Author: Jack Hamilton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674416597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Get Book Here
Book Description
By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become “white”? Just around Midnight reveals the interplay of popular music and racial thought that was responsible for this shift within the music industry and in the minds of fans. Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by black musicians, 1950s rock and roll was racially inclusive and attracted listeners and performers across the color line. In the 1960s, however, rock and roll gave way to rock: a new musical ideal regarded as more serious, more artistic—and the province of white musicians. Decoding the racial discourses that have distorted standard histories of rock music, Jack Hamilton underscores how ideas of “authenticity” have blinded us to rock’s inextricably interracial artistic enterprise. According to the standard storyline, the authentic white musician was guided by an individual creative vision, whereas black musicians were deemed authentic only when they stayed true to black tradition. Serious rock became white because only white musicians could be original without being accused of betraying their race. Juxtaposing Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, and many others, Hamilton challenges the racial categories that oversimplified the sixties revolution and provides a deeper appreciation of the twists and turns that kept the music alive.
Author: William Daniel White
Publisher: White Holdings LLC
ISBN: 9781607258278
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Get Book Here
Book Description
"February 3, 1959: At 1 AM, a Cadillac is stolen in Clear Lake, Iowa. Unknown to the thief, a set of tapes lie hidden in the trunk. Five days later in Southern California, a drag race will decide the fate of Buddy Holly's final recording. Will the music live or die? This story begins the day the music died. It's like riding shotgun in a 1950's whodunit. You can smell the fuel burning, quench your thirst with an ice cold Coca-Cola and feel the raw power of classic Detroit muscle screaming from the pages. The Last Rock and Roll Show flawlessly blends the details of the fateful night we lost some of rock's true pioneers with an original tale of teenage dreams gone wrong. The Last Rock and Roll Show is the kind of historical fiction music fans live for. "--Publisher.
Author: Glenn C. Altschuler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198031912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone. Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.
Author: Stephen Duncombe
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1844676889
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the Clash to Los Crudos, skinheads to afro-punks, the punk rock movement has been obsessed by race. And yet the connections have never been traced in a comprehensive way. White Riot is the definitive study of the subject, collecting first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history from across the globe. This book brings together writing from leading critics such as Greil Marcus and Dick Hebdige, personal reflections from punk pioneers such as Jimmy Pursey, Darryl Jenifer and Mimi Nguyen, and reports on punk scenes from Toronto to Jakarta.
Author: Michael T. Bertrand
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252025860
Category : Music and race
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Race, Rock, and Elvis, Michael T. Bertrand contends that popular music, specifically Elvis Presley's brand of rock 'n' roll, helped revise racial attitudes after World War II. Observing that youthful fans of rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, and other black-inspired music seemed more inclined than their segregationist elders to ignore the color line, Bertrand links popular music with a more general relaxation, led by white youths, of the historical denigration of blacks in the South. The tradition of southern racism, successfully communicated to previous generations, failed for the first time when confronted with the demand for rock 'n' roll by a new, national, commercialized youth culture. In a narrative peppered with the colorful observations of ordinary southerners, Bertrand argues that appreciating black music made possible a new recognition of blacks as fellow human beings. Bertrand documents black enthusiasm for Elvis Presley and cites the racially mixed audiences that flocked to the new music at a time when adults expected separate performances for black audiences and white. He describes the critical role of radio and recordings in blurring the color line and notes that these media made black culture available to appreciative whites on an unprecedented scale. He also shows how music was used to define and express the values of a southern working-class youth culture in transition, as young whites, many of them trying to orient themselves in an unfamiliar urban setting, embraced black music and culture as a means of identifying themselves. By adding rock 'n' roll to the mix of factors that fed into civil rights advances in the South, Race, Rock, and Elvis shows how the music,with its rituals and vehicles, symbolized the vast potential for racial accord inherent in postwar society.
Author: Anthony ed DeCurtis
Publisher:
ISBN: 0679737286
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 722
Get Book Here
Book Description
Discusses the evolution of rock music from its earliest origins to today's most influential musical styles and performers
Author: Maureen Mahon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333173
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Get Book Here
Book Description
The original architects of rock 'n roll were black musicians, but by the 1980s, rock music produced by African Americans was no longer "authentically black." Mahon offers an in-depth account of how, since 1985, members of the Black Rock Coalition have broadened understandings of black identity and culture through rock music.
Author: David Kirby
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826429653
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
Looks at the life and career of the rock and roll legend.
Author: Jim O'Connor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0451533828
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129
Get Book Here
Book Description
Put on your dancing shoes and move to the music. Rock and roll sprang from a combination of African-American genres, Western swing, and country music that exploded in post World War II America. Jim O'Connor explains what constitutes rock music, follows its history and sub-genres through famous musicians and groups, and shows how rock became so much more than just a style of music influencing fashion, language, and lifestyle. This entry in the New York Times best-selling series contains eighty illustrations and sixteen pages of black and white photographs.
Author: Patrick Burke
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676821X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Rock and roll's most iconic, not to mention wealthy, pioneers are overwhelmingly white, despite their great indebtedness to black musical innovators. Many of these pioneers were insensitive at best and exploitative at worst when it came to the black art that inspired them. Tear Down the Walls is about a different cadre of white rock musicians and activists, those who tried to tear down walls separating musical genres and racial identities during the late 1960s. Their attempts were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine engagement with African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. Burke considers this question by recounting five dramatic incidents that took place between August 1968 and August 1969, including Jefferson Airplane's performance with Grace Slick in blackface on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Jean-Luc Godard's 1968 film, Sympathy for the Devil, featuring the Rolling Stones and Black Power rhetoric, and the White Panther Party at Woodstock. Each story sheds light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock-white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. These radical white rock musicians believed that performing and adapting black music could contribute to what in the Black Lives Matter era is sometimes called "white allyship." This book explores their efforts and asks what lessons can be learned from them. As white musicians and activists today still attempt to find ethical, respectful approaches to racial politics, the challenges and victories of the 1960s can provide both inspiration and a sense of perspective"--
