The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy
The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy

Author: Kevin D. Greene

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-09-28

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1469646501

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Over the course of his long career, legendary bluesman William "Big Bill" Broonzy (1893–1958) helped shape the trajectory of the genre, from its roots in the rural Mississippi River Delta, through its rise as a popular genre in the North, to its eventual international acclaim. Along the way, Broonzy adopted an evolving personal and professional identity, tailoring his self-presentation to the demands of the place and time. His remarkable professional fluidity mirrored the range of expectations from his audiences, whose ideas about race, national belonging, identity, and the blues were refracted through Broonzy as if through a prism. Kevin D. Greene argues that Broonzy's popular success testifies to his ability to navigate the cultural expectations of his different audiences. However, this constant reinvention came at a personal and professional cost. Using Broonzy's multifaceted career, Greene situates blues performance at the center of understanding African American self-presentation and racial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Through Broonzy's life and times, Greene assesses major themes and events in African American history, including the Great Migration, urbanization, and black expatriate encounters with European culture consumers. Drawing on a range of historical source materials as well as oral histories and personal archives held by Broonzy's son, Greene perceptively interrogates how notions of race, gender, and audience reception continue to shape concepts of folk culture and musical authenticity.

Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America
Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America

Author: Robert F. Jefferson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1498586325

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Fusing riveting testimony from African American veterans with the most incisive research of current military scholars, Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in 20th-Century America: Closing Ranks explores the intersecting characteristics of civil rights struggle and political activism that was reflected in the lives of ex-GIs throughout Twentieth Century American history. The volume examines black veterans’ social and political activities throughout the 20th Century, from the World Wars, through the Korean and Vietnam War, and ends with the Persian Gulf War. Presenting the full flesh and blood experiences of black veterans who came from backgrounds and from all walks of life, each essay captures how race, gender, ethnic, class, disability, generation, and region shaped their experiences in the nation’s military during times of war and how these issues profoundly affected the postwar politics they embraced while trying to realize the true meaning of equality in America. With original essays by emerging scholars in the field of study, Closing Ranks is a foundational text for reassessing the relationship between the ex-GI and the modern nation state and providing readers with a vivid window into the harsh realities that black citizen-soldiers have faced during war and its aftermath for nearly a century.

Wasn’t That a Mighty Day
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day

Author: Luigi Monge

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1496841794

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Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. Featuring newly transcribed lyrics, the book offers sustained attention to how both Black and white communities responded to many of the tragic events that occurred before the mid-1950s. Through detailed textual analysis, Luigi Monge explores songs on natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes); accidental disasters (sinkings, fires, train wrecks, explosions, and air disasters); and infestations, epidemics, and diseases (the boll weevil, the jake leg, and influenza). Analyzed songs cover some of the most well-known disasters of the time period from the sinking of the Titanic and the 1930 drought to the Hindenburg accident, and more. Thirty previously unreleased African American disaster songs appear in this volume for the first time, revealing their pertinence to the relevant disasters. By comparing the song lyrics to critical moments in history, Monge is able to explore how deeply and directly these catastrophes affected Black communities; how African Americans in general, and blues and gospel singers in particular, faced and reacted to disaster; whether these collective tragedies prompted different reactions among white people and, if so, why; and more broadly, how the role of memory in recounting and commenting on historical and cultural facts shaped African American society from 1879 to 1955.

A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music
A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music

Author: Dick Weissman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1501344161

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Building on his 2006 book, Which Side Are You On?, Dick Weissman's A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music presents a provocative discussion of the history, evolution, and current status of folk music in the United States and Canada. North American folk music achieved a high level of popular acceptance in the late 1950s. When it was replaced by various forms of rock music, it became a more specialized musical niche, fragmenting into a proliferation of musical styles. In the pop-folk revival of the 1960s, artists were celebrated or rejected for popularizing the music to a mass audience. In particular the music seemed to embrace a quest for authenticity, which has led to endless explorations of what is or is not faithful to the original concept of traditional music. This book examines the history of folk music into the 21st century and how it evolved from an agrarian style as it became increasingly urbanized. Scholar-performer Dick Weissman, himself a veteran of the popularization wars, is uniquely qualified to examine the many controversies and musical evolutions of the music, including a detailed discussion of the quest for authenticity, and how various musicians, critics, and fans have defined that pursuit.

