In the blues, wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. C. As with all of oxford's very short introductions, clarity, The Blues tells you--with insight, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre. As howlin' wolf once described it, "when you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues.

It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches, or as a progression of chords, " using a five-note "blues scale. Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W.

It is not an easy thing to pin down. Praised as "suave, soulful, and a committed contrarian" New York Times Book Review, a graceful writer, ebullient" Tom Waits and "a meticulous researcher, Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. He follows its evolution from ma rainey and bessie smith through bob dylan and jimi hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters.

Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago.

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. A lucid. B. King, and many others. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to international popularity, recognition, to the steamy bars of Chicago’s South Side, and imitation.

Entrancing study" -- greil Marcus "Palmer has a powerful understanding of the music and an intense involvement in the culture. The nation Penguin Books. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: robert johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show and brought blues to the airwaves; and John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, B.

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Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader

Included are selections by folklorists, musicians, literary artists, anthropologists, sociologists, critics, and aficionados. Among the signal achievements of African American culture is the style of music known as the blues, an art form evolved from southern black songs of the late nineteenth century.

This book brings together some of the most significant writings about the blues published between 1911 and 1998. The extraordinary appeal of the blues is reflected in the range of contributors to this volume, among them Howard W. Included are selections by folklorists, literary artists, musicians, sociologists, critics, anthropologists, and aficionados.

From these various perspectives emerges a new understanding of the blues: its origins in African aesthetics; the impact of slavery and Reconstruction; its early folk manifestations; and the importance of religion, audience, protest, gender, style, and the record business in its development as an art form.

Penguin Books. Further context is provided by a comprehensive introduction, and an extensive bibliography, discography, section overviews, and videography of blues materials. It has served as a wellspring for other forms of music, and rap, rock, including gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, and has exerted an influence on literature and the visual arts as well.

Thut the blues published between 1911 and 1998. From the field hollers and steel-bodied guitar of its early days to the electric amplification of today's performers, spontaneity, the visceral power of the blues has long been celebrated for its creativity, and ingenuity. Odum, houston baker, alan lomax, paul oliver, hazel carby, leroi jones, Janheinz Jahn, Langston Hughes, Richard Alan Waterman, James Baldwin, Sam Charters, Jeff Todd Titon, Charles Keil, and Angela Davis.

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

The life of blues legend robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history.

Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. Penguin Books. Used book in Good Condition. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.

Amistad.

The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions

Used book in Good Condition. But there is also a long tradition, intensified in recent decades, of thinking about music as a product of the human mind. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. The field that has emerged around this approach is known as the psychology of music.

Whether considering composition, or appreciation, listening, performance, the constraints and capabilities of the human mind play a formative role. Written in a lively and accessible manner, musicologists, this volume connects the science to larger questions about music that are of interest to practicing musicians, music therapists, and the general public alike.

Music has been examined from multiple perspectives: as a product of human history, for example, or a product of human culture. Penguin Books. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. For example: why can one musical performance move an audience to tears, clap, and another compel them to dance, or snap along? How does a "hype" playlist motivate someone at the gym? And why is that top-40 song stuck in everyone's head? ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area.

Amistad.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America

Penguin Books. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history. And i make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz. From the music of african slaves in the united states through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music.

If the negro represents, something in and about the nature of American culture, or is symbolic of, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music. So says amiri baraka in the introduction to Blues People, economic, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, and cultural history.

Used book in Good Condition. The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. Amistad.

Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford university Press USA. When we think of folk music, most of us picture Pete Seeger singing "This Land is My Land" or Joan Baez singing "Barbara Allen. But this stimulating very short introduction throws open the doors on a remarkably diverse musical genre, in a wide-ranging portrait that goes far beyond America's shores to discuss folk music of every possible kind and in every corner of the globe.

. He looks in detail at three poignant songs from three widely separated regions--northern Afghanistan, Jewish Eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world--with musical notation and lyrics included. Amistad. Written by award-winning musicologist Mark Slobin, this is the first compact introduction to folk music that offers a truly global perspective.

Slobin offers an extraordinarily generous portrait of folk music, one that embraces a Russian wedding near the Arctic Circle, a group song in a small rainforest village in Brazil, and an Uzbek dance tune in Afghanistan. Used book in Good Condition. And he also describes the efforts of scholars who fanned out across the globe, to find and document this ever-changing music.

Penguin Books.

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music

Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, and first-person accounts with “his own calm, this engrossing narrative is flavored with insightful and vivid musical descriptions that ensure “an understanding of not only the musicians, interviews with living musicians, argument-closing incantations to draw a line through a century of Delta blues” New York Times, but the music itself” Boston Sunday Globe.

Rooted in the thick-as-tar delta soil, Delta Blues is already “a contemporary classic in its field” Jazz Review. W w norton Company. Oxford university Press USA. From the field hollers of nineteenth-century plantations to Muddy Waters and B. B. Amistad. King, delta blues delves into the uneasy mix of race and money at the point where traditional music became commercial and bluesmen found new audiences of thousands.

38 illustrations Penguin Books. Used book in Good Condition. The essential history of this distinctly American genre. Atlanta journal-constitution in this “expertly researched, elegantly written, award-winning author Ted Gioia gives us “the rare combination of a tome that is both deeply informative and enjoyable to read” Publishers Weekly, dispassionate yet thoughtful history” Gary Giddins, starred review.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music

And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience.

Duke ellington, and the beatles are all here, benny goodman, and the shirelles, frank sinatra, elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Frankie Avalon, Jo Stafford, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.

Penguin Books. W w norton Company. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, radio, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century.

Used book in Good Condition. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Amistad. There are no definitive histories, " writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes.

Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hip hop.

The Devil's Music: A History Of The Blues

W w norton Company. Amistad. B. King, the blues comes alive here through accounts by the blues musicians themselves and those who knew them. The devil's music is a wholehearted and loving examination of one of America's most powerful traditions. Superbly researched and vividly written, the devil's Music is one of the only books to trace the rise and development of the blues both in relation to other forms of black music and in the context of American social history as experienced by African Americans.

Throughout this wide-ranging and fascinating book, Giles Oakley describes the texture of the life that made the blues possible, and the changing attitudes toward the music. From its roots in the turn-of-the-century honky-tonks of New Orleans and the barrelhouses and plantations of the Mississippi Delta to modern legends such as John Lee Hooker and B.

Oxford university Press USA. Penguin Books. Used book in Good Condition.

Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock 'n' Roll and Rock Saved the Blues

The blues revival of the early 1960s brought new life to a seminal genre of American music and inspired a vast new world of singers, songwriters, and rock bands. Crossroads is the intersection of blues and rock ’n’ roll, fans, a vivid portrait of the fluidity of American folk culture that captures the voices of musicians, promoters, and critics to tell this very American story of how the blues came to rest at the heart of popular music.

The rolling stones took their name from a muddy waters song; Led Zeppelin forged bluesy riffs into hard rock and heavy metal; and ZZ Top did superstar business with boogie rhythms copped from John Lee Hooker. The blues revival brought notice to these forgotten musicians, and none more so than Robert Johnson, who had his songs covered by Cream and the Rolling Stones, and who sold a million CDs sixty years after dying outside a Mississippi Delta roadhouse.

Crossroads tells the myriad stories of the impact and enduring influence of the early-’60s blues revival: stories of the record collectors, and pop culture academics; and of the lucky musicians who learned life-changing lessons from the rediscovered Depression-era bluesmen that found hipster renown by playing at coffeehouses, beatniks, folkies, on college campuses, and at the Newport Folk Festival.

W w norton Company. Oxford university Press USA. Amistad. Penguin Books.