the Blues
Author: Mezz Mezzrow
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016-02-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590179455
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Hailed as an “American counter-culture classic,” this “funny” and candid musical memoir offers a delicious glimpse into the 1930s jazz scene (The Wall Street Journal) Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues—the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe—is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”

The Music

The Music
Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: William Morrow
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1987
Genre: Music
ISBN:
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The acclaimed author of Blues People and Black Music returns to the subject of music for the first time in two decades with this collection of essays on the history of jazz and blues, as well as critical comments on today's top performers. Black-and-white photographs.