Early Blues

Author : Jas Obrecht
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452945659
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Blues written by Jas Obrecht and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Living Blues Award for Blues Book of the Year Since the early 1900s, blues and the guitar have traveled side by side. This book tells the story of their pairing from the first reported sightings of blues musicians, to the rise of nationally known stars, to the onset of the Great Depression, when blues recording virtually came to a halt. Like the best music documentaries, Early Blues: The First Stars of Blues Guitar interweaves musical history, quotes from celebrated musicians (B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Ry Cooder, and Johnny Winter, to name a few), and a spellbinding array of life stories to illustrate the early days of blues guitar in rich and resounding detail. In these chapters, you’ll meet Sylvester Weaver, who recorded the world’s first guitar solos, and Paramount Records artists Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake, the “King of Ragtime Blues Guitar.” Blind Willie McTell, the Southeast’s superlative twelve-string guitar player, and Blind Willie Johnson, street-corner evangelist of sublime gospel blues, also get their due, as do Lonnie Johnson, the era’s most influential blues guitarist; Mississippi John Hurt, with his gentle, guileless voice and syncopated fingerpicking style; and slide guitarist Tampa Red, “the Guitar Wizard.” Drawing on a deep archive of documents, photographs, record company ads, complete discographies, and up-to-date findings of leading researchers, this is the most comprehensive and complete account ever written of the early stars of blues guitar—an essential chapter in the history of American music.

Author : Jeff Todd Titon
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9781469616919
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Downhome Blues written by Jeff Todd Titon and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a classic in music studies when it was first published in 1977, Early Downhome Blues is a detailed look at traditional country blues artists and their work. Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture. From forty-seven musical transcriptions, Titon derives a grammar of early downhome blues melody. His book is enriched with the recollections of blues performers, audience members, and those working in the recording industry. In a new afterword, Titon reflects on the genesis of this book in the blues revival of the 1960s and the politics of tourism in the current revival under way.

Author : Jeff Todd Titon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780252002908
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Downhome Blues written by Jeff Todd Titon and published by . This book was released on 1979-10-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 : Woody Mann
Publisher : Oak Publications
ISBN 13 : 1783234849
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Six Early Blues Roots Guitarists written by Woody Mann and published by Oak Publications. This book was released on 1973-06-01 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete guide to the fingerpicking styles of six of the greatest exponents of country blues and ragtime. Techniques include down-home ragtime, rural sounds, open tunings and bottleneck.

Author : Elijah Wald
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062018442
Total Pages : 510 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Escaping the Delta written by Elijah Wald and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.

Author : Lynn Abbott
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496810058
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Original Blues written by Lynn Abbott and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America's favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler "String Beans" May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the "blues master piano player of the world." His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female "coon shouters" acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the "blues queen." Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before--a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

Author : Paul Oliver
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521269421
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Songsters and Saints written by Paul Oliver and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-09-27 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Oliver rediscovers the wealth of neglected vocal traditions represented on Race records.

Author : Steve Cushing
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252033019
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blues Before Sunrise written by Steve Cushing and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. The book focuses in particular on pre–World War II blues singers, performers active in 1950s Chicago, and nonperformers who contributed to the early blues world. Interviewees include Alberta Hunter, one of the earliest African American singers to transition from Chicago's Bronzeville nightlife to the international spotlight, and Ralph Bass, one of the greatest R&B producers of his era. Blues expert, writer, record producer, and cofounder of Living Blues Magazine Jim O'Neal provides the book's foreword.

Author : Stefan Grossman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780825601064
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Delta Blues Guitar written by Stefan Grossman and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: