Today's Chicago Blues

Today's Chicago Blues PDF

Author: Karen Hanson

Publisher: Lake Claremont Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781893121195

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Profiles dozens of Chicago's blues musicians; discusses the city's blues history; and offers tips on clubs, radio stations, record labels, grave sites, and places of interest to blues fans.

Chicago Blues

Chicago Blues PDF

Author: David Whiteis

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Through revealing portraits of selected local artists and slice-of-life vignettes drawn from the city's pubs and lounges, Chicago Blues encapsulates the sound and spirit of the blues as it is lived today. As a committed participant in the Chicago blues scene for more than a quarter century, David Whiteis draws on years of his observations and extensive interviews to paint a full picture of the Chicago blues world, both on and off the stage. In addition to portraits of blues artists he has personally known and worked with, Whiteis takes readers on a tour of venues like East of Ryan and the Starlight Lounge; home to artists such as Jumpin' Willie Cobbs, Willie D., and Harmonica Khan. He tells the stories behind the lives of past pioneers including Junior Wells, pianist Sunnyland Slim, and harpist Big Walter Horton, whose music reflects the universal concerns with love, loss, and yearning that continue to keep the blues so vital for so many.

Blue Chicago

Blue Chicago PDF

Author: David Grazian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-11-15

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780226305899

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer. For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest. From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.

Chicago Blues

Chicago Blues PDF

Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann

Publisher: Big Earth Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9781932557497

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Crime stories from 21 Chicago authors.

Chicago Blues

Chicago Blues PDF

Author: Julie Reece Deaver

Publisher: HarperTeen

Published: 1995-06-09

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Lissa, a seventeen-year-old art sudent living on her own in Chicago, must raise her eleven-year-old sister when their alcoholic mother becomes incapable of caring for her.

Blues Legacy

Blues Legacy PDF

Author: David Whiteis

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2019-10-16

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 0252051742

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

Dirty Bird Blues

Dirty Bird Blues PDF

Author: Clarence Major

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0525508090

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird Blues The PRH Audio book of Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major won a 2022 EARPHONE AWARD. Narrated by Dion Graham. A Penguin Classic Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.

Chicago Blues

Chicago Blues PDF

Author: Raeburn Flerlage

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Flerlage is one of the most recognized names in photography, and his photos of the Chicago Blues scene in the 1960s and 1970s have become legendary among Blues fans and aficionados. Here, for the first time, are Raeburn's best photos of America's greatest blues artists at the pinnalcles of their careers, reporudced in a beautiful format. From Howlin' Wolf performing at the legendary Pepper's lounge to Otis Spann and James Cotton playing Muddy Waters' basement, these pictures bring to life one of the most incredible periods in American musical history.

The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold

The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold PDF

Author: Billy Boy Arnold

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-11-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 022680920X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Billy Boy Arnold, born in 1935, is one of the few native Chicagoans who both cultivated a career in the blues and stayed in Chicago. His perspective on Chicago's music, people, and places is rare and valuable. Arnold has worked with generations of musicians-from Tampa Red and Howlin' Wolf and to Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield-on countless recordings, witnessing the decline of country blues, the dawn of electric blues, the onset of blues-inspired rock, and more. Here, with writer Kim Field, he gets it all down on paper-including the story of how he named Bo Diddley Bo Diddley"--