Author: David Grazian
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226305899
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer. For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest. From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.
Author: David Whiteis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Through revealing portraits of selected local artists and slice-of-life vignettes drawn from the city's pubs and lounges, Chicago Blues encapsulates the sound and spirit of the blues as it is lived today. As a committed participant in the Chicago blues scene for more than a quarter century, David Whiteis draws on years of his observations and extensive interviews to paint a full picture of the Chicago blues world, both on and off the stage. In addition to portraits of blues artists he has personally known and worked with, Whiteis takes readers on a tour of venues like East of Ryan and the Starlight Lounge; home to artists such as Jumpin' Willie Cobbs, Willie D., and Harmonica Khan. He tells the stories behind the lives of past pioneers including Junior Wells, pianist Sunnyland Slim, and harpist Big Walter Horton, whose music reflects the universal concerns with love, loss, and yearning that continue to keep the blues so vital for so many.
Author: Karen Hanson
Publisher: Lake Claremont Press
ISBN: 9781893121195
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Profiles dozens of Chicago's blues musicians; discusses the city's blues history; and offers tips on clubs, radio stations, record labels, grave sites, and places of interest to blues fans.
Author: David Whiteis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051742
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.
Author: Alan Harper
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098285
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British blues fan Alan Harper became a transatlantic pilgrim to Chicago. "I've come here to listen to the blues," he told an American customs agent at the airport, and listen he did, to the music in its many styles, and to the men and women who lived it in the city's changing blues scene. Harper's eloquent memoir conjures the smoky redoubts of men like harmonica virtuoso Big Walter Horton and pianist Sunnyland Slim. Venturing from stageside to kitchen tables to the shotgun seat of a 1973 Eldorado, Harper listens to performers and others recollect memories of triumphs earned and chances forever lost, of deep wells of pain and soaring flights of inspiration. Harper also chronicles a time of change, as an up-tempo, whites-friendly blues eclipsed what had come before, and old Southern-born black players held court one last time before an all-conquering generation of young guitar aces took center stage.
Author: Raeburn Flerlage
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Flerlage is one of the most recognized names in photography, and his photos of the Chicago Blues scene in the 1960s and 1970s have become legendary among Blues fans and aficionados. Here, for the first time, are Raeburn's best photos of America's greatest blues artists at the pinnalcles of their careers, reporudced in a beautiful format. From Howlin' Wolf performing at the legendary Pepper's lounge to Otis Spann and James Cotton playing Muddy Waters' basement, these pictures bring to life one of the most incredible periods in American musical history.
Author: Julie Reece Deaver
Publisher: HarperTeen
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Lissa, a seventeen-year-old art sudent living on her own in Chicago, must raise her eleven-year-old sister when their alcoholic mother becomes incapable of caring for her.
Author: Billy Boy Arnold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680920X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
"Billy Boy Arnold, born in 1935, is one of the few native Chicagoans who both cultivated a career in the blues and stayed in Chicago. His perspective on Chicago's music, people, and places is rare and valuable. Arnold has worked with generations of musicians-from Tampa Red and Howlin' Wolf and to Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield-on countless recordings, witnessing the decline of country blues, the dawn of electric blues, the onset of blues-inspired rock, and more. Here, with writer Kim Field, he gets it all down on paper-including the story of how he named Bo Diddley Bo Diddley"--
Author: Marc PoKempner
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN: 9783791323008
Category : African American musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The booming industries of Chicago acted as a magnet for rural migrants from the Delta region of North Western Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. The often painful adjustments made by these new arrivals in the 'Windy City' led to the rise of a new musical form, an electrified urban version of the blues that was soon ringing out from the bars and clubs of the city's South Side. The impact that this music was to have on the development of popular music in the 20th century is impossible to overstate -- although its originators were often not the ones to pocket the profits. Blues lyrics -- concise, earthy, humorous, or downright dirty -- encapsulated the urban experience as no music had done before.
Author: Steve Cushing
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252033019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. The book focuses in particular on pre–World War II blues singers, performers active in 1950s Chicago, and nonperformers who contributed to the early blues world. Interviewees include Alberta Hunter, one of the earliest African American singers to transition from Chicago's Bronzeville nightlife to the international spotlight, and Ralph Bass, one of the greatest R&B producers of his era. Blues expert, writer, record producer, and cofounder of Living Blues Magazine Jim O'Neal provides the book's foreword.
