Blues VERIFIED
As Jennifer Dunning wrote in her book Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance, "[Blues Suite] is set in a 'sporting house.' The characters are the men and women who frequent the place, drinking, dancing, and flirting to the music of the blues over the course of a night that ends with the early morning sounds of a train and church bells."
blues
The history of Chicago blues since the 1960s has been a contradictory one, combining periods of recession and renewal. By the end of the 1960s, blues had infrastructural as well as aesthetic presence. WVON, the all-day radio station opened by Chess owners Leonard and Phil Chess in 1963, maintained a healthy blues playlist, augmenting programming from other local stations. Bluesnightclubscontinued to shape black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides; Roosevelt Road, Madison Street, and 43rd Street became blues thoroughfares. With the failure of Cobra Records in 1959 and Vee-Jay in 1966, Chess stood as the only remaining major label and, under the supervision ofWillie Dixon, consolidated the remaining talent. Old rivals such as Buddy Guy and Otis Rush were signed, along with newcomers Etta James, Little Milton (Campbell), and Koko Taylor. Yet blues music found itself at a disadvantage commercially next to soul, gospel, and other new genres of black popular music. Chess went out of business in 1975, by which time most older clubs were closing down.
This five-piece unit has an upbeat, electric blues sound reminiscent of the early Chicago blues scene. Sonny Charles supplies great amplified harmonica and vocals. Kid Royal adds blistering lead guitar and vocals. The solid rhythm section consists of Little Johnny Walter on rhythm guitar, Joe Bencomo on drums, and Stick Davis on bass. The band delivers its brand of original electric blues with the passion and integrity of a group that has spent decades refining its craft.
This is a modern blues record that draws heavily from classic Chicago blues, with flavorings of Texas blues guitar! It's a true winning combination, and this is an album you'll play over and over again.
Backtrack Blues Band was selected as the winner of the "Coolest Blues Song of 2019" Contest run by Detroit's Big City Blues Magazine . A panel of blues music experts judged Backtrack's song "Best Friend's Grave" as the best blues song among the many nominated by some of America's most prestigious blues songwriters .
"Backtrack Blues Band just opened for John Nemeth on the main stage at the Tremblant Blues Festival in Canada. They really delivered the goods! Seasoned veterans in the blues, Backtrack went through songs from their new CD and the crowd responded enthusiastically.
"Backtrack Blues Band became a favorite with our audience, playing Chicago-inspired, crowd pleasing, harmonica and guitar driven classic electric blues. The band had people dancing in the aisles, with encores at every show!"
The Coeur d'Alene Resort & Too Far North Productions are proud to welcome back the Annual Coeur d'Alene Blues Festival, a five-time winner of the Inland Empire Blues Society - "Best Blues Festival". Join us as we have invited some of the top electric blues headliners, a couple of legends, soul singers and brought back some favorites from years past. The invitation is open to all for a soulful weekend celebrating the best of modern blues, showcasing many of the most popular blues bands on the planet.
Blues Schoolhouse is an interactive, live musical presentation that traces the history of the blues from its roots in African musical traditions through its emergence as an American musical form. Participants see how people use music to tell their stories, preserve their memories and create a sense of community. The program weaves major historical events narrated across an American history timeline and demonstrates how music can reflect social conditions, drive social change and how African and African American music and cultural traditions influence the music enjoyed today.
By far the most popular paint color, blue can appear more traditional in its darker tones but feel breezy and cool when you add white. The calming effect of many blues make them perfect for spaces where you want to relax.
6 to 10 p.m. Friday, March 311 to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 11776 Independence Lane, Maitland, FLFree Admission PAT TRAVERSPat Travers smashed onto the music scene in 1976 with his hard and rowdy, rock and blues guitar style and vocals. The Canada-born musician cranked out several top albums in the 70s and 80s including party hits like "Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights)".
It took me a decade to find that those records told a story: Every voice, every title is telling you the story of Afro-American history. I really latched onto that idea. And I went back and started listening to the blues.
