Explores the work of professional blues musician Lonnie Johnson, demonstrating how his recorded works reveal lyrical and musical themes that call into question critical assumptions about the genre.
Lonnie Johnson is a blues legend. His virtuosity on the blues guitar is second to none, and his influence on artists from T-Bone Walker and B. B. King to Eric Clapton is well established. Yet Johnson mastered multiple instruments. He recorded with jazz icons such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and he played vaudeville music, ballads, and ......
Day by Day, Night After Night, His Final Years, 1983-1990
Stevie Ray Vaughan tightly grips a place in music history as an unmatched blues man and guitar legend. His unique style is unmistakable and has never been repeated. His otherworldly talent and relentless drive took him from humble beginnings in Texas bars to world tours and superstar status. This book presents a celebration of this artist.
Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated public radio staple Blues Before Sunrise, has spent more than thirty years observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In the expanded second edition of Pioneers of the Blues Revival, Cushing adds new interviewees to the roster of prominent white researchers and ......
The shades and structures of the blues had an immense impact on the poetry of Langston Hughes. Steven C. Tracy provides a cultural context for Hughes's work while revealing how Hughes mined Black oral and literary traditions to create his poetry. Comparing Hughes's poems to blues texts, Tracy reveals how Hughes's experimental forms reflect the ......
The product of a hardscrabble childhood, J. Mayo "Ink" Williams parlayed an Ivy League education into unlikely twin careers as a foundational producer of Black music and pioneering Black player in the early NFL. Clifford R. Murphy tells the story of an ambitious, upwardly mobile life affected, but never daunted, by white society's racism or the ......
The product of a hardscrabble childhood, J. Mayo "Ink" Williams parlayed an Ivy League education into unlikely twin careers as a foundational producer of Black music and pioneering Black player in the early NFL. Clifford R. Murphy tells the story of an ambitious, upwardly mobile life affected, but never daunted, by white society's racism or the ......
Explores lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal in the blues, revealing deceit and entrapment constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of African Americans. Argues that blues music calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular and moral justice-to-come.
Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues---the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their shared experience of brutal oppression. They used the power of music to survive that oppression, creating a simple-in-structure, emotionally complex form that ......