Author: Neil A. Wynn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628468211
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Book Description
Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.
Cross the Water Blues
Author: Neil A. Wynn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604735473
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604735473
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.
Transatlantic Roots Music
Author: Jill Terry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496834933
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, the contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496834933
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, the contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.
The Folksinger's Guide To The 12-String Guitar As Played by Leadbelly
Author: Julius Lester
Publisher: Oak Publications
ISBN: 1783234288
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
From Introduction: "Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly, died in December, 1949 at the age of 64. He had come out of the deep South, settled down in a little apartment on New York's lower East Side, determined to build a successful career as a musician. Unfortunately, there was not much interest in folk music then. He got occasional jobs singing for schools and colleges, or at little parties where they were raising money for some cause like helping Loyalist Spain. Until the last three years of his life, he had barely recorded more than a few dozen songs. Today, through his recordings, he is world famous as one of the greatest singers of folksongs of this century. Songs he composed, or helped put together out of the fragments of older tunes, or adapted into the form in which we all know them now, have sold in the tens of millions: Good Night Irene, Bring Me A Little Water, Silvy, Midnight Special, Rock Island Line, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (the tune), Old Cotton Fields At Home, and many others. The driving rhythms he developed on his unusual guitar, with its double strings, are unforgettable to anyone who ever heard them. Today, many young people wishing to learn his songs as he sang them, are trying to learn his style of guitar playing. This book is designed to help them, but it cannot be considered a substitute for listening to the recordings of Leadbelly....It must be remembered that more is involved than playing the correct notes and rhythm. When you listen to Leadbelly on record, you are listening to a man with many years of experience play an instrument. To achieve what he achieved is something which cannot be communicated in a book." - Julius Lester
Publisher: Oak Publications
ISBN: 1783234288
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
From Introduction: "Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly, died in December, 1949 at the age of 64. He had come out of the deep South, settled down in a little apartment on New York's lower East Side, determined to build a successful career as a musician. Unfortunately, there was not much interest in folk music then. He got occasional jobs singing for schools and colleges, or at little parties where they were raising money for some cause like helping Loyalist Spain. Until the last three years of his life, he had barely recorded more than a few dozen songs. Today, through his recordings, he is world famous as one of the greatest singers of folksongs of this century. Songs he composed, or helped put together out of the fragments of older tunes, or adapted into the form in which we all know them now, have sold in the tens of millions: Good Night Irene, Bring Me A Little Water, Silvy, Midnight Special, Rock Island Line, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (the tune), Old Cotton Fields At Home, and many others. The driving rhythms he developed on his unusual guitar, with its double strings, are unforgettable to anyone who ever heard them. Today, many young people wishing to learn his songs as he sang them, are trying to learn his style of guitar playing. This book is designed to help them, but it cannot be considered a substitute for listening to the recordings of Leadbelly....It must be remembered that more is involved than playing the correct notes and rhythm. When you listen to Leadbelly on record, you are listening to a man with many years of experience play an instrument. To achieve what he achieved is something which cannot be communicated in a book." - Julius Lester
Blues & Gospel Records, 1890-1943
Author: Robert M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1842
Book Description
Since its first edition, in 1964, Dixon and Godrich's Blues and Gospel Records has been dubbed 'the bible' for collectors of pre-war African-American music. It provides an exhaustive listing of all recordings made up to the end of 1943 in a distinctively African-American musical style,excluding those customarily classed as jazz (which are the subject of separate discographies). The book covers recordings made for the commercial market (whether issued at the time or not) and also recordings made for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song and similar bodies -- about 20,000titles in all, by more than 3,000 artists. For each recording session, full details are given of: artist credit, accompaniment, place and date of recording, titles, issuing company and catalogue numbers, matrix numbers and alternate takes. There are also short accounts of the major 'race labels',which recorded blues and gospel material, and a complete list of field trips to the south by travelling recording units. Howard Rye has joined the original compilers for this thoroughly revised fourth edition. The scope has been enlarged by the addition of about 150 new artists, in addition tonewly discovered recordings by other artists. Early cylinder recordings of gospel music, from the 1890s, are also included for the first time. Previous editions of this work were applauded for their completeness, accuracy, and reliability. This has now been enhanced by the addition of newinformation from record labels and from record company files, and by listening to a wide selection of titles, and detailed cross-checking.
