Readers trace the ups, downs, successes, and struggles of the West African nation of Mali in this detailed guide that comprehensively covers the land itself and the people who call it home. Mali’s unique culture is presented to readers through informative main text that’s paired with helpful sidebars, colorful maps, and even recipes that encourage young people to make some of Mali’s most beloved foods. The geography, arts, celebrations, and citizens of Mali are also highlighted through vibrant full-color photographs that enhance this reading experience.
Banning Eyre, a recognized expert in African guitar music, guides you through a variety of important styles, including congolese, mbira, Malian blues, and juju. Learn about the history of this music, the pioneering musicians that developed each style, and the dominant characteristics and techniques necessary to play this remarkable music. All material is presented in standard notation and TAB. A CD demonstrating examples and compositions in the book makes learning easy and trouble-free for all players.
How African American Christian music influenced Western cultural history and forever changed the world of song. What do blues, jazz, soul, R&B, rock'n'roll, folk, country, rock, pop and hip hop have in common? Their origin, their fire! Holy Blues (Gospel Blues) is the source of all the roots music we love. The history of gospel music is 400 years old; its spirit even much older, and without it we simply would not be able to be enchanted by soulful music today. Reason enough to trace this good spirit, Holy Spirit. The award-winning Swiss musician and book author Richard Koechli embarks on an adventurous journey through American cultural history and shows with countless concrete examples how high the influence of faith on the music and its producers has been throughout the centuries, how decisive and mysterious the divine dimension shapes the music at every moment. Koechli does this in a double package: as a book author with a soul stirring history trip, and as a blues artist with very personal interpretations of timeless Holy Blues songs (free download).
The first book by David Dicaire, Blues Singers: Biographies of 50 Legendary Artists of the Early 20th Century, (McFarland, 1999), included pioneers, innovators, superstars, and cult heroes of blues music born before 1940. This second work covers those born after 1940 who have continued the tradition. This work has five sections, each with its own introduction. The first, Modern Acoustic Blues, covers artists that are major players on the acoustic blues scene of recent time, such as John Hammond, Jr. The second, Contemporary Chicago Blues, features artists of amplified, citified, gritty blues (Paul Butterfield and Melvin Taylor, among others). Section three, Modern American Electric Blues, includes some Texas blues singers such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmie Vaughan and examines how the blues have spread throughout the United States. Contemporary Blues Women are in section four. Section five, Blues Around the World, covers artists from four different continents and twelve different countries. Each entry provides biographical and critical information on the artist, and a complete discography. A bibliography and supplemental discographies are also provided.
In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues. Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt. Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions. With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world [Publisher description].
Mali is a landlocked country in West Africa, bordered by Niger to the east, Burkina Faso to the south-east, Côte d'Ivoire to the south, Guinea to the south-west, Senegal to the west, and Mauritania to the north and north-west. The country has a rich cultural history, with evidence of human settlement as far back as 10,000 BC. From the ancient Malian Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries to the present-day challenges of political instability, Mali has experienced significant changes over time. Today, Mali remains one of the least developed countries in the world, with high poverty rates, food insecurity, and limited access to education and healthcare. Despite these challenges, Mali is rich in natural resources, including gold, and has potential for economic growth and development. As a former French colony, French is the official language of Mali, but many people also speak the regional languages of Bambara, Songhai, and Tamashek. Islam is the dominant religion in Mali, though there are also significant Christian and traditional animist populations. Mali is home to several important cultural sites, including the ancient city of Timbuktu and the Dogon people, known for their unique architecture and spiritual practices. Mali also has a strong tradition of music and dance, with the griot tradition of oral storytelling and praise singing being an important part of the country's cultural heritage.
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll surveys the origins of rock 'n' roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Unlike other histories of rock, Before Elvis offers a far broader and deeper analysis of the influences on rock music. Dispelling common misconceptions, it examines rock's origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock 'n' roll appeared. This unique study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock 'n' roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music till then played only by and for black audiences. In Before Elvis, Birnbaum daringly argues a more complicated history of rock's evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and rhythm-and-blues--a melange that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into rhythm-and-blues. Written in an easy style, Before Elvis presents a bold argument about rock's origins and required reading for fans and scholars of rock 'n' roll history.
