Big Bill Blues

Author : Bob Riesman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226717488
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Feel So Good written by Bob Riesman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major figure in American blues and folk music, Big Bill Broonzy (1903–1958) left his Arkansas Delta home after World War I, headed north, and became the leading Chicago bluesman of the 1930s. His success came as he fused traditional rural blues with the electrified sound that was beginning to emerge in Chicago. This, however, was just one step in his remarkable journey: Big Bill was constantly reinventing himself, both in reality and in his retellings of it. Bob Riesman’s groundbreaking biography tells the compelling life story of a lost figure from the annals of music history. I Feel So Good traces Big Bill’s career from his rise as a nationally prominent blues star, including his historic 1938 appearance at Carnegie Hall, to his influential role in the post-World War II folk revival, when he sang about racial injustice alongside Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel. Riesman’s account brings the reader into the jazz clubs and concert halls of Europe, as Big Bill's overseas tours in the 1950s ignited the British blues-rock explosion of the 1960s. Interviews with Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Ray Davies reveal Broonzy’s profound impact on the British rockers who would follow him and change the course of popular music. Along the way, Riesman details Big Bill’s complicated and poignant personal saga: he was married three times and became a father at the very end of his life to a child half a world away. He also brings to light Big Bill’s final years, when he first lost his voice, then his life, to cancer, just as his international reputation was reaching its peak. Featuring many rarely seen photos, I Feel So Good will be the definitive account of Big Bill Broonzy’s life and music.

Author : Roger House
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807138090
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blue Smoke written by Roger House and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary of blues greats Blind Blake, Tampa Red, and Papa Charlie Jackson, Chicago blues artist William "Big Bill" Broonzy influenced an array of postwar musicians, including Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, and J. B. Lenoir. In Blue Smoke, Roger House tells the extraordinary story of "Big Bill," a working-class bluesman whose circumstances offer a window into the dramatic social transformations faced by African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. One in a family of twenty-one children and reared by sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Broonzy seemed destined to stay on the land. He moved to Arkansas to work as a sharecropper, preacher, and fiddle player, but the army drafted him during World War I. After his service abroad, Broonzy, like thousands of other black soldiers, returned to the racism and bleak economic prospects of the Jim Crow South and chose to move North to seek new opportunities. After learning to play the guitar, he performed at neighborhood parties in Chicago and in 1927 attracted the attention of Paramount Records, which released his first single, "House Rent Stomp," backed by "Big Bill's Blues." Over the following decades, Broonzy toured the United States and Europe. He released dozens of records but was never quite successful enough to give up working as a manual laborer. Many of his songs reflect this experience as a blue-collar worker, articulating the struggles, determination, and optimism of the urban black working class. Before his death in 1958, Broonzy finally achieved crossover success as a key player in the folk revival movement led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, and as a blues ambassador to British musicians such as Lonnie Donegan and Eric Clapton. Weaving Broonzy's recordings, writings, and interviews into a compelling narrative of his life, Blue Smoke offers a comprehensive portrait of an artist recognized today as one of the most prolific and influential working-class blues musicians of the era.

Author : Big Bill Broonzy
Publisher : Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Big Bill Blues written by Big Bill Broonzy and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1992-08-21 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy (1893-1958) was one of the masters of the country blues. His vocal style was legendary long before his death, and his songs, including Big Bill Blues, Keys to the Highway, and Looking Up at Down, are some of the best known in the blues repertoire. His 1955 autobiography, Big Bill Blues, was the first - and only - book ever written by a country blues musician. It captures the full flavour of Broonzy's unique voice as he tells about his thirty years of playing the blues. Here are intimate stories about other blues greats - Sleepy John Estes, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim; Memphis Minnie, Washboard Sam - and descriptions of how he came up with the ideas for his songs.

Author : Billy Boy Arnold
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022680920X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold written by Billy Boy Arnold and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 : Bob Riesman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226717453
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Feel So Good written by Bob Riesman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was one of the most celebrated blues artists of his era, a visionary Chicago singer-songwriter in the 1930s; his overseas tours in the 1950s ignited the British blues-rock explosion of the 1960s. But Big Bill Broonzy has been virtually forgotten by the popular culture he helped shape. Riesman details Big Bill's complicated personal saga, and provides a definitive account of his life and music.

Author : Mike Rowe
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chicago Blues written by Mike Rowe and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1981-08-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago has always had a reputation as a "wide open town" with a high tolerance for gangsters, illegal liquor, and crooked politicians. It has also been the home for countless black musicians and the birthplace of a distinctly urban blues-more sophisticated, cynical, and street-smart than the anguished songs of the Mississippi delta--a music called the Chicago blues. This is the history of that music and the dozens of black artists who congregated on the South and Near West Sides. Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Tampa Red, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells, Eddie Taylor--all of these giants played throughout the city and created a musical style that had imitators and influence all over the world.

Author : Bill Dahl
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022639669X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of the Blues written by Bill Dahl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse elements of American popular music at large, and the visual art associated with this unique sound has been just as varied and dynamic. There is no better guide to this fascinating graphical world than Bill Dahl—a longtime music journalist and historian who has written liner notes for countless reissues of classic blues, soul, R&B, and rock albums. With his deep knowledge and incisive commentary—complementing more than three hundred and fifty lavishly reproduced images—the history of the blues comes musically and visually to life. What will astonish readers who thumb through these pages is the amazing range of ways that the blues have been represented—whether via album covers, posters, flyers, 78 rpm labels, advertising, or other promotional materials. We see the blues as it was first visually captured in the highly colorful sheet music covers of the early twentieth century. We see striking and hard-to-find label designs from labels big (Columbia) and small (Rhumboogie). We see William Alexander’s humorous artwork on postwar Miltone Records; the cherished ephemera of concert and movie posters; and Chess Records’ iconic early albums designed by Don Bronstein, which would set a new standard for modern album cover design. What these images collectively portray is the evolution of a distinctively American art form. And they do so in the richest way imaginable. The result is a sumptuous book, a visual treasury as alive in spirit as the music it so vibrantly captures.

Author : Paul Garon
Publisher : City Lights Books
ISBN 13 : 0872866211
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Woman with Guitar written by Paul Garon and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hot off the press! A revised, expanded edition of the quintessential portrait of one of the blues' greatest artists and the popular poetry of her lyrics.

Author : Debra Devi
Publisher : True Nature Books
ISBN 13 : 9781624071850
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Language of the Blues written by Debra Devi and published by True Nature Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive dictionary of blues lyrics invites listeners to interpret what they hear in blues songs and blues culture, including excerpts from original interviews with Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy, and many others.

Author : Paul Carroll
Publisher : Three Rivers Press
ISBN 13 : 9780517882214
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Big Blues written by Paul Carroll and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reporter who spent seven years covering IBM for the Wall Street Journal tells the inside story of the giant corporation's fall from grace. This edition includes an afterword updating IBM's fortunes after Louis Gerstner's first year as the company's CEO.