Moanin At Midnight

Author : James Segrest
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 0307831019
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Moanin' at Midnight written by James Segrest and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires. Born Chester Burnett in 1910, the Wolf survived a grim childhood and hardscrabble youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi. He began his career playing and singing with the first Delta blues stars for two decades in perilous juke joints. He was present at the birth of rock ’n’ roll in Memphis, where Sam Phillips–who also discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis–called Wolf his “greatest discovery.” He helped develop the sound of electric blues and vied with rival Muddy Waters for the title of king of Chicago blues. He ended his career performing and recording with the world’s most famous rock stars. His passion for music kept him performing–despite devastating physical problems–right up to his death in 1976. There’s never been a comprehensive biography of the Wolf until now. Moanin’ at Midnight is full of startling information about his mysterious early years, surprising and entertaining stories about his decades at the top, and never-before-seen photographs. It strips away all the myths to reveal–at long last–the real-life triumphs and tragedies of this blues titan.

Author : Charles Shaar Murray
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1466852364
Total Pages : 694 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Boogie Man written by Charles Shaar Murray and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed writer Charles Shaar Murray's Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of an extraordinary musician. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and he lets the man from Clarksdale, Mississippi, tell his own story. "Everything you read on album covers is not true, and every album reads different," he told Murray. Murray helps Hooker set the record straight, disentangling the myths and legends from truths so rock-ribbed that we understand, as if for the first time, why they have provided the source for a lifetime of unforgettable sound. Murray weaves together Hooker's life and music to reveal their indissoluble bonds. Yet Boogie Man is far more than merely an accomplished and brilliant biography of one man; it gives an account of an entire art form. Grounded in a time and place in American culture, the blues are universal, and in the hands of the greatest practitioners its power resides in the miracle of using despair to transcend it. "The preacher's mantle," Murray tells us, "passes to the bluesman." This bluesman traveled a hard road out of the American South, from obscurity to adulation and back-and back again. John Lee Hooker has seen it all and sung it all, and his music is both a living legacy and an American treasure. Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.

Author : Robert Gordon
Publisher : Canongate Books
ISBN 13 : 0857868705
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Can't Be Satisfied written by Robert Gordon and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can't Be Satisfied is that rare thing in musical biographies: a book that maps out not just a single, extraordinary life but the cultural forces that shaped it' Sean O'Hagan, Observer Muddy Waters was the greatest blues musician ever, and the most influential. He invented electric blues, inspired the Rolling Stones and created the template for the rock 'n' roll band and its wild lifestyle. Robert Gordon's definitive biography vividly chronicles the extraordinary life and personality of the musical legend who changed the course of modern popular music.

Author : Peter Guralnick
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316206741
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lost Highway written by Peter Guralnick and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.

Author : Nadine Cohodas
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312284947
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinning Blues Into Gold written by Nadine Cohodas and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-09-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sun Records gave us rock and roll, Motown Records gave us pop soul, and Chess Records gave us the blues. Chess was label for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Bo Diddley--and in this critcially acclaimed history we learn the full story of this legendary label. The greatest artists who sang and played the blues made their mark with Leonard and Phil Chess, whose Chicago-based record company was synonymous with the sound that swept up from the South, embraced the Windy City, and spread out like wildfire into mid-century America. Spinning Blues into Gold is the impeccably researched story of the men behind the music and the remarkable company they created. Chess Records--and later Checkers, Argo, and Cadet Records--was built by Polish immigrant Jews, brothers who saw the blues as a unique business opportunity. From their first ventures, a liquor store and then a nightclub, they promoted live entertainment. And parlayed that into the first pressings sold out of car trunks on long junkets through the midsection of the country, ultimately expanding their empire to include influential radio stations. The story of the Chess brothers is a very American story of commerce in the service of culture. Long on chutzpah, Leonard and Phil Chess went far beyond their childhoods as the sons of a scrap-metal dealer. They changed what America listened to; the artists they promoted planted the seeds of rock 'n' roll--and are still influencing music today. In this book, Cohodas expertly captures the rich and volatile mix of race, money, and recorded music. She also takes us deep into the world of independent record producers, sometimes abrasive and always aggressive men striving to succeed. Leonard and Phil Chess worked hand-in-glove with disenfranchised black artists, the intermittent charges of exploitation balanced by the reality of a common purpose that eventually brought fame to many if not most of the parties concerned. From beginning to end, as we find in these pages, the lives of the Chess brothers were socially, financially, and creatively entwined with those of the artists they believed in.

Author : Tony Glover
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135353832
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blues with a Feeling written by Tony Glover and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whenever you hear the prevalent wailing blues harmonica in commercials, film soundtracks or at a blues club, you are experiencing the legacy of the master harmonica player, Little Walter. Immensely popular in his lifetime, Little Walter had fourteen Top 10 hits on the R&B charts, and he was also the first Chicago blues musician to play at the Apollo. Ray Charles and B.B. King, great blues artists in their own right, were honored to sit in with his band. However, at the age of 37, he lay in a pauper's grave in Chicago. This book will tell the story of a man whose music, life and struggles continue to resonate to this day.

Author : Willie Dixon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Am the Blues written by Willie Dixon and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1598534998
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Unknown Kerouac written by Jack Kerouac and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style. This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success—a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac’s French Canadian childhood. Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations. Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.

Author : Peter Guralnick
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316341843
Total Pages : 784 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll written by Peter Guralnick and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography: Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.

Author : Anthony DeCurtis
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822312659
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Present Tense written by Anthony DeCurtis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992-09-18 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part. In Present Tense, Anthony DeCurtis brings together writers from a wide variety of fields to explore how rock & roll is made, consumed, and experienced in our time. In this collection, Greil Marcus creates a collage of words and pictures that evokes and explores Elvis Presley's grisly fate as an American cultural image, while Robert Palmer tells the gripping tale of the origins and meanings of the electric guitar. Rap music, MTV, and the issue of gender identity in the work of Bruce Springsteen all undergo thorough examination; rock & roll's complex relationship with the forces of censorship gets a remarkably fresh reading; and the mainstreaming of rock & roll in the 1980s is detailed and analyzed. And, in an interview with Laurie Anderson and an essay by Atlanta musician Jeff Calder, the artists speak for themselves. Contributors. Jeff Calder, Anthony DeCurtis, Mark Dery, Paul Evans, Glenn Gass, Trent Hill, Michael Jarrett, Alan Light, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Robert B. Ray, Dan Rubey, David R. Shumway, Martha Nell Smith, Paul Smith