Black Popular Music in America

Black Popular Music in America PDF Author: Arnold Shaw
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
As Shaw correctly states, no single volume covers the history of black popular music in its entirety, and most studies have focused on the white mainstream. American pop music is in fact a blend of black and white musical influences that can be better understood if explored from a black perspective. Shaw examines five key black stylesminstrelsy, spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and bluesanalyzing the origins and developments of each, profiling important artists and songs, and exploring the "white synthesis." Often the "synthesis" has amounted to little more than a soulless white imitation of inspired black stylistic innovations.

Black Popular Music in America

Black Popular Music in America PDF Author: Arnold Shaw
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
As Shaw correctly states, no single volume covers the history of black popular music in its entirety, and most studies have focused on the white mainstream. American pop music is in fact a blend of black and white musical influences that can be better understood if explored from a black perspective. Shaw examines five key black stylesminstrelsy, spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and bluesanalyzing the origins and developments of each, profiling important artists and songs, and exploring the "white synthesis." Often the "synthesis" has amounted to little more than a soulless white imitation of inspired black stylistic innovations.

The Black and White of American Popular Music

The Black and White of American Popular Music PDF Author: Vera Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book probes the interplay of black and white popular music, from the minstrel period to bebop, examining connections relations between the races in a wide variety of fields, such as musical comedy, radio, recording, songwriting, performance, industry, etc.

Stomp and Swerve

Stomp and Swerve PDF Author: David Wondrich
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569764972
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The early decades of American popular music--Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Caruso--are, for most listeners, the dark ages. It wasn't until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this music--black and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crude--made it onto records for all to hear. This book brings a forgotten music, hot music, to life by describing how it became the dominant American music--how it outlasted sentimental waltzes and parlor ballads, symphonic marches and Tin Pan Alley novelty numbers--and how it became rock 'n' roll. It reveals that the young men and women of that bygone era had the same musical instincts as their descendants Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and even Ozzy Osbourne. In minstrelsy, ragtime, brass bands, early jazz and blues, fiddle music, and many other forms, there was as much stomping and swerving as can be found in the most exciting performances of hot jazz, funk, and rock. Along the way, it explains how the strange combination of African with Scotch and Irish influences made music in the United States vastly different from other African and Caribbean forms; shares terrific stories about minstrel shows, "coon" songs, whorehouses, knife fights, and other low-life phenomena; and showcases a motley collection of performers heretofore unknown to all but the most avid musicologists and collectors.

Souled American

Souled American PDF Author: Kevin Phinney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
From Jim Crow to Eminem, white culture has been transformed by black music. To be so influenced by the boundless imagination of a race brought to America in chains sets up a fascinating irony, andSouled American, an ambitious and comprehensive look at race relations as seen through the prism of music, examines that irony fearlessly—with illuminating results. Tracing a direct line from plantation field hollers to gangsta rap, author Kevin Phinney explains how blacks and whites exist in a constant tug-of-war as they create, re-create, and claim each phase of popular music. Meticulously researched, the book includes dozens of exclusive celebrity interviews that reveal the day-to-day struggles and triumphs of sharing the limelight. Unique, intriguing, Souled Americanshould be required reading for every American interested in music, in history, or in healing our country’s troubled race relations. • Combines social history and pop culture to reveal how jazz, blues, soul, country, and hip-hop have developed • Includes interviews with Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, B. B. King, David Byrne, Sly Stone, Donna Summer, Bonnie Raitt, and dozens more • Confronts questions of race and finds meaningful answers • Ideal for Black History Month

Blackface Nation

Blackface Nation PDF Author: Brian Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645164X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Introduction -- Carnival -- The Vulgar Republic -- Jim Crow's Genuine Audience -- Black Song -- Meet the Hutchinsons -- Love Crimes -- The Middle-Class Moment -- Culture Wars -- Black America -- Conclusion: Musical without End

The Story of African American Music

The Story of African American Music PDF Author: Andrew Pina
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1534560742
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
The influence of African Americans on music in the United States cannot be overstated. A large variety of musical genres owe their beginnings to black musicians. Jazz, rap, funk, R&B, and even techno have roots in African American culture. This volume chronicles the history of African American music, with spotlights on influential black musicians of the past and present. Historical and contemporary photographs, including primary sources, contribute to an in-depth look at this essential part of American musical history.

Blacksound

Blacksound PDF Author: Matthew D. Morrison
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520390571
Category : African American musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry. Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

A Right to Sing the Blues

A Right to Sing the Blues PDF Author: Jeffrey Melnick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040902
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Race Music

Race Music PDF Author: Guthrie P. Ramsey
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520243331
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Covering the vast and various terrain of African American music, this text begins with an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago. It goes on to explore the global influence and social relevance of African American music.

Boogaloo

Boogaloo PDF Author: Arthur Kempton
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Boogaloo—the synonym of choice among the cognoscenti for rhythm and blues—is a stylish and profound meditation on the art, influence, and commerce of black American popular music. At once deeply knowing and keenly observant, Arthur Kempton reveals the tensions between the sacred and the profane at the heart of “soul music,” and the complex centrality of “Aframericans” in the evolution of our mass musical culture. What that culture is all about, who owns it, and who gets paid—these are issues of moment in his epic narrative. Kempton brilliantly traces the interconnections among a century’s worth of signal personalities, events, and achievements: from Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel Music, whose career (“Got to Know How to Work Your Show”) sheds light on Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown, among others, to the rise of that “handsome Negro lad,” Sam Cooke (perhaps the greatest of soul singers) and his definitive crossover dreams; from Berry Gordy Jr.’s infatuation with Doris Day and his sharp business plan to capture and exploit the sounds of young America through Motown (“It’s What’s in the Grooves That Counts”) to the founding of Stax Records and Memphis Soul by a white farm kid who grew up dreaming of being a country fiddler; from the visionary funk of George Clinton to the ascendancy of hip hop (“Sharecropping in Wonderland”), the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and the story of Death Row Records. Boogaloois a monumental work, informed by a rare fierceness of intellect, which debunks many a myth and canard about our popular music heritage even as it enlarges our understanding of its quintessence.