Bitter Blues

Author : Phil Wiggins
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496826957
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sweet Bitter Blues written by Phil Wiggins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC’s Homemade Blues depicts the life and times of harmonica player Phil Wiggins and the unique, vibrant music scene around him, as described by music journalist Frank Matheis. Featuring Wiggins’s story, but including information on many musicians, the volume presents an incomparable documentary of the African American blues scene in Washington, DC, from 1975 to the present. At its core, the DC-area acoustic “down home” blues scene was and is rooted in the African American community. A dedicated group of musicians saw it as their mission to carry on their respective Piedmont musical traditions: Mother Scott, Flora Molton, Chief Ellis, Archie Edwards, John Jackson, John Cephas, and foremost Phil Wiggins. Because of their love for the music and willingness to teach, these creators fostered a harmonious environment, mostly centered on Archie Edwards’s famous barbershop where Edwards opened his doors every Saturday afternoon for jam sessions. Sweet Bitter Blues features biographies and supporting essays based on Wiggins’s recollections and supplemented by Matheis’s research, along with a foreword by noted blues scholar Elijah Wald, historic interviews by Dr. Barry Lee Pearson with John Cephas and Archie Edwards, and previously unpublished and rare photographs. This is the story of an acoustic blues scene that was and is a living tradition.

Author : Ursula Renee
Publisher : The Wild Rose Press Inc
ISBN 13 : 1509215115
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bitter Blues written by Ursula Renee and published by The Wild Rose Press Inc. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their different backgrounds, Randy Jones agreed to take Cassie Ann Porter for better and for worse. He never considered how much worse things could get, but he finds out after he returns home from serving in the army during World War II. Unable to find a job, he has to depend on his wife to support the family, which includes their two daughters, who at first refuse to have anything to do with him. Cass works at the shipyard, one of many women employed to fill in while the men were gone to war. Her employer doesn’t replace her and the others because he can pay them so much less than he would men, yet she would like nothing better than to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. When a good intention goes wrong, Randy wonders if he and Cass have made a mistake in going against society’s rules. Can the “worse” ever get better?

Author : Mechal Sobel
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807134016
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Painting a Hidden Life written by Mechal Sobel and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in 1853, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for most of his life. But in 1928 he moved to Montgomery and changed his life, becoming a self-taught lyric painter of extraordinary ability and power. From 1936 to 1946, he sat on a street corner—old, ill, and homeless—and created well over 1,200 paintings. Collected and later promoted by Charles Shannon, a young Montgomery artist, his work received star placement in the Corcoran Gallery’s 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America.” From then on, the spare and powerful “radical modernity” of Traylor’s work helped place him among the rising stars of twentieth-century American artists. Most critics and art historians who analyze Traylor’s paintings emphasize his extraordinary form and evaluate the content as either simple or enigmatic narratives of black life. In Painting a Hidden Life, historian Mechal Sobel’s trenchant analysis reveals a previously unrecognized central core of meaning in Traylor’s near-hidden symbolism—a call for retribution in response to acts of lynching and other violence toward blacks. Drawing on historical records and oral histories, Sobel carefully explores the relationship between Traylor’s life and his paintings and arrives at new interpretations of his art. From an interview with Traylor’s great-granddaughter, Sobel learned that Traylor believed the Birmingham policemen who killed his son in 1929 in fact lynched him—a story that neither Traylor nor his family had previously disclosed. The trauma of this event, Sobel explains, propelled Traylor to find a way to voice his rage and spurred the creation of his powerful, mysterious visual language. Traylor’s encoded paintings tell a vibrant, multilayered story of conjure power, sexual rivalry, and violence. Revealing an extraordinarily diverse visual universe, the symbols in Traylor’s paintings reflect the worlds he lived in between 1853 and 1949: the plantation conjure milieu into which he was born, the blues culture in which he matured, the world of Jim Crow he learned to secretly violate, and the Catholic values he adopted in his final years. From his African heritage, Traylor drew symbols not readily understood by whites. He mixed traditional African images with conjure signs, with symbols of black Baptists and Freemasons, and with images central to the hidden black protest movement—the cross and the lynching tree. In this groundbreaking examination of an extraordinary artist, Sobel uncovers the internalized pain of several generations and traces the paths African Americans blazed long before the march down the Selma–Montgomery highway.

Author : Phil Wiggins
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496826930
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sweet Bitter Blues written by Phil Wiggins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC’s Homemade Blues depicts the life and times of harmonica player Phil Wiggins and the unique, vibrant music scene around him, as described by music journalist Frank Matheis. Featuring Wiggins’s story, but including information on many musicians, the volume presents an incomparable documentary of the African American blues scene in Washington, DC, from 1975 to the present. At its core, the DC-area acoustic “down home” blues scene was and is rooted in the African American community. A dedicated group of musicians saw it as their mission to carry on their respective Piedmont musical traditions: Mother Scott, Flora Molton, Chief Ellis, Archie Edwards, John Jackson, John Cephas, and foremost Phil Wiggins. Because of their love for the music and willingness to teach, these creators fostered a harmonious environment, mostly centered on Archie Edwards’s famous barbershop where Edwards opened his doors every Saturday afternoon for jam sessions. Sweet Bitter Blues features biographies and supporting essays based on Wiggins’s recollections and supplemented by Matheis’s research, along with a foreword by noted blues scholar Elijah Wald, historic interviews by Dr. Barry Lee Pearson with John Cephas and Archie Edwards, and previously unpublished and rare photographs. This is the story of an acoustic blues scene that was and is a living tradition.

Author : Jeremy Reed
Publisher : Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bitter Blue written by Jeremy Reed and published by Peter Owen Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A frank and revealing account of a struggle with addiction in the wild streets of London by the cult poet and novelist Jeremy Reed.

Author : Adam Gussow
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469660377
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Whose Blues? written by Adam Gussow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Author : Robert Ford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135865078
Total Pages : 2397 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Blues Bibliography written by Robert Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 2397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Blues Bibliography, Second Edition is a revised and enlarged version of the definitive blues bibliography first published in 1999. Material previously omitted from the first edition has now been included, and the bibliography has been expanded to include works published since then. In addition to biographical references, this work includes entries on the history and background of the blues, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional variations and lyric transcriptions and musical analysis. The Blues Bibliography is an invaluable guide to the enthusiastic market among libraries specializing in music and African-American culture and among individual blues scholars.

Author : Barry Lee Pearson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Virginia Piedmont Blues written by Barry Lee Pearson and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the journey of two black American bluesmen, Archie Edwards and John Cephas, as they carry their musical heritage to the world.

Author : Joseph Gentile
Publisher : iUniverse
ISBN 13 : 0595182593
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Forever Nevermore written by Joseph Gentile and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of poetry suspends the reality of life and pursues reality as seen through a young man's eyes. No subject is taboo and no emotion is withheld. Love and pain, life and death, friendship and betrayal are all confronted. The result is poetry that speaks to the mind, screams to the heart, and attaches to the soul. Included are several short stories that will stimulate the mind through reflection and self-examination.

Author : Vladimir Bogdanov
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN 13 : 9780879307363
Total Pages : 772 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book All Music Guide to the Blues written by Vladimir Bogdanov and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2003 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews and rates the best recordings of 8,900 blues artists in all styles.