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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
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- – Blues history (42)
- – Did you know ? Blues facts from within (16)
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- The Boll Weevil Song (1)
- – Pre Blues era (24)
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- Minstrelsy (5)
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Category Archives: – Did you know ? Blues facts from within
– Yodeling blues
It is not unrealistic to say that in the early period of blues and country music there existed a fair deal of cross pollination between these musical styles. Hillbilly and blues originate from the same region and time period and there is evidence that the racial segregation in the global social context was less striking […]
– Blowing the blues out with laughter
I have been reading a lot about the origins of the blues so far, and most of the literature presents quite interesting theories, but I was particularly struck this week with an excerpt from the classic work of Alan Lomax: “The land where the blues began” (pp 459-479). No theories, just a conversation between men […]
– Who is the Masked Marvel ?
It was August 1929. Black Thursday 24th October on Wall Street was only a couple of weeks away. The industry flourished and the sky seemed to be the limit for the booming technology and the consumerism. Ice cream and popcorn were all over in crowded movie theaters; radios sounded cheerfully and cars filled the streets. […]
– Blues music is junk
To avoid any misunderstanding : the title is not my opinion but the one of music critic Ray Kornblum in 1922 when he pronounced himself on the new phenomenon of race records that had started in the beginning of the 20s. In order to fully grasp the depth and significance of a past event, it […]
– The Sparks
One of the characteristics of blues is that is draws largely from a common repertoire of basic tunes. A new song was very often not more than a change of some lines to an existing tune either in a live performance or during a studio session, quite frequently just by improvization inspired by the mood […]