Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music

Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music

Gussow, Adam

Paperback

Blues & SoulGeneral SociologyWorld Music

ISBN10: 1469660369
ISBN13: 9781469660363
Publisher: Univ Of North Carolina Pr
Published: Oct 19 2020
Pages: 332
Weight: 1.13
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

World Music

View All