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Post by wezzywest on Apr 17, 2013 16:34:00 GMT
Mississippi John Hurt - His life, his times, his blues. by Philip R Ratcliffe. Handy if you can develop the knack of skimming over the considerable detail of who married who, when, lived where , when etc details and concentrate on the "more interesting" bits, But hey, maybe Im just a lazy reader....I am enjoying it! I read this book last year, really enjoyed it. As you say noe details are spared
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Post by myk on Apr 19, 2013 12:43:33 GMT
Recently finished Life by Keith Richards and I thought it was a great book. Currently reading Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald. About halfway through and really enjoying it.
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Post by Mairena Red on Apr 20, 2013 10:31:49 GMT
Hello everbody,
Sorry guys ( and gals) but I'm too busy playing my recently acquired J45 to find time to read a book. However, I'm in the process of ordering Palm Trees, Señoritas and Rocket Ships which will hopefully cure me of my addiction.
All the best,
Joe (aka Mairena Red)
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Post by Stevie on Jun 1, 2013 15:22:40 GMT
Still meandering through "Palm Trees, Senoritas and Rocket Ships".
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Post by bod on Oct 20, 2013 14:16:00 GMT
Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi by David Evans (ed), available online (as, I imagine, is much else) at The American Folklife Center ( direct link to document) Evans is an academic and this shows in his approach to writing and editing, but even if the style is a bit dry it is a very interesting read (for anyone who is interested in the music of the North Mississippi 'hill country'). Unfortunately, as it seems originally to be notes to go with the recording of the same name and includes detailed discussion of the tracks, I've just had to order another CD to be able to more fully appreciate the discussion - so be warned, if you read it this could also happen to you! (MP3 samples available here)
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Post by bod on Jan 19, 2014 13:28:26 GMT
How Music Works by David Byrne, which is interesting, but I'm taking a bit at a time... (I was amazed to read that the early musical gramophones allowed home recording - things could have been very different if they'd followed that path further...) Recently finished Blues from the Delta by William Ferris, valued the discussion of mobilising learnt and improvised verses to vary song length in line with dancers' enthusiasm (or lack of it) and the role of audience-related humorous banter and badinage in the verses, leading to the observation that: "The experienced bluesman sings near a door or window which provides a quick escape if the crowd becomes to rowdy” (kinda brings it all to life..) And the dated, but fascinating (to me at least) The Natural History of the Musical Bow: A Chapter in the Developmental History of Stringed Instruments of Music, by Henry Balfour, a book like that might give a person ideas...
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Post by Michael Messer on Jan 19, 2014 13:35:17 GMT
The David Byrne book is great. It is really well written and put together. The other books are new to me.
Shine On Michael
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Post by zak71 on Jan 19, 2014 13:50:11 GMT
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Post by bod on Jan 19, 2014 14:51:52 GMT
The David Byrne book is great. It is really well written and put together. The other books are new to me. Shine On Michael I agree, the Byrne book is great both for Byrne's ideas about music and for thinking about his music (I just know Stop Making Sense is going to make a different kind of sense to me now next time I watch it). I'm just taking a chapter at a time because I'm finding a lot in each chapter and they're all about very different aspects of music in our world... I'm finding it suits me to mull each over before moving on. Here's a tad more on the other titles (having realised that naming a couple of titles doesn't tell anyone much about them... ) Ferris' Blues from the Delta is a study of blues life and culture in Clarksdale in the 60s, based on history and field trips - kinda academic, but also readable... The Natural History of the Musical Bow is a kind of extended article / section of planned bigger book from 1899. It was mentioned in something else and then I bumped into a copy at Abebooks for a tenner, couldn't resist... Unsurprisingly, then, it is really old fashioned. (Can something be offensively quaint, I wonder?) It's about the use of hunting bows as instruments, temporary mods to make such bows better when used as instruments and bows that make good instruments but can't be used for hunting... Balfour sees these as a series, and as the earliest steps in the development of stringed instruments. He discusses examples from many parts of the world, but this notwithstanding he still manages to see it as more or less an essentially African thing... (and talks about 19th century Africans as if they were a bit like living fossils, revealing the distant past to the scholar's trained eye...) Still of some interest (to me), plus some informative pictures and descriptions
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Post by Colin McCubbin on Jan 19, 2014 19:57:08 GMT
I just finished "Out of the Blues" by Brian D Kramer.. Most (all?) of us will know Brian and his reso playing, he published the book to accompany his latest CD, "Full Circle".
