John Franklin Bardin's most acclaimed work plays a virtuoso performance on music and madness in this unforgettable thriller. In 1946 New York, Ellen, a world-renowned musician, is suffering from the effects of her latest mental breakdown. Amongst other challenges, a chance meeting with a folk singer from her past causes her psychological well-being to rapidly deteriorate. Over the following terrifying weeks, Ellen finds herself becoming both a criminal and a victim as she attempts to contend with the darkness within. "We have all had these feelings, more or less, and now and then. The healthier among us try to step back from the brink, try to laugh at what might have happened if we had gone a bit further. The reader of these tales will read in horror—those who can take it. And they will not forget very soon." —Patricia Highsmith
A poetic treatment of the period of American history between the beginning of the Mexican War and the end of the Civil War, by Michigan poet Vievee Francis. The title of Blue-Tail Fly comes from an antebellum song commonly known as "Jimmy Crack Corn." The blue-tail fly is a supposedly insignificant creature that bites the horse that bucks and kills the master. In this collection, poet Vievee Francis gives voice to "outsiders"—from soldiers and common folk to leading political figures—who play the role of the blue-tail fly in the period of American history between the Mexican American War and the Civil War. Through a diverse range of styles, characters, and emotions, Francis's poems consider the demands of war, protest and resistance to it, and the cross-cultural exchanges of wartime. More than a narrowly themed text, Blue-Tail Fly is a book of balances, weighing the give-and-take of people and cultures in the arena of war. For lovers of poetry and those interested in American history, Blue-Tail Fly will illustrate the complexities of the American past and future.
Why, beginning in the late 1960s, did expressive objects made by poor people come to be regarded as "twentieth-century folk art," increasingly sought after by the middle class and the wealthy? Julia Ardery explores that question through the life story of
Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas, evoking the African American South in fluid detail. Her poems become panhandle folktales fraught with the weight of memories both individual and collective. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people, and geography will keep the reader rooted in the good earth of extraordinary verse.
A new edition of the classic New York Times bestseller edited by Toni Morrison, offering an encyclopedic look at the black experience in America from 1619 through the 1940s with the original cover restored. “I am so pleased the book is alive again. I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph.”—Toni Morrison Seventeenth-century sketches of Africans as they appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.” In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly five hundred others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America—The Black Book. Now in a newly restored hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith joined Harris and Morrison (then a Random House editor, ultimately a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Nobel Laureate) to spend months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials—transcripts from fugitive slaves’ trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and celebrated abolitionists, as well as chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century, and vibrant posters from “Black Hollywood” films of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, it was an article she found while researching this project that provided the inspiration for Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved. A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented and featuring a foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work.
Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.
This is a guide book for those totally new to the art of tying flies. Until now, learning flytying from a book has not only been challenging, but often the cause of great frustration, with photographs or diagrams making even the elementary techniques difficult to grasp. Step-by-step images help a reasonably proficient flytyer understand the stages in making a fly, but for the new beginner, there will always be a gap between each step-by-step image, which can be bewildering. Seeing the manual maneuvers that take place in these pages can make the different between success and failure for a beginner. The techniques you will learn in this book are the building blocks for which all successful fishing flies, even the most complex ones, are based.
A huge collection of the world's most-loved folk songs and melodies, in "fakebook" style (melody, lyrics and chord changes). Perfect for sing-alongs, children's centers, classroom teachers or parents.
Whatever happened to the old-fashioned children's games and songs? Old favorites like Kick the Can, Fox and Geese, and Red Rover encouraged camaraderie, physical activity, coordination and social interaction--as electronic and computer games never can. Family and campfire singalongs helped preserve the folksong and storytelling tradition while instilling in children a sense of community and a confidence in their musical capability. Writer and poet Sharon O'Bryan has gathered a collection of the old games and songs. She brings the old days back to life with instructions for outdoor games like King of the Mountain; car games like Graveyard; card games including Old Maid; and favorite party games such as Blind Man's Bluff. Lyrics and music to singing games and campfire songs are added to this collection to offer old style amusement for every child and occasion.
