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I am a Linguist provides a fascinating account of the academic adventures of multi-faceted linguist, R.M.W. (Bob) Dixon. There is fieldwork (and lengthy grammars) on Dyirbal, Yidiñ and other Aboriginal languages of Australia, the Boumaa dialect of Fijian, and Jarawara from the dense jungles of Amazonia. Theoretical studies include adjective classes, ergativity and complement clauses. There are also detective novels, science fiction stories, and pioneering work on blues and gospel discography. Interspersed with the autobiographical narrative are explanations of how linguistics is a scientific discipline, of the development of universities, of diminishing academic standards, and of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. The book is written in an easy, accessible style with numerous illustrative anecdotes. It will be an inspiration to young linguists and of interest to the general reader curious about what a scientific linguist does.
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 Clu...
Tracing the cultural, technological, and economic shifts that shaped the transformation of the recording industry
"Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses not so much on the musical contents of these genres as on the process of 'gentrification' through which these categories are produced."--Provided by publisher.
A Blues Bibliography, Second Edition is a revised and enlarged version of the definitive blues bibliography first published in 1999. Material previously omitted from the first edition has now been included, and the bibliography has been expanded to include works published since then. In addition to biographical references, this work includes entries on the history and background of the blues, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional variations and lyric transcriptions and musical analysis. The Blues Bibliography is an invaluable guide to the enthusiastic market among libraries specializing in music and African-American culture and among individual blues scholars.
In I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta, Stephen A. King reveals the strategies used by blues promoters and organizers in Mississippi, both African American and white, local and state, to attract the attention of tourists. In the process, he reveals how promotional materials portray the Delta’s blues culture and its musicians. Those involved in selling the blues in Mississippi work to promote the music while often conveniently forgetting the state’s historical record of racial and economic injustice. King’s research includes numerous interviews with blues musicians and promoters, chambers of commerce, local and regional tourism entities, and member...
This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would go, and I want to go but not I want that he would go. The first part of the book reviews the main poin...