Author: Paige A. McGinley
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376318
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as "actresses" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.
Author: Paige A. McGinley
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822357452
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as "actresses" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.
Author: Lynn Abbott
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810031
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 866
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Book Description
Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.
Author: Bobby Rush
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0306874792
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush. This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas, donning a fake mustache to trick club owners into thinking he was old enough to gain entry. He led his first band in Arkansas between Little Rock and Pine Bluff in the 1950s. It was there he first had Elmore James play in his band. Rush later relocated to Chicago to pursue his musical career and started to work with Earl Hooker, Luther Allison, and Freddie King, and sat in with many of his musical heroes, such as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter. Rush eventually began leading his own band in the 1960s, crafting his own distinct style of funky blues, and recording a succession of singles for various labels. It wasn't until the early 1970s that Rush finally scored a hit with "Chicken Heads." More recordings followed, including an album which went on to be listed in the Top 10 blues albums of the 1970s by Rolling Stone and a handful of regional jukebox favorites including "Sue" and "I Ain't Studdin' Ya." And Rush's career shows no signs of slowing down now. The man once beloved for performing in local jukejoints is now headlining major music/blues festivals, clubs, and theaters across the U.S. and as far as Japan and Australia. At age eighty-six, he is still on the road for over 200 days a year. His lifelong hectic tour schedule has earned him the affectionate title "King of the Chitlin' Circuit," from Rolling Stone. In 2007, he earned the distinction of being the first blues artist to play at the Great Wall of China. His renowned stage act features his famed shake dancers, who personify his funky blues and his ribald sense of humor. He was featured in Martin Scorcese's The Blues docuseries on PBS, a documentary film called Take Me to the River, performed with Dan Aykroyd on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and most recently had a cameo in the Golden Globe nominated Netflix film, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. He was recently given the highest Blues Music Award honor of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year. His songs have also been featured in TV shows and films including HBO's Ballers and major motion pictures like Black Snake Moan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Considered by many to be the greatest bluesman currently performing, this book will give readers unparalleled access into the man, the myth, the legend: Bobby Rush.
Author: Charles Bevel
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573627996
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 62
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Book Description
This sizzling revue of the blues and blues infused songs that changed the way the world hears the human heartbeat took New York by storm. Ravishing songs trace the evolution of the blues from Africa to Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago.
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Publisher: Live Oak Media (NY)
ISBN: 9781595194336
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
A blues poem that revisits the history of the African American experience.
Author: Jim Snidero
Publisher: Alfred Music
ISBN: 9783954810512
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
The Essence of the Blues by Jim Snidero provides beginners and moderately advanced musicians with an introduction to the language of the blues. In 10 etudes focusing on various types of the blues, the musician learns to master the essential basics step by step. Each piece comes with an in-depth analysis of blues styles and music theory, appropriate scale exercises, tips for studying and practicing, suggestions for improvising, recommended listening, and specific techniques used by some of the all-time best jazz/blues musicians, including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, B.B. King, Stanley Turrentine, and others. The accompanying play-along CD features world famous New York recording artists including Eric Alexander, Jeremy Pelt, Jim Snidero, Steve Davis, Mike LeDonne, Peter Washington, and others. Recorded at a world-class studio, these play alongs are deeply authentic, giving the musician a real-life playing experience to learn and enjoy the blues.
Author: Buzzy Jackson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393059367
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Traces the artistic heritage of numerous women blues singers, from Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday to Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, exploring the messages within their songs and images while discussing their contributions to music and American history. 15,000 first printing.
Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307948501
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
44 SCOTLAND STREET - Book 7 The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy—just ask his mother. If you haven’t met the residents of 44 Scotland Street yet, there is no better time, since everyone seems to be in the midst of new beginnings. New parents Matthew and Elspeth must muddle through the difficulties of raising their triplets Rognvald, Tobermory and Fegus—there's normal sleep deprivation, and then there's trying to tell the children apart from one another. Angus and Domenica are newly engaged, and now they must negotiate the complex merger of two households. Domenica is also forced to deal with the return of an old flame, while Big Lou has begun the search for a new one, boldly exploring the new world of online dating and coming up with an Elvis impersonator on the first try. And in Bertie’s family, there's a shift in power as his father Stuart starts to stand up to overbearing mother, Irene—and then there’s Bertie, who has been thinking that he might want to start over with a new family and so puts himself up for adoption on eBay. With his signature charm and gentle wit Alexander McCall Smith vividly portrays the lives of Edinburgh’s most unique and beloved characters.
Author: Daphne Duval Harrison
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813512808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Some singers included in this book are Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson, and Alberta Hunter.
