-
Most recent posts
- – The blackface lumpenproletariat and American popular culture
- – African American Music – A survival or an actual creative force in today’s culture?
- – Christmas is when the greedy give to the needy
- – The blues, they are no art
- – How criticism helped the vaudeville: The spotlight on Franklin “Baby” Seals
- – Wagner, Beethoven & Negro Folksongs, and … baseball
- – The Whitman Sisters: why we may never silence them.
- – Catfish & Cotton & Caffeine
- – Marketing Patent Medicine Folk and Blues
- – Blues from the circus tent
Categories
- – Artists (23)
- Alexis Korner (1)
- Blind Boy Fuller (1)
- Blind Willie Johnson (1)
- Deford Bailey (1)
- Franklin "Baby" Seals (1)
- Henry Thomas (1)
- Jaybird Coleman (1)
- Joe Evans and Arthur McCain (1)
- King Solomon Hill (1)
- Leroy Carr (1)
- Mavis Staples (1)
- Mississippi Fred McDowell (1)
- Rubin Lacy (1)
- Skip James (2)
- Son House (5)
- The Sparks (1)
- The Whitman SIsters (1)
- Walter Furry Lewis (1)
- – Blues history (42)
- – Did you know ? Blues facts from within (16)
- – Key figures (7)
- Butler May (1)
- Charles Peabody (1)
- H. C. Speir (1)
- Henry Edward Krehbiel (1)
- John Hammond (1)
- Lucy McKim (1)
- Perry Bradford (1)
- – Key Songs and Albums (3)
- Stagger Lee (1)
- Sweet Home Chicago (1)
- The Boll Weevil Song (1)
- – Pre Blues era (24)
- – Technology and Marketing (5)
- Minstrelsy (5)
- Vaudeville (5)
- – Artists (23)
Category Archives: – Pre Blues era
– Marketing Patent Medicine Folk and Blues
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Willem van Dullemen, who in his passion for folk (music) helped me in getting at my disposal part of the reading material. I also owe a great deal to watching the documentary “Free Show Tonight” produced, in 1983, by Paul Wagner, Steven J. Zeitlin, and Barr Weissman. It is a […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Pre Blues era, Minstrelsy, Vaudeville
Leave a comment
– Blues from the circus tent
Acknowledgements The credits for the essay below go completely to Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff whose invaluable research in the historical archives have permitted to unearth the role of the circus side show in the spread of the popular music (Ragged but Right, 2007) ________________________________ The circus brings to mind feelings of joy, laughter and […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Pre Blues era, Minstrelsy, Vaudeville
Leave a comment
– The Rabbit and the Wolf Blues: some notes on the echoes of the “ring shout”
[To read the article in magazine-format, click here] Speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the Jazz player and composer Sidney Bechet once mused: “Inside him he’d got the memory of all the wrong that’s been done to my people. That’s what the memory is….When a blues is good, […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Did you know ? Blues facts from within, - Pre Blues era
Tagged as: blues, ring-shout
Leave a comment
– From lash to cash: one step on the path to the blues
FOR A READING IN MAGAZINE-FORMAT, CLICK IMAGE The lineage of the blues to the African-American slave field hollers, work songs and spirituals has been endlessly repeated. Plenty of historical overviews highlight how these vocal articulations echoed African cultural elements, and how their characteristics have had a defining impact on the development of the blues. It […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Pre Blues era
3 Comments
– If the blues overtake you, jump overboard and drown
This essay’s title is inspired by the lyrics of Peg Leg Howell’s “Rock and Gravel Blues” when he sings: “Let’s go to the river and sit down Honey, let’s go to the river and sit down If the blues overtake us, jump overboard and drown”. The song was recorded at 20th April 1928 in Atlanta […]