Mister Satan's Apprentice

Mister Satan's Apprentice PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452915059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Adam Gussow is a writer and blues harmonica player. He is associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Mister Satan's Apprentice

Mister Satan's Apprentice PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452915059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Adam Gussow is a writer and blues harmonica player. He is associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Mister Satan's Apprentice

Mister Satan's Apprentice PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816667758
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Adam Gussow is a writer and blues harmonica player. He is associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Beyond the Crossroads

Beyond the Crossroads PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633671
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
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.

Journeyman's Road

Journeyman's Road PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572335691
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee, and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition. At the heart of Gussow's story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling Mr. Satan Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities--black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship--but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds. Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York's mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman's Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues.

Seems Like Murder Here

Seems Like Murder Here PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226311007
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture PDF Author: M. Thomas Inge
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469616645
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture

Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture PDF Author: Patricia R. Schroeder
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252029158
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Suddenly Robert Johnson is everywhere. Though the Mississippi bluesman died young and recorded only twenty-nine songs, the legacy, legend, and lore surrounding him continue to grow. Focusing on these developments, Patricia R. Schroeder's Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture breaks new ground in Johnson scholarship, going beyond simple or speculative biography to explore him in his larger role as a contemporary cultural icon. Part literary analysis, part cultural criticism, and part biographical study, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture shows the Robert Johnson of today to be less a two-dimensional character fixed by the few known facts of his life than a dynamic and contested set of ideas. Represented in novels, in plays, and even on a postage stamp, he provides inspiration for "highbrow" cultural artifacts--such as poems--as well as Hollywood movies and T-shirts. Schroeder's detailed and scholarly analysis directly engages key images and stories about Johnson (such as the Faustian crossroads exchange of his soul for guitar virtuosity), navigating the many competing interpretations that swirl around him to reveal the cultural purposes these stories and their tellers serve. Unprecedented in both range and depth, Schroeder's work is a fascinating examination of the relationships among Johnson's life, its subsequent portrayals, and the cultural forces that drove these representations. With penetrating insights into both Johnson and the society that perpetuates him, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is essential reading for cultural critics and blues fans alike.

Whose Blues?

Whose Blues? PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660377
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
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.

African American Folklore

African American Folklore PDF Author: Anand Prahlad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
African American folklore dates back 240 years and has had a significant impact on American culture from the slavery period to the modern day. This encyclopedia provides accessible entries on key elements of this long history, including folklore originally derived from African cultures that have survived here and those that originated in the United States. Inspired by the author's passion for African American culture and vernacular traditions, African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students thoroughly addresses key elements and motifs in black American folklore-especially those that have influenced American culture. With its alphabetically organized entries that cover a wide range of subjects from the word "conjure" to the dance style of "twerking," this book provides readers with a deeper comprehension of American culture through a greater understanding of the contributions of African American culture and black folk traditions. This book will be useful to general readers as well as students or researchers whose interests include African American culture and folklore or American culture. It offers insight into the histories of African American folklore motifs, their importance within African American groups, and their relevance to the evolution of American culture. The work also provides original materials, such as excepts from folktales and folksongs, and a comprehensive compilation of sources for further research that includes bibliographical citations as well as lists of websites and cultural centers.

New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement PDF Author: Lisa Gail Collins
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541077
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture—which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement—has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.