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Challenging the traditional interpretation that the years between Reconstruction and World War I were a period when Blacks made only marginal advances in religion, politics, and social life, John Giggie contends that these years marked a critical turning point in the religious history of Southern Blacks.
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. Featuring newly transcribed lyrics, the book offers sustained attention to how both Black and white communities responded to many of the tragic events that occurred before the mid-1950s. Through detailed textual analysis, Luigi Monge explores songs on natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes); accidental disasters (sinkings, fires, train wrecks, explosions, and air disasters); and infestations, epidemics, and diseases (the boll weevil, the jake leg, and influen...
Born 130 years ago in the heart of Mississippi, Charlie Patton (c. 1891–1934) is considered by many to be a father of the Delta blues. With his bullish baritone voice and his fluid slide guitar touch, Patton established songs like “Pony Blues,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere” in the blues lexicon and, through his imitators, in American music. But over the decades, his contributions to blues music have been overshadowed in popularity by those of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and other mid-century bluesmen and women who’ve experienced a resurgence in their music. King of the Delta Blues Singers, originally published in 1988, began a small renaissance in Patton a...
The Voice of the Blues brings together interviews with many pioneering blues men including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and many others.
Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.
The venerable Dixie Hummingbirds stand at the top of the black gospel music pantheon as artists who not only significantly shaped that genre but, in the process, also profoundly influenced emerging American pop music genres from Rhythm & Blues and Doo-Wop to Rock 'n' Roll, Soul, and Hip-Hop. Great God A'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds shows how, in a career spanning more than nine decades, they pointed the way from pure a cappella harmony to guitar-driven soul to pop-stardom crossover, collaborating with artists like Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon along the way. Drawing on interviews with founding and quintessential members as well as many of the pop luminaries influenced by the Hummingbirds, a...
How could the Mississippi Delta, one of the world's most prolific cultural centres, be demolished by a predictable natural disaster? This revised edition of Clyde Woods's classic book examines disaster relief and reconstruction conflicts after Hurricane Katrina. Development Arrested also traces the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy discourse from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, documenting the unceasing attacks on the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and how, despite having suffered countless defeats at the hands of the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta region have continued to push forward their agenda for social, economic and cultural justice. Woods examines the role of the blues in sustaining their efforts, surveying a musical tradition including jazz, rock and roll, soul and hiphop that has embraced a radical vision of social change.
The popular Encyclopedia of the Blues, first published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1992 and reprinted six times, has become an indispensable reference source for all involved with or intrigued by the music. The work alphabetizes hundreds of biographical entries, presenting detailed examinations of the performers and of the instruments, trends, recordings, and producers who have created and popularized this truly American art form.
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A multicultural, interdisciplinary panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in "Bridging Southern Culture" by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. Using the best of recent scholarship, this collection demonstrates a revitalized energy in southern studies. A showcase of preeminent southern intellectuals, this book is is a heady mix of observations that draw new connections between eras, groups, races, and subregions. Lowe and his peers present a timely assessment of the state of southern studies in the twenty-first century.