Blueswomen

Author : Angela Y. Davis
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030757444X
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.

Author : Anna Stong Bourgeois
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 9780786421220
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blueswomen written by Anna Stong Bourgeois and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2004-10-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much has been written over the years about male blues singers of the first half of the 20th century, little attention has been paid to blueswomen. These women used their songs to proclaim their pain or to speak up and protest unfair conditions and discrimination. Through their songs, they expressed a desire for freedom and equality in a time when women were almost universally subjugated. The 37 women profiled here are representative of the many blueswomen who performed in the United States through the end of World War II. Some are well known (e.g., Lucille Bogan and Sippie Wallace), but many are obscure (such as Lil Johnson, Liza Brown and Margaret Whitmire). Biographical profiles are followed by a sampling of the performers' lyrics.

Author : A. Yemisi Jimoh
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 9781572331723
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction written by A. Yemisi Jimoh and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Brian Robertson
Publisher : Algonquin Books
ISBN 13 : 9781565121379
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Little Blues Book written by Brian Robertson and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This little book transcends geographical, social, and economic boundaries to search the heart and soul of the blues, looking for rules to live by, hope for the downtrodden, cautionary tales for the good times, and truths that "hurt so good". Sometimes, you just gotta be blue. But, as this book goes to show, that's okay--because you're never alone.

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 : Maisha S. Akbar
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351065122
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Preaching the Blues written by Maisha S. Akbar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-02 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays examines several lynching plays to foreground black women’s performances as non-normative subjects who challenge white supremacist ideology. Maisha S. Akbar re-maps the study of lynching drama by examining plays that are contingent upon race-based settings in black households versus white households. She also discusses performances of lynching plays at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the South and reviews lynching plays closely tied to black school campuses. By focusing on current examples and impacts of lynching plays in the public sphere, this book grounds this historical form of theatre in the present day with depth and relevance. Of interest to scholars and students of both general Theatre and Performance Studies, and of African American Theatre and Drama, Preaching the Blues foregrounds the importance of black feminist artists in lynching culture and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Author : Daphne Duval Harrison
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813512808
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Pearls written by Daphne Duval Harrison and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some singers included in this book are Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson, and Alberta Hunter.

Author : Buzzy Jackson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393059367
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them written by Buzzy Jackson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Buzzy Jackson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781437951912
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bad Woman Feeling Good written by Buzzy Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the blues-women¿s story, from the earliest days of the music to the way the blues sounds today. An exciting lineage of women singers -- originating with Ma Rainey and her protégée Bessie Smith -- launched the blues as a powerful, expressive vehicle of emotional liberation. Along with their successors, Billie Holliday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Janis Joplin, they injected a dose of reality into the often trivial world of popular song. These women passed their image, rhythms, and toughness on to the next generation of blueswomen, which has its contemporary incarnation in singers like Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams. ¿A sweeping view of American history to illuminate the role of blueswomen in a powerful musical tradition.¿

Author : Bruce Iglauer
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022658187X
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bitten by the Blues written by Bruce Iglauer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Blues Book of the Year, Living Blues Readers’ Poll: “A fascinating look at one of the great independent record labels, and producers, of our time.” —Library Journal It started with the searing sound of a slide careening up the neck of an electric guitar. In 1970, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Iglauer walked into Florence’s Lounge in Chicago’s South Side and was overwhelmed by the joyous, raw music of Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. A year later, Iglauer produced Hound Dog’s debut album in eight hours and pressed a thousand copies, the most he could afford. From that one album grew Alligator Records, the largest independent blues record label in the world. Bitten by the Blues is Iglauer’s memoir of a life immersed in the blues—and the business of the blues. No one person was present at the creation of more great contemporary blues music: he produced albums by Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Professor Longhair, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Son Seals, Roy Buchanan, Shemekia Copeland, and many other major figures. Here, he takes us behind the scenes, offering unforgettable stories of those charismatic musicians and classic sessions, in an intimate and unvarnished look at what it’s like to work with the greats of the blues. It’s a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary musicians and larger-than-life personalities who brought America’s music to life. It’s also an expansive history of half a century of blues in Chicago and around the world, tracing the business through massive transitions as a genre originally created by and for black southerners adapted to an influx of white fans and musicians and found a global audience. Most of the smoky bars and packed clubs that fostered the Chicago blues scene have disappeared. But their soul lives on, and so does their sound. As real and audacious as the music that shaped it, this is a raucous journey through the world of Genuine Houserockin’ Music. “A coming-of-age story; an elegy for a bygone, grittier Chicago; and a case study on the many ways the color barrier was crossed musically in the mid-twentieth century.” —Booklist