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Most recent posts
- – The blackface lumpenproletariat and American popular culture
- – African American Music – A survival or an actual creative force in today’s culture?
- – Christmas is when the greedy give to the needy
- – The blues, they are no art
- – 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
– The melancholic camouflage of the blues
In his article “From Blues, The conflict of Cultures” (1961), Janheinz-Jahn convincingly argues that if one reads the blues texts carefully, without any prejudice, they are all only exceptionally about melancholy. Yet, blues is associated in our minds and in our language with melancholy; when we have the blues, we mean that we feel sad, […]
– Yodeling blues
It is not unrealistic to say that in the early period of blues and country music there existed a fair deal of cross pollination between these musical styles. Hillbilly and blues originate from the same region and time period and there is evidence that the racial segregation in the global social context was less striking […]
– Blues : notes touched with pain and sensual joy
The mystery and the uncertainty that still hang over the roots of the the blues is a major factor that attracts me to the subject, almost at the same height as the joy that it gives me to listen to it. My constant amazement over the fact that a musical style which is at the […]
Posted in - Blues history
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– The Black Swan Label: A Black Swan Event?
Those familiar with my blog will already have noticed my appetite for titles which tend to be provocative and in which I try to link seemingly unrelated events or circumstances. This post is not different from the previous, but I hope that when you will have stopped reading this post the full meaning of the […]
Posted in - Blues history, - Technology and Marketing
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– The Beetle Blues
As Edward Comara points out in his Encyclopedia of the Blues (p. 995), it is quite normal that the blues singer in his capacity as African American bard deals with disasters of all different kind : incidental, long-term, accidental and natural. An analysis of the frequency of the disaster theme in blues songs and its […]
Posted in - Blues history, The Boll Weevil Song
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