Four women meet once a year for a ritual photo shoot, chronicling their changing (and aging) selves as they navigate love, careers, children, and the complications of history. But when these private photographs threaten to go public, relationships are tested, forcing the women to confront who they are and how they’ll deal with whatever lies ahead. 20TH CENTURY BLUES is a sharply funny and evocative play by Obie Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner Susan Miller that questions our place in the world and with one another.
Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a long network of interrelated texts that the author wrote and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. Many of the texts have appeared before, in both pamphlets and in critically acclaimed full-length volumes, but this edition has been revised throughout. It also includes a previously unpublished book-length text on the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, as well as a number of shorter pieces. All now appear in their intended order, and with their connections to other poems made apparent via an index. At the centre of the book is the sequence The Lores, written according to a strict word count and introducing the politics and poetics of ‘creative linkage’ demonstrated throughout. It focuses upon fascism and resistances to it. Running through the volume are the ‘Empty Diaires’ which offer an alternative history of the twentieth century, told through a series of female narrators. Woven between these are poems on blues music, the first Gulf War, Stalin’s poems, failed utopias, the Earl of Rochester, a sci-fi elegy for the human, a translation from Horace, the ideology of Thatcherism, atheist hymns, a hilarious romp with a very rude Robinson Crusoe, homages to various other artists, and an elegy to Frank Sinatra. The hilarious Wayne Pratt spoofs find their final resting place here too. The prose-poem essay, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’, brings the project to rest with a celebration of the complexity of our powers of human connection.
Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a network of texts written and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. At its heart is an alternative history of the twentieth century. This long-awaited volume is revised throughout, fully indexed, and with many previously unpublished texts.
The autobiography of Britain's greatest living composer is as idiosyncratic as the man himself, revealing his insatiable curiosity about people and places, ideas and sensations, and music of every kind. Vigorous, brave, funny, candid about his sexual and emotional life, Sir Michael has written a remarkable, memorable book.
This book "examines the folksy ex-husband and wife duo who stunned the music world with the most powerful blues-rock since Led Zeppelin and the most haunting country-rock since the Byrds and Gram Parsons. Rock biographer Dick Porter analyses the quirkiness of their former claims to be a brother and sister from a family of ten, Jack's austere puritanism and obsessions with truth and death, and the child-like innocence of the couple's matching red-and-white colour themes." - back cover.
Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category 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.
The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music has established itself as the classic reference work in this area. From ABBA to ZZ Top, through Noel Coward, The Skatalites and The Stone Roses, this book covers the major players in the vast history of popular music in the twentieth century. With over 2,500 entries and covering bebop to western swing by way of psychedelic rock, Hardy's companion maps out a cultural history of the century that is both entertaining and informative.
