New Orleans Music Observed

New Orleans Music Observed

Author: Emilie Rhys

Publisher:

Published: 2021-07-30

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781737413868

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This richly illustrated volume documents in detail the exhibition "New Orleans Music Observed: The Art of Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys" at the New Orleans Jazz Museum from January 30, 2020 to September 1, 2021, curated by the museum's own David Kunian and expanded upon in this book by Emilie Rhys (wearing several hats as contributing artist, contributing writer, co-editor, photo editor, layout designer, and publisher). Noel Rockmore, well-known in New Orleans for his mid-1960s oil portraits of Preservation Hall musicians, and his daughter Emilie Rhys, whose artwork of contemporary musicians all around town has gained her recent public notice, are brought together for their first joint exhibition in which a selection of their drawings and paintings is paired with a wide variety of artifacts and historic instruments, culled mostly from the Jazz Museum's incomparable archives. As the curator of this profusely illustrated book, Emilie Rhys not only provides a visual record of the exhibition, she expands upon it through the presentation of significant new material by several Louisiana natives who are close observers of the vibrant cultural life that makes New Orleans a veritable global magnet. They are novelist, journalist, and art collector John Ed Bradley; print and public radio journalist Gwen Thompkins; and scientist and art collector Myles Robichaux. For the lead chapter in this book, Bradley has written the first ever literary exploration of the intertwined lives of Rockmore and Rhys, "Picture in a Picture: Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys in New Orleans." In Chapter 3, Robichaux's original essay speaks to the profound impact on him of discovering Rockmore's art in 2002 and meeting Rhys in 2011. For Chapter 4, "Depiction/Being Depicted," Thompkins conducted interviews in 2020 with 14 musicians exploring their interest in visual art, their thoughts about the development of their own image, and how they feel about their image appearing in drawings, paintings, and photographs by visual artists. The book has 368 illustrations including 302 in full color, a large number of which have never been seen in public previously and have been selected by Rhys, many from her extensive personal archives.


Hell and High Water

Hell and High Water

Author: Rebecca Theim

Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781455618811

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The genesis and aftermath of the print edition's death knell. In May 2012, the New York Times broke a story that the internationally acclaimed, locally beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning New Orleans Times-Picayune would become a three-day-a-week publication. The profitable newspaper slashed its veteran newsroom, antagonized the city, state, and nation, and jeopardized its vaunted reputation-all in an effort to create a new blueprint for American newspapers in the increasingly digital world. Here is the insider's account of the outrage, betrayal, and aftermath of the death of the daily edition of the Times-Picayune.


Signposts in a Strange Land

Signposts in a Strange Land

Author: Walker Percy

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-04

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9780312254193

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At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.


Katrina

Katrina

Author: Gary Rivlin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1451692269

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Ten years in the making, Gary Rivlin’s Katrina is “a gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused….a starting point for anyone interested in how The City That Care Forgot develops in its second decade of recovery” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects not just on the area’s geography and infrastructure—but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities. Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina as a staff reporter for The New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back? “Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories….Rivlin’s exquisitely detailed narrative captures the anger, fatigue, and ambiguity of life during the recovery, the centrality of race at every step along the way, and the generosity of many from elsewhere in the country” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Katrina tells the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age. This is “one of the must-reads of the season” (The New Orleans Advocate).


The Inevitable City

The Inevitable City

Author: Scott Cowen

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1137278862

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The incredible story of how New Orleans came back after Hurricane Katrina stronger than before, and how its success can be reproduced, from the man who spearheaded the efforts


Stomp and Swerve

Stomp and Swerve

Author: David Wondrich

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2003-08

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1569764972

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The early decades of American popular music--Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Caruso--are, for most listeners, the dark ages. It wasn't until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this music--black and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crude--made it onto records for all to hear. This book brings a forgotten music, hot music, to life by describing how it became the dominant American music--how it outlasted sentimental waltzes and parlor ballads, symphonic marches and Tin Pan Alley novelty numbers--and how it became rock 'n' roll. It reveals that the young men and women of that bygone era had the same musical instincts as their descendants Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and even Ozzy Osbourne. In minstrelsy, ragtime, brass bands, early jazz and blues, fiddle music, and many other forms, there was as much stomping and swerving as can be found in the most exciting performances of hot jazz, funk, and rock. Along the way, it explains how the strange combination of African with Scotch and Irish influences made music in the United States vastly different from other African and Caribbean forms; shares terrific stories about minstrel shows, "coon" songs, whorehouses, knife fights, and other low-life phenomena; and showcases a motley collection of performers heretofore unknown to all but the most avid musicologists and collectors.


Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets

Author: Judy Cooper

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780917860829

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"Explores the history, social ties, fashion, dance, and music of second lines, participatory parades put on by New Orleans's network of social aid and pleasure clubs. "Dancing in the Streets" brings together historical photographs with the work of ten contemporary second line photographers, profiles all clubs active today, and explores the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tradition"--


Snippets of New Orleans

Snippets of New Orleans

Author: Emma Fick

Publisher: University of Louisiana

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781935754992

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FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Snippets are fragments of things. They are people observed, foods consumed, ornaments spotted: a man on a streetcar, crawfish shells on the sidewalk, an ornate cornstalk-shaped fence. I believe that to immerse oneself in a place means to try and hold all its elements, past and present, grandiose and mundane, in a single plane of vision. This is, of course, impossible. The result is fragments, vignettes. In Jackson Square, for example: a vision of the first French settlers coming up the Mississippi alongside the sight of a garishly painted street performer harassing passers-by. If we cannot hold all facets of a place in our mind at once, I think the next best thing is to honor our fragmented understanding, to see in "Snippets." I learned and re-learned a lot of things making this book. I learned that even in my "home" in Louisiana I feel I am an outsider peering into a window. I re-learned how beautiful and bizarre New Orleans is, how every street has a distinct personality. . . . I re-learned that I know very little about anything, and that the more I learn the more I realize how little I know. I learned that asking for entry into people's personal lives is complicated and requires a lot of mental and ethical somersaults. This book is my most earnest and honest reflection of New Orleans: triumphant and tragic, gaudy and gritty, elegant and ugly, rich and poor, a city that embodies all these and other polar opposites with a perverse kind of grace. My account is flawed and incomplete in the way all our experiences are flawed and incomplete: there are always vistas left to see, flavors left to try, stories left to hear; there are assumptions made, words misunderstood, histories distorted. May this book communicate the New Orleans I know, and may you weave your own New Orleans truth between the pages. - Emma Fick


What a Wonderful World

What a Wonderful World

Author: Ricky Riccardi

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 030737923X

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In this richly detailed and prodigiously researched book, jazz scholar and musician Ricky Riccardi reveals for the first time the genius and remarkable achievements of the last 25 years of Louis Armstrong’s life, providing along the way a comprehensive study of one of the best-known and most accomplished jazz stars of our time. Much has been written about Armstrong, but the majority of it focuses on the early and middle stages of his career. During the last third of his career, Armstrong was often dismissed as a buffoonish if popular entertainer. Riccardi shows us instead the inventiveness and depth of his music during this time. These are the years of his highest-charting hits, including “Mack the Knife” and “Hello, Dolly"; the famed collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington; and his legendary recordings with the All Stars. An eminently readable and insightful book, What a Wonderful World completes and enlarges our understanding of one of America’s greatest and most beloved musical icons.


Woman Walk the Line

Woman Walk the Line

Author: Holly Gleason

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-09-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1477314903

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Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates. Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it. Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.