Blues Vision
Blues Vision

Author: Alexs D. Pate

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society

Published: 2015-02

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0873519744

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"A rich Minnesota literary tradition is brought into the spotlight in this groundbreaking collection of incisive prose and powerful poetry by forty- three black writers who educate, inspire, and reveal the unabashed truth. Historically significant figures tell their stories, demonstrating how much and how little conditions have changed: Gordon Parks hitchhikes to Bemidji, Taylor Gordon describes his first day as a chauffeur in St. Paul, and Nellie Stone Johnson insists on escaping the farm for high school in Minneapolis. A profusionof modern voices-- poet Tish Jones, playwright Kim Hines, and memoirist Frank Wilderson-- reflect the dizzying, complex realities of the present. Showcasing the unique vision and reality of Minnesota's African American community from the Harlem renaissance through the civil rights movement, from the black power movement to the era of hip- hop and the time of America's first black president, this compelling anthology provides an explosion of artistic expression about what it means to be a Minnesotan. Alexs Pate, an award- winning novelist, playwright, and writing professor, is the president of Innocent Technologies, LLC. Pamela R. Fletcher is associate professor of English at St. Catherine University. J. Otis Powell!? is a poet, performance artist, and curator working in an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentric lore and culture"--

BluesSpeak
BluesSpeak

Author: Lincoln T Beauchamp

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-12-11

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0252056957

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This incomparable anthology collects articles, interviews, fiction, and poetry from the Original Chicago Blues Annual, one of music history's most significant periodical blues publications. Founded and operated from 1989 to 1995 by African American musician and entrepreneur Lincoln T. Beauchamp Jr., OCBA gave voice to the blues community and often frankly addressed contentious issues within the blues such as race, identity, prejudice, wealth, gender, and inequity. OCBA often expressed an explicitly black perspective, but its contributors were a mix of black and white, American and international. Likewise, although OCBA's roots and main focus were in Chicago, Beauchamp's vision for the publication (and his own activities as a blues performer and promoter) embraced an international dimension, reflecting a broad diversity of blues audiences and activities in locations as farflung as Iceland, Poland, France, Italy, and South Africa. This volume includes key selections from OCBA's seven issues and features candid interviews with blues luminaries such as Koko Taylor, Eddie Boyd, Famoudou Don Moye, Big Daddy Kinsey, Lester Bowie, Junior Wells, Billy Boy Arnold, Herb Kent, Barry Dolins, and many more. Also featured are heartfelt memorials to bygone blues artists, insightful observations on the state of the blues in Chicago and beyond, and dozens of photographs of performers, promoters, and other participants in the worldwide blues scene.

The Virgin Encyclopedia of The Blues
The Virgin Encyclopedia of The Blues

Author: Colin Larkin

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 1448132746

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The Virgin Encyclopaedia of the Blues is a complete handbook of information and opinion about the history of the most classically simple, enduring and inspiring genre in the history of popular music. All entries have been created from the massive database of The Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, which has swiftly and firmly established itself as the undisputed champion of contemporary music reference books. Brand new research ensures that the 1000 entries are bang up-to-date and cover everyone - the musicians, bands, songwriters, producers and record labels - who has made a significant impact on the development of the blues. It brings together pioneers like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the influence of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon on the blues boom of the 1960s, and the most recent blues resurgence featuring Keb'Mo, Larry Garner and Jonny Lang. As well as the giants of the blues, this encyclopaedia has the range and depth to include performers who flew the blues flag during fallow periods, the 1980s band Roomful of Blues for example, or acts like Paul Butterfield, Chicken Shack, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who took the music to a wider, whiter, audience. Some blues musicians, including John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal, seem to last forever. Others simply defined the genre, like Lead Belly, Bessie Smith and Howlin' Wolf. Whomever you remember or want to know more about, each entry gives the essential elements - dates, career facts, discography and album ratings - as well as a sense of context, striking a balance between the extremes of the self-opinionated and the bland.

Bluets
Bluets

Author: Maggie Nelson

Publisher: Wave Books

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1933517646

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Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Whose Blues?
Whose Blues?

Author: Adam Gussow

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1469660377

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Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Finding a Way Home
Finding a Way Home

Author: Owen E. Brady

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-02-17

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1604733357

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Essays by Owen E. Brady, Kelly C. Connelly, Juan F. Elices, Keith Hughes, Derek C. Maus, Jerrilyn McGregory, Laura Quinn, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Daniel Stein, Lisa B. Thompson, Terrence Tucker, and Albert U. Turner, Jr. In Finding a Way Home, thirteen essays by scholars from four countries trace Walter Mosley's distinctive approach to representing African American responses to the feeling of homelessness in an inhospitable America. Mosley (b. 1952) writes frequently of characters trying to construct an idea of home and wrest a sense of dignity, belonging, and hope from cultural and communal resources. These essays examine Mosley's queries about the meaning of “home” in various social and historical contexts. Essayists consider the concept—whether it be material, social, cultural, or virtual—in all three of Mosley's detective/crime fiction series (Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow, and Fearless Jones), his three books of speculative fiction, two of his “literary” novels (RL's Dream, The Man in My Basement), and in his recent social and political nonfiction. Essays here explore Mosley's modes of expression, his testing of the limitations of genre, his political engagement in prose, his utopian/dystopian analyses, and his uses of parody and vernacular culture. Finding a Way Home provides rich discussions, explaining the development of Mosley's work.

Blues of a Lifetime
Blues of a Lifetime

Author: Mark T. Bassett

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2011-06

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0299269132

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Blues of a Lifetime is essential reading for people interested in suspense novelist Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear Window. Woolrich’s autobiography includes accounts of his working methods, his family and home, memories of childhood, college experience, and his philosophy of life.

Strange Natures
Strange Natures

Author: Nicole Seymour

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0252094875

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In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of "natural" categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.