-
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: – Did you know ? Blues facts from within
– Christmas is when the greedy give to the needy
READ THE PDF-VERSION HERE Next year, I will celebrate Christmas on April’s fool day, and give Easter presents on Halloween. In my 2014 agenda, I have noted to skip Christmas holiday. This is my way of protesting against the fake and commercialized institutional holidays that program our feelings, and wear out our feet running to […]
– Toasting to the Blues and Rap
I admit straight away that, while the blues touch my deepest emotions, rap music does not strike a chord in me. Having reached the age where retirement is no longer an abstract notion, I can hide behind the (cheap, and probably invalid) excuse of a generational argument to justify my lack of interest too in […]
– 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
– 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 […]
– Bhel, black, blue: some thoughts on the inevitability and the curative power of the blues
In 2010, Peter Muir published his book “Long Lost Blues”, which David Evans qualified as “One of the most important and original books on blues to be published in the past decade” (The Journal of Southern History). Muir is, next to a scholar, also an internationally acclaimed pianist, composer, conductor, and, moreover, the cofounder and […]