Author: Michael W. Harris Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195358112 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
Most observers believe that gospel music has been sung in African-American churches since their organization in the late 1800s. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as Michael W. Harris's history of gospel blues reveals. Tracing the rise of gospel blues as seen through the career of its founding figure, Thomas Andrew Dorsey, Harris tells the story of the most prominent person in the advent of gospel blues. Also known as "Georgia Tom," Dorsey had considerable success in the 1920s as a pianist, composer, and arranger for prominent blues singes including Ma Rainey. In the 1930s he became involved in Chicago's African-American, old-line Protestant churches, where his background in the blues greatly influenced his composing and singing. Following much controversy during the 1930s and the eventual overwhelming response that Dorsey's new form of music received, the gospel blues became a major force in African-American churches and religion. His more than 400 gospel songs and recent Grammy Award indicate that he is still today the most prolific composer/publisher in the movement. Delving into the life of the central figure of gospel blues, Harris illuminates not only the evolution of this popular musical form, but also the thought and social forces that forged the culture in which this music was shaped.
Author: Michael W. Harris Associate Professor of History and African-American World Studies Wesleyan University Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198022859 Category : Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
In the early 1930s an exciting new musical form arose in Chicago known as the gospel blues. The principal figure in the creation of this distinctive music was a blues pianist named Thomas A. Dorsey, who had considerable success in the 1920s as a pianist, composer, and arranger for such prominent blues singers as Ma Rainey. In the 1930s, Dorsey became increasingly involved in the African-American churches in Chicago. His background in the blues was an important influence on his composing and singing of church music. At first the "respectable" Chicago churches rejected this new form, not only because of Dorsey's blues playing and singing, but more because of the excitement in the church congregation that this new gospel blues produced. However, by the end of the 1930s, the power of the music had made gospel blues a major force in African-American churches and religion. Through the voices of such singers as Mahalia Jackson, gospel blues helped shape the development of American popular music. In this book, Harris looks at the story of the rise of gospel blues as seen through the career of its founding figure. Harris also places it in the broader contexts of African-American religion and the large urban migration of African-Americans after World War I.
Author: Mark Burford Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190634901 Category : African American gospel singers Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
Nearly a half century after her death in 1972, Mahalia Jackson remains the most esteemed figure in black gospel music history. Born in the backstreets of New Orleans in 1911, Jackson during the Great Depression joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where she became an highly regarded church singer and, by the mid-fifties, a coveted recording artist for Apollo and Columbia Records, lauded as the "World's Greatest Gospel Singer." This "Louisiana Cinderella" narrative of Jackson's career during the decade following World War II carried important meanings for African Americans, though it remains a story half told. Jackson was gospel's first multi-mediated artist, with a nationally broadcast radio program, a Chicago-based television show, and early recordings that introduced straight-out-of-the-church black gospel to American and European audiences while also tapping the vogue for religious pop in the early Cold War. In some ways, Jackson's successes made her an exceptional case, though she is perhaps best understood as part of broader developments in the black gospel field. Built upon foundations laid by pioneering Chicago organizers in the 1930s, black gospel singing, with Jackson as its most visible representative, began to circulate in novel ways as a form of popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, its practitioners accruing prestige not only through devout integrity but also from their charismatic artistry, public recognition, and pop-cultural cachet. These years also saw shifting strategies in the black freedom struggle that gave new cultural-political significance to African American vernacular culture. The first book on Jackson in 25 years, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field draws on a trove of previously unexamined archival sources that illuminate Jackson's childhood in New Orleans and her negotiation of parallel careers as a singing Baptist evangelist and a mass media entertainer, documenting the unfolding material and symbolic influence of Jackson and black gospel music in postwar American society.
Author: Patrick B Mullen Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252050312 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
The cowboy songs and dusty Texas car rides of his youth set Patrick B. Mullen on a lifelong journey into the sprawling Arcadia of American music. That music fused so-called civilized elements with native forms to produce everything from Zydeco to Conjunto to jazz to Woody Guthrie. The civilized/native idea, meanwhile, helped develop Mullen's critical perspective, guide his love of music, and steer his life's work. Part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir, Right to the Juke Joint follows Mullen from his early embrace of country and folk to the full flowering of an idiosyncratic, omnivorous interest in music. Personal memory merges with a lifetime of fieldwork in folklore and anthropology to provide readers with a deeply informed analysis of American roots music. Mullen opens up on the world of ideas and his own tireless fandom to explore how his cultural identity--and ours--relates to concepts like authenticity and "folkness." The result is a charming musical map drawn by a gifted storyteller whose boots have traveled a thousand tuneful roads.
Author: James D. Bratt Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing ISBN: 0802867103 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
This book samples the rich variety of worship practices in American history to show how worship can be a fruitful subject for historians to study and how past cases can enrich our understanding of worship today. By the Vision of Another World gathers highly regarded historians who usually are not read together because of the widely different subjects on which they typically work. Yet their essays all fit together here as they address how worship, work, and worldview converge and reinforce each other no matter what particular place, era, denomination, or ethnic/racial group is under consideration. The variety of methodologies and voices will appeal to a breadth of critical interests, while the consistently high quality of historical narrative will keep readers engaged.
Author: David Horn Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1441148744 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 586
Book Description
The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music Volume 8 is one of six volumes within the 'Genre' strand of the series. This volume discusses the genres of North America in relation to their cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; lyrics and language; typical features of performance and presentation; historical development and paths and modes of dissemination; influence of technology, the music industry and political and economic circumstances; changing stylistic features; notable and influential performers; and relationships to other genres and sub-genres. This volume features over 100 in-depth essays on genres ranging from Adult Contemporary to Alternative Rock, from Barbershop to Bebop, and from Disco to Emo.
Author: Anthony Appiah Publisher: ISBN: 0195170555 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 3951
Book Description
Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.
Author: Dave DiMartino Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317464303 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 800
Book Description
This is an examination of the crucial formative period of Chinese attitudes toward nuclear weapons, the immediate post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki period and the Korean War. It also provides an account of US actions and attitudes during this period and China's response.
Author: Kyle B. Roberts Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004340297 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 788
Book Description
In Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014, Kyle Roberts and Stephen Schloesser, S.J., bring together new scholarship that explores the work and experiences of Jesuits and their women religious collaborators in North America over two centuries.
Author: Charles Hiroshi Garrett Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520942825 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.
Author: Michael W. Harris
Author: Michael W. Harris Associate Professor of History and African-American World Studies Wesleyan University
Author: Mark Burford
Author: Patrick B Mullen
Author: James D. Bratt
Author: David Horn
Author: Anthony Appiah
Author: Dave DiMartino
Author: Kyle B. Roberts
Author: Charles Hiroshi Garrett