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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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- Blind Boy Fuller (1)
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- Joe Evans and Arthur McCain (1)
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- – Blues history (42)
- – Did you know ? Blues facts from within (16)
- – Key figures (7)
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- H. C. Speir (1)
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- – Key Songs and Albums (3)
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- The Boll Weevil Song (1)
- – Pre Blues era (24)
- – Technology and Marketing (5)
- Minstrelsy (5)
- Vaudeville (5)
- – Artists (23)
Category Archives: – Pre Blues era
– 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 […]
– A Slave’s Christmas: From ‘Big Times’ to ‘Heartbreak Day’
In 1937, the former slave Kisey McKimm, born around 1853 in the state of Kentucky, told the Federal Writer’s Project reporter what most of the slave histories confirm: “De great day on de plantation, was Christmas, when we all got a little present from de Master”. Another former slave, Beauregard Tenneyson, aged 87 when interviewed, […]
Posted in - Pre Blues era
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– Hambone: an ingredient for delicious soup, or an instrument for scorn, or for strong rhythm, or for hot sex?
In 2009, the Richmond professional baseball team was looking for a new franchise and was about to move to a new home place in Virginia. On this occasion, it wanted to replace its name “The Defenders”. One of the six names on the short list was “The Hambones”. This alternative was dropped when the Virginia […]
Posted in - Pre Blues era
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– Jim Crow and black music: from cheerful stable boy to despised symbol of institutionalized racism
Do you have a spare minute for me, yes? I would like to tell you briefly the tragic story of a poor black stableboy who happily jumped through life but ended up, against his own will, to be an icon of structural and institutionalized racism, up until today. Once upon a time in America, around […]
Posted in - Pre Blues era, Minstrelsy
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– From post-mortem racism to blues
The reading of black music in America reveals a striking thematic continuity from the earliest slave songs to the blues and later to hip hop. One such a consistent theme is the expression of the emotional reaction from the individual singer, as the exponent of his group, to the oppression exercised by the dominant white […]
Posted in - Pre Blues era
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