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Author Gussow, Adam, author.

Title Whose blues? : facing up to race and the future of the music / Adam Gussow
Published Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020]
©2020

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Description 1 online resource (320 pages) : illustrations
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents Starting the conversation -- Blues conditions -- Blues feelings and "real bluesmen" -- Blues expressiveness and the blues ethos -- W.C. Handy and the "birth" of the blues -- Langston Hughes and the scandal of early blues poetry -- Zora Neale Hurston in the Florida jooks -- Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Southern blues violences -- The blues revival and the Black arts movement -- Giving it all away : blues harmonica education in the digital age -- Turnaround
Summary "Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of 'Crazy Blues' set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for 'race records.' Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's 'No black. No white. Just the blues,' as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if 'blues is black music,' as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-308), discography, and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (JSTOR, viewed January 12, 2020)
Subject Blues (Music) -- History and criticism
Music and race -- United States
African Americans -- United States -- Music -- History and criticism
MUSIC / Ethnomusicology
African Americans -- Music
Blues (Music)
Music and race
United States
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
Author Project Muse. distributor.
LC no. 2020015417
ISBN 1469660385
9781469660387
9781469660370
1469660377