Moanin' at Midnight

Moanin' at Midnight PDF Author: James Segrest
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307831019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
Howlin’ Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires. Born Chester Burnett in 1910, the Wolf survived a grim childhood and hardscrabble youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi. He began his career playing and singing with the first Delta blues stars for two decades in perilous juke joints. He was present at the birth of rock ’n’ roll in Memphis, where Sam Phillips–who also discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis–called Wolf his “greatest discovery.” He helped develop the sound of electric blues and vied with rival Muddy Waters for the title of king of Chicago blues. He ended his career performing and recording with the world’s most famous rock stars. His passion for music kept him performing–despite devastating physical problems–right up to his death in 1976. There’s never been a comprehensive biography of the Wolf until now. Moanin’ at Midnight is full of startling information about his mysterious early years, surprising and entertaining stories about his decades at the top, and never-before-seen photographs. It strips away all the myths to reveal–at long last–the real-life triumphs and tragedies of this blues titan.

Moanin' at Midnight

Moanin' at Midnight PDF Author: James Segrest
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307831019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 585

Get Book

Book Description
Howlin’ Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires. Born Chester Burnett in 1910, the Wolf survived a grim childhood and hardscrabble youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi. He began his career playing and singing with the first Delta blues stars for two decades in perilous juke joints. He was present at the birth of rock ’n’ roll in Memphis, where Sam Phillips–who also discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis–called Wolf his “greatest discovery.” He helped develop the sound of electric blues and vied with rival Muddy Waters for the title of king of Chicago blues. He ended his career performing and recording with the world’s most famous rock stars. His passion for music kept him performing–despite devastating physical problems–right up to his death in 1976. There’s never been a comprehensive biography of the Wolf until now. Moanin’ at Midnight is full of startling information about his mysterious early years, surprising and entertaining stories about his decades at the top, and never-before-seen photographs. It strips away all the myths to reveal–at long last–the real-life triumphs and tragedies of this blues titan.

Lightnin' Hopkins

Lightnin' Hopkins PDF Author: Alan Govenar
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569766207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Based on scores of interviews with the artist's relatives, friends, lovers, producers, accompanists, managers, and fans, this brilliant biography reveals a man of many layers and contradictions. Following the journey of a musician who left his family's poor cotton farm at age eight carrying only a guitar, the book chronicles his life on the open road playing blues music and doing odd jobs. It debunks the myths surrounding his meetings with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, his time on a chain gang, his relationships with women, and his lifelong appetite for gambling and drinking. This volume also discusses his hard-to-read personality; whether playing for black audiences in Houston's Third Ward, for white crowds at the Matrix in San Francisco, or in the concert halls of Europe, Sam Hopkins was a musician who poured out his feelings in his songs and knew how to endear himself to his audience--yet it was hard to tell if he was truly sincere, and he appeared to trust no one. Finally, this book moves beyond exploring his personal life and details his entire musical career, from his first recording session in 1946--when he was dubbed Lightnin'--to his appearance on the national charts and his rediscovery by Mack McCormick and Sam Charters in 1959, when his popularity had begun to wane and a second career emerged, playing to white audiences rather than black ones. Overall, this narrative tells the story of an important blues musician who became immensely successful by singing with a searing emotive power about his country roots and the injustices that informed the civil rights era.

Boogie Man

Boogie Man PDF Author: Charles Shaar Murray
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466852364
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Acclaimed writer Charles Shaar Murray's Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of an extraordinary musician. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and he lets the man from Clarksdale, Mississippi, tell his own story. "Everything you read on album covers is not true, and every album reads different," he told Murray. Murray helps Hooker set the record straight, disentangling the myths and legends from truths so rock-ribbed that we understand, as if for the first time, why they have provided the source for a lifetime of unforgettable sound. Murray weaves together Hooker's life and music to reveal their indissoluble bonds. Yet Boogie Man is far more than merely an accomplished and brilliant biography of one man; it gives an account of an entire art form. Grounded in a time and place in American culture, the blues are universal, and in the hands of the greatest practitioners its power resides in the miracle of using despair to transcend it. "The preacher's mantle," Murray tells us, "passes to the bluesman." This bluesman traveled a hard road out of the American South, from obscurity to adulation and back-and back again. John Lee Hooker has seen it all and sung it all, and his music is both a living legacy and an American treasure. Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.

Blues with a Feeling

Blues with a Feeling PDF Author: Tony Glover
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135353832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Whenever you hear the prevalent wailing blues harmonica in commercials, film soundtracks or at a blues club, you are experiencing the legacy of the master harmonica player, Little Walter. Immensely popular in his lifetime, Little Walter had fourteen Top 10 hits on the R&B charts, and he was also the first Chicago blues musician to play at the Apollo. Ray Charles and B.B. King, great blues artists in their own right, were honored to sit in with his band. However, at the age of 37, he lay in a pauper's grave in Chicago. This book will tell the story of a man whose music, life and struggles continue to resonate to this day.

Lost Highway

Lost Highway PDF Author: Peter Guralnick
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316206741
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.

Big Boss Man

Big Boss Man PDF Author: Will Romano
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879308780
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Alcoholic. Epileptic. Technically challenged. Described as all this and worse, Jimmy Reed nevertheless overcame these roadblocks to become perhaps the most successful R&B/pop crossover artist of the '50s. In "Big Boss Man," musicians, family members, and those whose lives Reed touched offer revealing and heart-wrenching insights into this now-revered bluesman. Although Reed's alcoholism was no secret, its effect on his musicianship is less understood -- this and more is explored in this comprehensive biography of a classic bluesman.

Can't Be Satisfied

Can't Be Satisfied PDF Author: Robert Gordon
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 0857868705
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Can't Be Satisfied is that rare thing in musical biographies: a book that maps out not just a single, extraordinary life but the cultural forces that shaped it' Sean O'Hagan, Observer Muddy Waters was the greatest blues musician ever, and the most influential. He invented electric blues, inspired the Rolling Stones and created the template for the rock 'n' roll band and its wild lifestyle. Robert Gordon's definitive biography vividly chronicles the extraordinary life and personality of the musical legend who changed the course of modern popular music.

The Unknown Kerouac

The Unknown Kerouac PDF Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598534998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style. This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success—a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac’s French Canadian childhood. Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations. Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.

I Am the Blues

I Am the Blues PDF Author: Willie Dixon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Blues (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll

Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll PDF Author: Peter Guralnick
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316341843
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
From the author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography: Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.