The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875657769
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"This is the biography of George T. Ruby, an African American statesman who was active in Texas politics and fought for equal rights for black freedmen in Reconstruction Texas"--

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875657769
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This is the biography of George T. Ruby, an African American statesman who was active in Texas politics and fought for equal rights for black freedmen in Reconstruction Texas"--

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292787766
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Musical magic hit Austin, Texas, in the early 1970s. At now-legendary venues such as Threadgill's, Vulcan Gas Company, and the Armadillo World Headquarters, a host of country, rock-and-roll, blues, and folk musicians came together and created a sound and a scene that Jan Reid vividly detailed in his 1974 book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. The breadth of talent still astounds—Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doug Sahm, Delbert McClinton, Michael Martin Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, Kinky Friedman, Steve Fromholz, Bobby Bridger, Billy Joe Shaver, Marcia Ball, and Townes Van Zandt. Reid's book even inspired the nationally popular and long-running PBS series Austin City Limits, which focused attention on the trends that fed the music scene—progressive country, country rock, western swing, blues, and bluegrass among them. In this new edition, Jan Reid revitalizes his classic look at the Austin music scene. He has substantially reworked the early chapters to include musicians and musical currents from other parts of Texas that significantly contributed to the delightful convergence of popular cultures in Austin. Four new chapters and an epilogue show how the creative burst of the seventies directly spawned a new generation of talents who carry on the tradition—Lyle Lovett, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Jimmy LaFave, Kelly Willis, Joe Ely, Bruce and Charlie Robison, and The Dixie Chicks.

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292701977
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Jan Reid revitalizes his classic look at the Austin music scene in substantially reworked chapters that include musicians and musical currents from all over Texas that have significantly contributed to the delightful convergence of popular cultures in Austin.

Confessions of a Maddog

Confessions of a Maddog PDF Author: Jay Dunston Milner
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 9781574410501
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Once upon a time there was an innocent lad from West Texas who wrote a novel and fell in with a rabble of Texas writers as they were bridging the literary gap between J. Frank Dobie and his paisanos and the current bumper crop of Texas writers who seem to be everywhere writing about everything. This rowdy rabble of gap bridgers bonded in a sort of literary and social club they called Maddog Inc. (Motto: Doing indefinable services to mankind.) But our hero managed to live through it all anyway. This is his story. Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group comprised Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris, among others. From the musical scene there were the "picker poets" such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings. Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, King's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.

The Bullet Meant for Me

The Bullet Meant for Me PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292709730
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
On April 20, 1998, Jan Reid was shot during a robbery in Mexico City, where he had gone to watch his friend, the boxer Jesus Chavez, fight. In The Bullet Meant for Me, Reid powerfully recounts his ordeal, the long chain of life events that brought him to that fateful attack, and his struggle to regain the ability to walk and to be a full partner in a deeply satisfying marriage. Re-examining the whole trajectory of his life, Reid questions how much the Texan ideal of manhood shaped his identity, including his love for boxing and participation in the sport. He meditates on male friendship as he tells the story of his close relationship with Chavez, whose career and personal travails Reid details with empathy and insight. And he describes his long months in physical therapy, during which he drew on the unwavering love of his wife and daughter, as well as the courage and strength he had learned from boxing, to heal his body and spirit. A moving, intimate portrait of a man, a friendship, and a marriage, The Bullet Meant for Me is Jan Reid's most personal book.

Rednecks & Bluenecks

Rednecks & Bluenecks PDF Author: Chris Willman
Publisher: Rednecks & Bluenecks
ISBN: 9781595580177
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Willman looks at the way country music's increasing popularity and conservative drift parallel the transformation of the Democratic South into the heart of the Republican mainstream.