Debt and Redemption in the Blues
Debt and Redemption in the Blues

Author: Julia Simon

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2023-03-16

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0271096721

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This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come. Placing blues music within its historical context of the post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of African Americans. Surveying blues music from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century, Simon’s analyses focus on economic relations, such as sharecropping, house contract sales, debt peonage, criminal surety, and convict lease. She demonstrates how the music reflects this exploitative economic history and how it is shaped by commodification under racialized capitalism. As Simon assesses the lyrics, technique, and styles of a wide range of blues musicians, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Albert Collins, and Kirk Fletcher, she argues forcefully that the call for racial justice is at the heart of the blues. A highly sophisticated interpretation of the blues tradition steeped in musicology, social history, and critical-cultural hermeneutics, Debt and Redemption not only clarifies blues as an aesthetic tradition but, more importantly, proves that it advances a theory of social and economic development and change.

Grief, Golf, and Reinvention
Grief, Golf, and Reinvention

Author: Mick Rothman

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2015-10-02

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1491774711

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Grief, Golf and Reinvention, is the inspiring story of a retired man who suddenly finds himself widowed, alone and needing to define his new life. It is a story about the long journey from shattered pieces, through acceptance, to renewal, strength, and personal reinvention. It is an absorbing, quirky, and amazing journey from loss to a new normal, with the love of friends & family, a beginners mind, and the regularity and peace to be found in the wonderful game of golf. Mick Rothmans beautifully written book is as therapeutic as it is fascinating. I found it impossible to put down as it drew me into his lifes sudden crossroad. His emotional honesty is truly admirable and his journey extraordinary. Ron Perlman, Ph.D. President, The Center: Resources for Teaching and Learning Well written and very entertaining. An excellent illustration of the importance of meaningful activities and meaningful relationships in a persons life during a time of loss. Kim A. Meyer, Ph.D., BCBA-D Clinical Psychologist and Board Certified Behavior Analyst This book will be helpful to men who find grief and grieving unmanly. On the other hand, as a woman, this is very insightful into how a man processes emotion differently than a woman. A much-needed guide to finding our emotional comfort through the process of grief. Lynne Shupp, EA

The Normativity of Musical Works: A Philosophical Inquiry
The Normativity of Musical Works: A Philosophical Inquiry

Author: Alessandro Arbo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 9004462775

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The essay advocates a theory of the musical work as a “social object” which is based on a trace informed by a normative value. Such a normativity is explored in relation to three ways of fixing the trace: orality, notation and phonography.

The Blues Come to Texas
The Blues Come to Texas

Author:

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 1149

ISBN-13: 162349639X

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From October 1959 until the mid-1970s, Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick collaborated on what they hoped to be a definitive history and analysis of the blues in Texas. Both were prominent scholars and researchers—Oliver had already established an impressive record of publications, and McCormick was building a sprawling collection of primary materials that included field recordings and interviews with blues musicians from all over Texas and the greater South. Despite being eagerly awaited by blues fans, folklorists, historians, and ethnomusicologists who knew about the Oliver-McCormick collaboration, the intended manuscript was never completed. In 1996, Alan Govenar, a respected writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker, began a conversation with Oliver about the unfinished book on Texas blues. Subsequently, Oliver invited Govenar to assist him, and when Oliver became ill, Govenar enlisted folklorist and ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell to help him contextualize and document the existing manuscript for publication. The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book presents an unparalleled view into the minds and methods of two pioneering blues scholars.

Theft!
Theft!

Author: James Boyle

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781535543675

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"A tale of law and music that leads through the gates of time!"

I Feel So Good
I Feel So Good

Author: Bob Riesman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0226717453

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He was one of the most celebrated blues artists of his era, a visionary Chicago singer-songwriter in the 1930s; his overseas tours in the 1950s ignited the British blues-rock explosion of the 1960s. But Big Bill Broonzy has been virtually forgotten by the popular culture he helped shape. Riesman details Big Bill's complicated personal saga, and provides a definitive account of his life and music.