If you do plan to read the book, I strongly recommend you listen to the CD first, as much of the subject matter in the book reflects the songs lyrics (might be the other way round) and having the songs in my head certainly added to the book and made it very enjoyable. An interesting concept, book and music combo sharing content and reflecting each other.
I should say that I have no commercial link to Brian apart from having bought all his CDs over the years..
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Post by eggy on Jan 19, 2014 21:38:03 GMT
A very fascinating book.
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Post by bod on Apr 7, 2014 17:42:26 GMT
Hi all, A couple of things I want to share here. Firstly, I recently discovered that JSTOR (an online store for journals) started offering free, if limited, 'register and read,' access to their online collection of articles around a year ago ( link). In short, you get a (virtual) shelf and can keep up to 3 items on it an any one time. Articles currently on your shelf can be read online, but not printed or downloaded. Any article you place on your shelf has to stay there for a fortnight, to keep free use reasonable (and encourage pro researchers etc to stump up for the pro service). So, who wants to read a bunch of old journal articles? Well, me for a start. Especially when they include things like: 'Afro-American One-Stringed Instruments' by David Evans (1970) and 'Country Blues Performance and the Oral Tradition' by Ralph Eastman (1988). Seriously, it's a neat service, whatever you are interested in, it may be worth a search (for the record, I just use their free service and have no other involvement...) Secondly, I've just read 'Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?' by Joel Rudinow (1994) on JSTOR and, in short, I think it a good paper, certainly worth a read. It's an academic philosophy (of music) paper, so fairly analytic with some structured argument but, I think, still pretty accessible. I also think Rudinow does a good job of negotiating this much discussed and too often ranted about topic. According to Rudinow, 'Can white people sing the blues?' is an important question but people might not see that and won't understand it if they think it is all about race (biology). Not least because if we think that, we're liable to think that those who claim white people can't sing the blues are simply being racist (and they're not). To do the question justice, he thinks we need to look at it in terms of ethnicity (culture). However, ethnocentrism won't really solve the problem any more than racism and neither will help keep the blues alive, so we need to think about authenticity (which is, he says, really a question of credentials). He argues that white people can sing the blues - and they can do so without participating in the 'Great Music Robbery' and without descending to mere posturing - so long as they have the right credentials: I realise I've probably gone on a bit about this paper, sorry about that but it is a good paper, both in terms of awareness of the issues and the music and in terms of quality of analysis and argument. I've quoted quite a bit of the final paragraph because it seems to me to bear on issues of ongoing interest to many members of this forum, and some of these issues seem to me be to be alive in and around recent / current threads.
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Post by oldnat on Apr 9, 2014 7:57:52 GMT
G'day, Reading The Story of Paul Bigsby The Father Of the Modern Solid Body Electric Guitar. Great biography and fantastic pictures of very rare guitars and old time players. Bigsby was a very talented and interesting man. Champion motorcycle racer, patern maker, inventor, maker of the first electric guitar, the first pedal steel and his famous tremelo arms. He was also a musician in his spare time.
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Post by bod on Apr 9, 2014 9:28:19 GMT
Yeah, P.A. Bigsby was quite a chap. He also had a major hand in the design and development of Crockers - some of the most beautiful and powerful bikes to come out of the USA . In fact, that's how I first became aware of him... I really thought my mate was having a laugh at my expense when they told me he also designed the tailpieces. Then I heard about how he made early electric guitars, wound pickups, built revolutionary pedal steels...0......
So, thanks for the tip, oldnat. I think I'll have to have a read of that one myself!
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Post by oldmanblue on Apr 9, 2014 11:18:55 GMT
Just finished reading "The Mayor of MacDougal Street", the biography of Dave Van Ronk. Dave started playing acoustic blues in New York City in the 50s' and was close friends with Brownie McGhee and Rev Gary Davis. When Bob Dylan first came to New York, he slept on Dave's couch. Great book and great stories from a great man, music scholar and one of a kind player/performer. I am half way through this at the moment.
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