A Thousand Honey Creeks Later

A Thousand Honey Creeks Later
Author: Preston Love
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1997-11-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780819563200

The rise of jazz and Motown seen through the eyes of a premier African American performer.

Midnight at the Barrelhouse

Midnight at the Barrelhouse
Author: George Lipsitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2010-03-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1452939292

Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.” Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton. Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians. Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.

Uptown Conversation

Uptown Conversation
Author: Robert G. O'Meally
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780231123518

'Uptown Conversation' asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a culture. The essays illustrate how for more than a century jazz has initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures, inspiring musicians, filmmakers,painters and poets.

Footsteps in the Dark

Footsteps in the Dark
Author: George Lipsitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2007
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816650195

Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes. In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s. Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever. George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).

Musicking

Musicking
Author: Christopher Small
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819572241

Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. In this new book, Small outlines a theory of what he terms "musicking," a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower. Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity. This engaging and deftly written trip through the concert hall will have readers rethinking every aspect of their musical worlds.

Voices in Bali

Voices in Bali
Author: Edward Herbst
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2012-12-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819573280

A scholar and trained performer of Balinese vocal music and dance, ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst brings unique talents to bear in this provocative book. The lessons of his Balinese masters enable him to offer fresh insight to this culture's aesthetics and cultural elements. Appropriating John Cage's effective style of "mixing theory, anecdote, context, philosophy, and humor," Herbst crafts an accessible body of work, compelling in substance and form. By merging the "Balinese concept of place-time-context with Cage's concepts of structure, method, and form, [Herbst] returns to the critical issue of what scholars and intercultural artists are doing, and 'what' is their 'object' under study." Undergraduates and scholars in fields as varied as theater studies and anthropology will find this book and companion CD (in print editions) an important resource not only for its knowledgeable treatment of Balinese culture, but as an example of a more personal and engaging style of scholarly discourse. The ebook edition includes embedded audio.

The City of Musical Memory

The City of Musical Memory
Author: Lise A. Waxer
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819570567

Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Popular Music Books (2002) Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's (SEM) Alan P. Merriam Prize (2003) Salsa is a popular dance music developed by Puerto Ricans in New York City during the 1960s and 70s, based on Afro-Cuban forms. By the 1980s, the Colombian metropolis of Cali emerged on the global stage as an important center for salsa consumption and performance. Despite their geographic distance from the Caribbean and from Hispanic Caribbean migrants in New York City, Caleños (people from Cali) claim unity with Cubans, Puerto Ricans and New York Latinos by virtue of their having adopted salsa as their own. The City of Musical Memory explores this local adoption of salsa and its Afro-Caribbean antecedents in relation to national and regional musical styles, shedding light on salsa's spread to other Latin American cities. Cali's case disputes the prevalent academic notion that live music is more "real" or "authentic" than its recorded versions, since in this city salsa recordings were until recently much more important than musicians themselves, and continued to be influential in the live scene. This book makes valuable contributions to ongoing discussions about the place of technology in music culture and the complex negotiations of local and transnational cultural identities.

Dub

Dub
Author: Michael Veal
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819574422

Winner of the ARSC’s Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008) When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee “Scratch” Perry began crafting “dub” music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae’s “golden age” of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings—electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks—to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub’s social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the “dub revolution” that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe. Ebook Edition Note: Seven of the 25 illustrations have been redacted.

The 'Hood Comes First

The 'Hood Comes First
Author: Murray Forman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819501662

My Music, My War

My Music, My War
Author: Lisa Gilman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819576018

In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, recent technological developments in music listening enabled troops to carry with them vast amounts of music and easily acquire new music, for themselves and to share with their fellow troops as well as friends and loved ones far away. This ethnographic study examines U.S. troops' musical-listening habits during and after war, and the accompanying fear, domination, violence, isolation, pain, and loss that troops experienced. My Music, My War is a moving ethnographic account of what war was like for those most intimately involved. It shows how individuals survive in the messy webs of conflicting thoughts and emotions that are intricately part of the moment-to-moment and day-to-day phenomenon of war, and the pervasive memories in its aftermath. It gives fresh insight into musical listening as it relates to social dynamics, gender, community formation, memory, trauma, and politics.