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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
– Tapping the African and European barrel : tap dancing across the colour line
In my previous article I have started a narrative on my quest for the roots of the blues in the early slave music. I would now like to make a small step sideways to dedicate a few words on tap dancing. Yes, tap dancing, because it is a form of music which illustrates beautifully how […]
– Sex by the lightning of the smokestack
According to Angela Davis, political activist, writer and academic (1), the archetypal blues singer was a solitary wandering man whose principal theme was the sexual relationship to which all other themes sooner or later reverted (Giles Oakley (2)). Whilst going through the material in preparation of a coming article I plan on boogie woogie I […]
– Blues is good for your mental health
In June 1954, Professor S.I. Hayakawa presented a most interesting paper at the Second Conference on General Semantics in St. Louis, Missouri (1). Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1906 – 1992) was a politically active English professor who combined his professional activity as linguist, psychologist and above all as semanticist with his lively interest in (classic) Jazz. […]
– The Happenstance Blues
The study of history is often big fun because it leaves room to speculate in terms of “what if”. For instance : “what if” the African Americans would have had full control on their music production in the 20s instead of being “colonized also in wax”? What if for instance the Black Swan Label or […]
– The melancholic camouflage of the blues
In his article “From Blues, The conflict of Cultures” (1961), Janheinz-Jahn convincingly argues that if one reads the blues texts carefully, without any prejudice, they are all only exceptionally about melancholy. Yet, blues is associated in our minds and in our language with melancholy; when we have the blues, we mean that we feel sad, […]