"I always liked jazz," Baraka says. "And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that. But when I went to Howard, the great Sterling Brown was a great influence on many of us. A.B. Spellman and I, Toni Morrison ... a lot of us sat up under Brown. And so, you can always tell that influence.
"We thought we knew so much about jazz. [Brown] said, 'Why don't you come on by my house, I'll show you some things.' We went by there, and he had the whole wall full of records, by chronology and genre, and he said to me, 'That's your history.' So it took me a decade to find that those records told a story: Every voice, every title is telling you the story of Afro-American history. I really latched on to that idea. And I went back and started listening to the blues."
Not everyone was convinced. In his 1964 book of essays Shadow and Act, novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that "[t]he tremendous burden of sociology, which Jones would place upon this body of music, is enough to give even the blues the blues."
"He put my book down in his book," Baraka says, still stinging from Ellison's criticism five decades later. "I came with a sociological analysis of the blues that he didn't want to accept. He had a romantic kind of conception: The blues is just music that comes out of... But I was trying to find out why. [Sterling] Brown said if you study the actual music and the lyrics, they're talking about their lives. What do you think they're talking about? Some fantasy world? They're talking about their lives in America. And for Ralph not to understand that I think was a fundamental flaw in his understanding."
As for the author, Baraka himself notes with satisfaction that the music and culture of "blues people" enjoys a wider influence in the 21st century than it did in 1963. "My own thinking has evolved," Baraka says. "You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it. ... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood."
"The blues" is a secular African-American musical genre that has had broad influence in popular music. Blues songs deal with a variety of topics and emotions, though it is often mistakenly thought that they deal almost exclusively with sorrow and protest.
Although there are no recordings of blues songs made before the 1910s, it is generally accepted that a musical style recognizable as blues was being played and sung by African-American musicians in the Southern United States by the 1890s. The songs drew freely from earlier African American styles, such as work songs, field hollers, spirituals, minstrelsy, as well as from Anglo and European derived forms. Blues singers emphasized "blue notes," usually the third, fifth and seventh degrees of the scale, which they often slurred or "bent" upward a quarter tone or more, sometimes mimicking or echoing these effects on accompanying instruments, such as the fiddle, harmonica or guitar. Although they did not always seek to tell a story, singers used imagery that reflected their audience's language and world. Moans, cries, shouts and grunts were often interpolated. The so-called "12 Bar Blues" became the dominant blues song form early on, and remains so to this day. In it, verses are three lines long, with the first line repeated, and the third line usually completing a thought or making a point:
African-American composer W. C. Handy (1873-1958) said that he first encountered blues music in 1903, and subsequently found that forms of it were widely popular with African Americans. He began publishing adaptation of blues themes then in vernacular circulation in 1912, and eventually reached a broad national and international audience with them. He published his most famous song "St. Louis Blues" in 1914, which is quoted above. The Victor Military Band recorded it in 1916, as part of a medley that also included another early blues, "Joe Turner Blues."
Countless blues songs were published in the wake of Handy' success, though many were blues in name only, with the word "blues" being attached to a title in much the way "rag" had been earlier, in an attempt to be in line with the newest song fad. Still, the new style spread quickly, and became a vehicle for songs that were both comic and tragic. White singers such as Al Bernard and Marion Harris drew on black vocal styles in their blues recordings of the late 1910s and 1920s. In 1920, African-American singer Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," a song about frustrated love reached a national audience, and started a vogue for women blues singers in band settings.
African-American blues artists were now recording regularly, and other urban and rural blues styles that had been developing throughout this time, made it on to records for the first time. Great blues artists who emerged in the 1920s and 1930s include singer-guitarists such as Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie. Son House of Mississippi, recorded commercially in 1930 without success, though he is now considered one of the greatest of all "Delta" blues artists. House was an associate of Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson, and taught the young McKinley Morganfieldd, later known as Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, he made field recordings for Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress, such as "Depot Blues" and "Low Down Dirty Dog Blues." 041b061a72