Publisher: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1842
Book Description
Since its first edition, in 1964, Dixon and Godrich's Blues and Gospel Records has been dubbed 'the bible' for collectors of pre-war African-American music. It provides an exhaustive listing of all recordings made up to the end of 1943 in a distinctively African-American musical style,excluding those customarily classed as jazz (which are the subject of separate discographies). The book covers recordings made for the commercial market (whether issued at the time or not) and also recordings made for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song and similar bodies -- about 20,000titles in all, by more than 3,000 artists. For each recording session, full details are given of: artist credit, accompaniment, place and date of recording, titles, issuing company and catalogue numbers, matrix numbers and alternate takes. There are also short accounts of the major 'race labels',which recorded blues and gospel material, and a complete list of field trips to the south by travelling recording units. Howard Rye has joined the original compilers for this thoroughly revised fourth edition. The scope has been enlarged by the addition of about 150 new artists, in addition tonewly discovered recordings by other artists. Early cylinder recordings of gospel music, from the 1890s, are also included for the first time. Previous editions of this work were applauded for their completeness, accuracy, and reliability. This has now been enhanced by the addition of newinformation from record labels and from record company files, and by listening to a wide selection of titles, and detailed cross-checking.
Debt and Redemption in the Blues
Author: Julia Simon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109673X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109673X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
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.
Blues
Author: William Christopher Handy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Crossing Traditions
Author: Babacar M'Baye
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810888289
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
In Crossing Traditions: American Popular Music in Local and Global Contexts, a wide range of scholarly contributions on the local and global significance of American popular music examines the connections between selected American blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop music and their equivalents from Senegal, Nigeria, England, India, and Mexico. Contributors show how American popular music promotes local and global awareness of such key issues as economic inequality and social marginalization while inspiring cross-cultural and interethnic influences among regional and transnational communities. Specifically, Crossing Traditions highlights the impact of American popular music on the spread of sounds, rhythms, styles, and ideas about freedom, justice, love, and sexuality among local and global communities, all of which share the same desires, hopes, and concerns despite geographic differences. Contributors look at the local contexts of Chicago blues, early rock and roll, white Christian rap, and Frank Zappa alongside the global influence of Mahalia Jackson on Senegalese blues, the transatlantic character of the British Invasion’s relationship to African American rock, and the impact of Latin house music, global hip-hop, and Bhangra in cross-cultural settings. Essays also draw on a broad range of disciplines in their analyses: American studies, popular culture studies, transnational studies, history, musicology, ethnic studies, literature and media studies, and critical theory. Crossing Traditions will appeal to a wide range of readers, including college and university professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and music scholars in general.
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810888289
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
In Crossing Traditions: American Popular Music in Local and Global Contexts, a wide range of scholarly contributions on the local and global significance of American popular music examines the connections between selected American blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop music and their equivalents from Senegal, Nigeria, England, India, and Mexico. Contributors show how American popular music promotes local and global awareness of such key issues as economic inequality and social marginalization while inspiring cross-cultural and interethnic influences among regional and transnational communities. Specifically, Crossing Traditions highlights the impact of American popular music on the spread of sounds, rhythms, styles, and ideas about freedom, justice, love, and sexuality among local and global communities, all of which share the same desires, hopes, and concerns despite geographic differences. Contributors look at the local contexts of Chicago blues, early rock and roll, white Christian rap, and Frank Zappa alongside the global influence of Mahalia Jackson on Senegalese blues, the transatlantic character of the British Invasion’s relationship to African American rock, and the impact of Latin house music, global hip-hop, and Bhangra in cross-cultural settings. Essays also draw on a broad range of disciplines in their analyses: American studies, popular culture studies, transnational studies, history, musicology, ethnic studies, literature and media studies, and critical theory. Crossing Traditions will appeal to a wide range of readers, including college and university professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and music scholars in general.
