Willie Dixon
Willie Dixon

Author: Mitsutoshi Inaba

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 0810869934

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One of the greats of blues music, Willie Dixon was a recording artist whose abilities extended beyond that of bass player. A singer, songwriter, arranger, and producer, Dixon's work influenced countless artists across the music spectrum. In Willie Dixon: Preacher of the Blues, Mitsutoshi Inaba examines Dixon's career, from his earliest recordings with the Five Breezes through his major work with Chess Records and Cobra Records. Focusing on Dixon's work on the Chicago blues from the 1940s to the early 1970s, this book details the development of Dixon's songwriting techniques from his early professional career to his mature period and compares the compositions he provided for different artists. This volume also explores Dixon's philosophy of songwriting and its social, historical, and cultural background. This is the first study to discuss his compositions in an African American cultural context, drawing upon interviews with his family and former band members. This volume also includes a detailed list of Dixon's session work, in which his compositions are chronologically organized.

When I Left Home
When I Left Home

Author: Buddy Guy

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2012-05-08

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0306821079

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According to Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy is the greatest blues guitarist of all time. An enormous influence on these musicians as well as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck, he is the living embodiment of Chicago blues. Guy's epic story stands at the absolute nexus of modern blues. He came to Chicago from rural Louisiana in the fifties—the very moment when urban blues were electrifying our culture. He was a regular session player at Chess Records. Willie Dixon was his mentor. He was a sideman in the bands of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. He and Junior Wells formed a band of their own. In the sixties, he became a recording star in his own right. When I Left Home tells Guy's picaresque story in his own unique voice, that of a storyteller who remembers everything, including blues masters in their prime and the exploding, evolving culture of music that happened all around him.

Give My Poor Heart Ease
Give My Poor Heart Ease

Author: William Ferris

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 080789852X

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself.

Bass Players To Know
Bass Players To Know

Author: Ryan Madora

Publisher:

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 9781689573658

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For the aspiring musician, knowing what to listen to is just as important as knowing what to play. Bass player and writer Ryan Madora provides the reader with exactly that--a guide to listening and learning from the greats. Shining the spotlight on players who are too often confined to the background, this book highlights the session aces, band members, and career musicians whose bass lines have permeated popular culture. Madora discusses the nuances of bass playing and the stylistic choices behind classic records, top-forty hits, and funky deep cuts. An invaluable resource for professionals and hobbyists alike, Bass Players To Know features players who have contributed to the evolution of the instrument, including Ray Brown, Jack Bruce, Cliff Burton, Duck Dunn, Louis Johnson, Edgar Meyer, Willie Weeks, and many others.

Can't Quit You, Baby
Can't Quit You, Baby

Author: Ellen Douglas

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1989-12-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0140121021

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“It is rare when a book this fine enters the world of contemporary American literature.” – The Boston Globe Two women share a Mississippi household for fifteen years, rolling out piecrusts and making conversation. Cornelia is rich, white, and pampered, the mistress of the house, who oversees a seemingly perfect world of smooth surfaces and stubborn silence. Tweet, her housekeeper, is a poor, black, world-weary woman with a ghost-ridden past. As the years go by, Cornelia and Tweet each endure moments of uncertainty and despair; each, in her time of need, is rescued by the other. In the footsteps of Southern writers like Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Douglas celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit in this story of two women bound by transgression and guilt, memory and illusion, gratitude and love. “Ellen Douglas is not just one of our best Southern novelists. She is one of our best American novelists.” – The New York Times Book Review

Romancing the Folk
Romancing the Folk

Author: Benjamin Filene

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780807848623

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In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo

Incurable Blues
Incurable Blues

Author: Will Romano

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780879308339

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Gennem interviews med Hubert Sumlin og hans nærmeste samarbejdspartnere beskrives den særlige Sumlin-bluesguitarstil, som gennem tiden har inspireret navne som Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan m.fl.

Moanin' at Midnight
Moanin' at Midnight

Author: James Segrest

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2012-11-28

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 0307831019

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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.

Can't Be Satisfied
Can't Be Satisfied

Author: Robert Gordon

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0316567728

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Muddy Waters invented electric blues and created the template for the rock and roll band and its wild lifestyle. Gordon excavates Muddy's mysterious past and early career, taking us from Mississippi fields to postwar Chicago street corners.