|
Satan and Adam CDs
Harlem Blues
/
Mother Mojo
/
Living on the River (Reviews)
* * * *
*
Seems Like
Murder Here:
Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition
By Adam Gussow
Seems Like
Murder Here offers a
revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere
laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerges in
this provocative study as a vital response to spectacle
lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in
the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both
classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of
W.C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B.B. King to the poetry
of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems
Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues
and its enduring power.
Seems Like
Murder Here reshapes
the blues to form a resonant and persuasive narrative of violence,
trauma, memory, resilience, expressive cultural resistance, and
healing. As an intimate practitioner and inspired scholar, Gussow
offers stunning insights and provocative new understandings of the
blues worldview. he is abreast of blues in song, lyricism, story,
and action, and his ambitious and impressive tale is blues itself
at its audacious and speculative heights."
— Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of
Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature
Seems Like
Murder Here is a cogent
and insightful reflection on the meaning and purpose of the blues.
Gussow has liberated the genre by establishing it as a vehicle for
chronicling and interpreting the complex relationship between
music, its performers, its venues, and the conditions that
informed and shaped its content. This book will fascinate anyone
who is interested in exploring this marvelous music and American
culture."— Daphne Duval Harrison, author of
Black
Pearls: Blue Queens of the 1920s
Seems Like
Murder Here is a true and
rare presentation of the blues. With this phenomenal book, Gussow
becomes a triple-crown winner in his contributions to the blues:
as a brilliant performer, as a poignant memoirist, and now as a
seminal blues scholar."— Sterling D. Plumpp, author of
Blues
Narratives
 |
Adam Gussow is assistant
professor of English and southern studies at the University of
Mississippi. He is the author of Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues
Memoir and has been a professional blues harmonica player for many
years, touring widely in the 1990s a s part of the Harlem-based duo
Satan and Adam.
Satan and Adam albums:
Harlem Blues
/
Mother Mojo
/
Living on the River (Reviews)
|
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* *
* * *
|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 30 December 2011
|
