The Blue and the Gray... and the Brown! While out on patrol, Blutch and Chesterfield encounter an unusual soldier: a woman wearing a Union uniform, who has come to join the army to look for her brother and uphold the family's honour. Blutch is unconvinced, but the sergeant, won over by the combination of bravery and a pretty face, agrees to help her. That, however, means taking her along for Captain Stark's demented charges - a prospect that could drive anyone to shirk their duty or desert...
An Ezra Jack Keats Book Award Winner A New York Times Best Illustrated Book An NPR Best Book of the Year A Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner A picture book celebration of the indomitable Muddy Waters, a blues musician whose fierce and electric sound laid the groundwork for what would become rock and roll. Muddy Waters was never good at doing what he was told. When Grandma Della said the blues wouldn’t put food on the table, Muddy didn’t listen. And when record producers told him no one wanted to listen to a country boy playing country blues, Muddy ignored them as well. This tenacious streak carried Muddy from the hardscrabble fields of Mississippi to the smoky juke joints of Chicago and finally to a recording studio where a landmark record was made. Soon the world fell in love with the tough spirit of Muddy Waters. In blues-infused prose and soulful illustrations, Michael Mahin and award-winning artist Evan Turk tell Muddy’s fascinating and inspiring story of struggle, determination, and hope.
Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international contributors to Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From explore this aspect of the blues and establish the significance of African American popular song as a neglected form of oral history. “High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood,” by David Evans, is the definitive study of songs about one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the United States. In “Death by Fire: African American Popular Music on the Natchez Rhythm Club Fire,” Luigi Monge analyzes a continuum of songs about exclusively African American tragedy. “Lookin’ for the Bully: An Enquiry into a Song and Its Story,” by Paul Oliver traces the origins and the many avatars of the Bully song. In “That Dry Creek Eaton Clan: A North Mississippi Murder Ballad of the 1930s,” Tom Freeland and Chris Smith study a ballad recorded in 1939 by a black convict at Parchman prison farm. “Coolidge’s Blues: African American Blues from the Roaring Twenties” is Guido van Rijn’s survey of blues of that decade. Robert Springer's “On the Electronic Trail of Blues Formulas” presents a number of conclusions about the spread of patterns in blues narratives. In “West Indies Blues: An Historical Overview 1920s-1950s,” John Cowley turns his attention to West Indian songs produced on the American mainland. Finally, in “Ethel Waters: ‘Long, Lean, Lanky Mama,’” Randall Cherry reappraises the early career of this blues and vaudeville singer
Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters begins with a moment lifted from a young musician’s dreams. Brian Bisesi, a guitarist barely out of his teens, is invited on stage to fill in for a missing member of the band backing blues legend Muddy Waters. This life-changing quirk of fate opens the door into a world of challenges and opportunities that Bisesi, an Italian American reared in the comforts of a New York City suburb, can barely imagine. Despite their differences, Bisesi and Waters hit it off, and what might have been a one-night stand turns into a career. From 1978 to 1980, Bisesi works for Waters as his road manager, bean-counter, and at times his confidant, while often sitting in with the band. Bisesi’s years with the band take him to Europe, Japan, Canada, and across the United States as Waters tours—and parties—with rock gods like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, a Beatle, and the gamut of musicians who came of age with Waters and introduced a younger generation to the blues. In Out of the Blue, Bisesi captures it all: from the pranks and tensions among bluesmen enduring a hard life on the road, to observations about Waters’s technique, his love of champagne and reefer, his eye for women, and his sometimes-acrid views of contemporary music. Bisesi has sharp insights into the ill-conceived management decisions that led to the dissolution of Waters’s longest-serving band in June of 1980. This book will rivet, amuse, and occasionally infuriate blues aficionados. It is a raucous and intimate portrait of the blues scene at a pivotal moment in time that fascinates music historians and blues fans alike.
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.
The greatest albums of all time . . . and how they happened. Organised chronologically and spanning seven decades, The MOJO Collection presents an authoritative and engaging guide to the history of the pop album via hundreds of long-playing masterpieces, from the much-loved to the little known. From The Beatles to The Verve, from Duke Ellington to King Tubby and from Peggy Lee to Sly Stone, hundreds of albums are covered in detail with chart histories, full track and personnel listings and further listening suggestions. There's also exhaustive coverage of the soundtrack and hit collections that every home should have. Like all collections, there are records you listen to constantly, albums you've forgotten, albums you hardly play, albums you love guiltily and albums you thought you were alone in treasuring, proving The MOJO Collection to be an essential purchase for those who love and live music.
Featuring interviews with some of the most influential blues musicians who ever lived, this guide explores the electric guitar pioneers and practitioners of Chicago and Delta blues, including such historic figures as Lightnin' Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, Jimmie Reed, and Freddie King. Original.
This revised and updated definitive blues bibliography now includes 6,000-7,000 entries to cover the last decade’s writings and new figures to have emerged on the Country and modern blues to the R&B scene.
The Harmonica Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive book ever written on the instrument, offering over 900 articles on players, bands, techniques, resources and a discography of over 5,000 recordings by harmonica players. Originallyreleased in 1998, this new edition is profusely illustrated with over 150 photographs of the players who have made the harmonica the world's most popular musical instrument. This book has been critically acclaimed by readers in over 25 countries and is a must-have for any serious harmonica enthusiast