Blues Lyric Poetry
Author: Michael Taft
Publisher: Scholarly Title
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
Publisher: Scholarly Title
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
Backwater Blues
Author: Richard M. Mizelle Jr.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452943974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, reshaping the social and cultural landscape as well as the physical environment. Often remembered as an event that altered flood control policy and elevated the stature of powerful politicians, Richard M. Mizelle Jr. examines the place of the flood within African American cultural memory and the profound ways it influenced migration patterns in the United States. In Backwater Blues, Mizelle analyzes the disaster through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and labor. The book’s title comes from Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” perhaps the best-known song about the flood. Mizelle notes that the devastation produced the richest groundswell of blues recordings following any environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, with more than fifty songs by countless singers evoking the disruptive force of the flood and the precariousness of the levees originally constructed to protect citizens. Backwater Blues reveals larger relationships between social and environmental history. According to Mizelle, musicians, Harlem Renaissance artists, fraternal organizations, and Creole migrants all shared a sense of vulnerability in the face of both the Mississippi River and a white supremacist society. As a result, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was not just an environmental crisis but a racial event. Challenging long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency, Mizelle offers insights into the broader dynamics of human interactions with nature as well as ways in which nature is mediated through the social and political dynamics of race.Includes discography.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452943974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, reshaping the social and cultural landscape as well as the physical environment. Often remembered as an event that altered flood control policy and elevated the stature of powerful politicians, Richard M. Mizelle Jr. examines the place of the flood within African American cultural memory and the profound ways it influenced migration patterns in the United States. In Backwater Blues, Mizelle analyzes the disaster through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and labor. The book’s title comes from Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” perhaps the best-known song about the flood. Mizelle notes that the devastation produced the richest groundswell of blues recordings following any environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, with more than fifty songs by countless singers evoking the disruptive force of the flood and the precariousness of the levees originally constructed to protect citizens. Backwater Blues reveals larger relationships between social and environmental history. According to Mizelle, musicians, Harlem Renaissance artists, fraternal organizations, and Creole migrants all shared a sense of vulnerability in the face of both the Mississippi River and a white supremacist society. As a result, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was not just an environmental crisis but a racial event. Challenging long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency, Mizelle offers insights into the broader dynamics of human interactions with nature as well as ways in which nature is mediated through the social and political dynamics of race.Includes discography.
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day
Author: Luigi Monge
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496841794
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. Featuring newly transcribed lyrics, the book offers sustained attention to how both Black and white communities responded to many of the tragic events that occurred before the mid-1950s. Through detailed textual analysis, Luigi Monge explores songs on natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes); accidental disasters (sinkings, fires, train wrecks, explosions, and air disasters); and infestations, epidemics, and diseases (the boll weevil, the jake leg, and influenza). Analyzed songs cover some of the most well-known disasters of the time period from the sinking of the Titanic and the 1930 drought to the Hindenburg accident, and more. Thirty previously unreleased African American disaster songs appear in this volume for the first time, revealing their pertinence to the relevant disasters. By comparing the song lyrics to critical moments in history, Monge is able to explore how deeply and directly these catastrophes affected Black communities; how African Americans in general, and blues and gospel singers in particular, faced and reacted to disaster; whether these collective tragedies prompted different reactions among white people and, if so, why; and more broadly, how the role of memory in recounting and commenting on historical and cultural facts shaped African American society from 1879 to 1955.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496841794
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. Featuring newly transcribed lyrics, the book offers sustained attention to how both Black and white communities responded to many of the tragic events that occurred before the mid-1950s. Through detailed textual analysis, Luigi Monge explores songs on natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes); accidental disasters (sinkings, fires, train wrecks, explosions, and air disasters); and infestations, epidemics, and diseases (the boll weevil, the jake leg, and influenza). Analyzed songs cover some of the most well-known disasters of the time period from the sinking of the Titanic and the 1930 drought to the Hindenburg accident, and more. Thirty previously unreleased African American disaster songs appear in this volume for the first time, revealing their pertinence to the relevant disasters. By comparing the song lyrics to critical moments in history, Monge is able to explore how deeply and directly these catastrophes affected Black communities; how African Americans in general, and blues and gospel singers in particular, faced and reacted to disaster; whether these collective tragedies prompted different reactions among white people and, if so, why; and more broadly, how the role of memory in recounting and commenting on historical and cultural facts shaped African American society from 1879 to 1955.