Whose Blues?
Regular price
€91.99
A01=Adam Gussow
August Wilson
Author_Adam Gussow
B. B. King
Bessie Smith
Black Arts movement
black blues
black music
blues harmonica
blues literature
blues music
blues poetry
blues revival
Category=AVA
Category=AVLP
Category=JBF
contemporary blues
David Honeyboy Edwards
Delta blues
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Jim Crow
Langston Hughes
lynching
Ma Rainey
Mississippi Delta
Ralph Ellison
Richard Wright
Robert Johnson
segregation
slavery
Sterling Magee
Sugar Blue
Their Eyes Were Watching God
W. C. Handy
white blues
Zora Neale Hurston
Product details
- ISBN 9781469660356
- Weight: 650g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 19 Oct 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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?
In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.
In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.
Adam Gussow is professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi and author of four previous books on the blues, including Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. He is currently appearing on Netflix in Satan & Adam, an award-winning documentary about his thirty-five-year partnership with Mississippi-born bluesman Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee.
