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- – African American Music – A survival or an actual creative force in today’s culture?
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- – How criticism helped the vaudeville: The spotlight on Franklin “Baby” Seals
- – Wagner, Beethoven & Negro Folksongs, and … baseball
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Category Archives: – Blues history
– African American Music – A survival or an actual creative force in today’s culture?
PDF-version One of the recurrent topics for debate among blues aficionados is the degree of African retentions. The discussion reflects the broader theme of the social-cultural position of African Americans in the American society, and relates to questions of assimilation, acculturation or retention of the original culture. In this context, it is common to quote […]
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– The blues, they are no art
READ THE PDF-VERSION HERE Do I sound provocative? What if I contend moreover that strictly speaking the blues were denatured the very minute their first notes were put on paper sometime around the turn of the first decade of the 19th century? If I claim furthermore that the epithet “the blues” has become less and […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Pre Blues era
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– How criticism helped the vaudeville: The spotlight on Franklin “Baby” Seals
Read the print-friendly version here I have always had a soft spot for persons and events which for whatever reason have fallen out of grace in history books. Often, their story discloses much more of their environment than the historic relics which have been promoted on a pedestal, for the historic aura of the […]
– Wagner, Beethoven & Negro Folksongs, and … baseball
[Read the print-friendly version here] Introduction & acknowledgement In his book “The Bluesman: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas” (1992), Julio Finn, himself a blues musician wrote: “[White blues performers] can never be bluespeople […] because the blues is not something they live but something they do – which makes […]
– Catfish & Cotton & Caffeine
A review of : “Catfish & Cotton: Driving down the blues highway“, by Luc & Marc Borms, 2012 (http://www.catfish-and-cotton.com/index_boek.html) Doubtlessly, my background as sociologist left indelible traces on my character and attitudes. Hence, it is one of my bad habits never to take things for granted, and it is a natural reaction of mine […]
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