Write Me a Few of Your Lines

Write Me a Few of Your Lines
Author: Steven Carl Tracy
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 632
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

A major anthology of writings on the blues published between 1911 and 1998, this collection includes sections by folklorists, literary artists, musicians, critics and aficionados.

American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales [3 volumes]

American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales [3 volumes]
Author: Christopher R. Fee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1265
Release: 2016-08-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610695682

A fascinating survey of the entire history of tall tales, folklore, and mythology in the United States from earliest times to the present, including stories and myths from the modern era that have become an essential part of contemporary popular culture. Folklore has been a part of American culture for as long as humans have inhabited North America, and increasingly formed an intrinsic part of American culture as diverse peoples from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania arrived. In modern times, folklore and tall tales experienced a rejuvenation with the emergence of urban legends and the growing popularity of science fiction and conspiracy theories, with mass media such as comic books, television, and films contributing to the retelling of old myths. This multi-volume encyclopedia will teach readers the central myths and legends that have formed American culture since its earliest years of settlement. Its entries provide a fascinating glimpse into the collective American imagination over the past 400 years through the stories that have shaped it. Organized alphabetically, the coverage includes Native American creation myths, "tall tales" like George Washington chopping down his father's cherry tree and the adventures of "King of the Wild Frontier" Davy Crockett, through to today's "urban myths." Each entry explains the myth or legend and its importance and provides detailed information about the people and events involved. Each entry also includes a short bibliography that will direct students or interested general readers toward other sources for further investigation. Special attention is paid to African American folklore, Asian American folklore, and the folklore of other traditions that are often overlooked or marginalized in other studies of the topic.

Cross the Water Blues

Cross the Water Blues
Author: Neil A. Wynn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2010-02-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1604735473

Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.

Time in the Blues

Time in the Blues
Author: Julia Simon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190666552

Immediate and spontaneous, the blues focuses on the present moment, creating an experience of time for performer and listener. Time in the Blues offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues within the historical context of Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence, and migration.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright
Author: Keneth Kinnamon
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476609128

African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.

Langston Hughes and the Blues

Langston Hughes and the Blues
Author: Steven C. Tracy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2024-05-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0252056949

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 poetics, structures, rhythms, and musical techniques of the music. Tracy also offers a discography of recordings by the artists--Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others--who most influenced the poet.

Theory Matters

Theory Matters
Author: Vincent Leitch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135204977

First Published in 2003. In this book on what theory means today, the general editor of the Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory explores how theory has altered the way the humanities do business. Theory got personal, went global, became popular, and in the process has changed everything we thought we knew about intellectual life. One of the most adroit and perceptive observers of the critical scene, Vincent Leitch offers these engaging snapshots to show how theory is at work. This is an utterly readable little book by one of our best historians on the theoretical turn that over the past thirty years has so powerfully changed the academy.

The British Blues Network

The British Blues Network
Author: Andrew Kellett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472036998

An exciting new examination of how African-American blues music was emulated and used by white British musicians in the late 1950s and early 1960s

Encyclopedia of the Blues: A-J, index

Encyclopedia of the Blues: A-J, index
Author: Edward M. Komara
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
Total Pages: 728
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780415927000

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Hearing Eye

The Hearing Eye
Author: Graham Lock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0195340507

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists. There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes V lz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom. With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.