Texas Tornado

Texas Tornado PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774397
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
A biography of the Sir Douglas Quintet and Texas Tornados founder, a rock and roll innovator whose Grammy Award–winning career spans half the twentieth century. Doug Sahm was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist of legendary range and reputation. The first American musician to capitalize on the 1960s British invasion, Sahm vaulted to international fame leading a faux-British band called the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose hits included “She’s About a Mover,” “The Rains Came,” and “Mendocino.” He made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1968 and 1971 and performed with the Grateful Dead, Dr. John, Willie Nelson, Boz Scaggs, and Bob Dylan. Texas Tornado is the first biography of this national music legend. Jan Reid traces the whole arc of Sahm’s incredibly versatile musical career, as well as the manic energy that drove his sometimes-turbulent personal life and loves. Reid follows Sahm from his youth in San Antonio as a prodigy steel guitar player through his breakout success with the Sir Douglas Quintet and his move to California, where, with an inventive take on blues, rock, country, and jazz, he became a star in San Francisco and invented the “cosmic cowboy” vogue. Reid also chronicles Sahm’s later return to Texas and to chart success with the Grammy Award–winning Texas Tornados, a rowdy “conjunto rock and roll band” that he modeled on the Beatles and which included Sir Douglas alum Augie Meyers and Tejano icons Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez. With his exceptional talent and a career that bridged five decades, Doug Sahm was a rock and roll innovator whose influence can only be matched among his fellow Texas musicians by Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Texas Tornado vividly captures the energy and intensity of this musician whose life burned out too soon, but whose music continues to rock. “Doug was like me, maybe the only figure from that period of time that I connected with. His was a big soul. He had a hit record, “She’s About a Mover,” and I had a hit record [“Like a Rolling Stone”] at the same time. So we became buddies back then, and we played the same kind of music. We never really broke apart. We always hooked up at certain intervals in our lives. . . . I’d never met anyone who’d played on stage with Hank Williams before, let alone someone my own age. Doug had a heavy frequency, and it was in his nerves. . . . I miss Doug. He got caught in the grind. He should still be here.” —Bob Dylan “I once made the analogy that Doug was like St. Sebastian—pierced by 1,000 arrows—but instead of blood, talent coming out of every wound. I really regard him as the best musician I ever knew, because of his versatility, and the range of his information and taste.” —Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records producer

Dissonant Identities

Dissonant Identities PDF Author: Barry Shank
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819572675
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

The Song Leader

The Song Leader PDF Author: Jan Reid
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 0875657834
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
Songwriter, band leader, Vietnam vet, sparring partner of the great Ken Norton—Haid Shelton’s coming of age story immerses the reader in the volatile last half of the twentieth century as only Jan Reid could do. The Song Leader follows Haid from his teenage years in a small Texas pipe town, where he is the song leader of his church. His enduring gifts are his tenor voice and success as a Golden Gloves boxer. Dreaming of becoming a rock star and hoping to evade Vietnam, Haid joins the Marine reserves, gets into serious trouble, and is sentenced to four years in the brig. There he’s recruited as the sparring partner of future heavyweight champion Ken Norton. Haid’s knockout by his new friend Kenny gets him shunted to the war as an infantry grunt in 1968. Back home, bitter, with a disabled hand and a Purple Heart, he’s surprised and signed to a recording contract by the rock star Leon Russell. He rejoins his friendship with Norton on the eve of Kenny’s famous upset of Muhammad Ali, who’s an important character along with George Foreman, Joe Frazier, and Mike Weaver. Later their lives are brought together by a horrendous accident and by Kenny’s guardian angel Virginie Nalula, a child refugee from eastern Congo. Enduring friendship, race relations, professional boxing, and the American culture of violence are brilliantly explored in this last novel by the late, great Jan Reid.

Armadillo World Headquarters

Armadillo World Headquarters PDF Author: Eddie Wilson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477314164
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
“Eddie’s story is by turns hilarious, informative, and the living spirit of its age. . . . [He] piles the most unlikely anecdotes on top of one another, creating a land of enchantment and an order of chemically altered consciousness that rescues an era I’d thought not so much lost as forgotten. Not only am I thrilled I’ve read this story and wish I was in it, I wish I’d written it.” —Dave Marsh, from the foreword “The Armadillo World Headquarters . . . was one of the most exciting, and remained one of the most exciting, places in the United States for the years that it was in operation. I saw a little of everything at the Armadillo, and it was one of the great experiences of my life.” —Ann Richards, from the author’s preface On August 7, 1970, Eddie Wilson and a band of hippies threw open the doors of Armadillo World Headquarters, and the live music capital of the world was born in Austin, Texas. Over its ten-year lifespan, the Armadillo hosted thousands of high-profile musicians—Willie Nelson, Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, Taj Mahal, AC/DC, Charlie Daniels, the Ramones, Roy Buchanan, and Bette Midler, to name a random few. The Armadillo helped define the Austin lifestyle, culture, and identity, setting the stage for successors such as the SXSW music festival, PBS’s Austin City Limits, and the ACL festival, which have made Austin an international destination for music fans. In this rollicking memoir, Eddie Wilson tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Armadillo from the moment he first peered into a derelict National Guard armory building and knew that destiny had found him. He vividly describes how two previously clashing groups—rednecks and hippies—came together at the Armadillo, enjoying a new blend of country music and rock that spawned a many-named movement: cosmic cowboy, progressive country, and redneck rock, among others. Wilson also reveals the struggles and creative solutions that kept the doors open, the angels who provided timely infusions of cash, the janitors and carpenters who maintained the Dillo, and the artists who created iconic poster art. Extensively illustrated with candid photographs and music posters, Armadillo World Headquarters recounts the story of this legendary venue as no other book can.