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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
- – The Whitman Sisters: why we may never silence them.
- – Catfish & Cotton & Caffeine
- – Marketing Patent Medicine Folk and Blues
- – Blues from the circus tent
Categories
- – Artists (23)
- Alexis Korner (1)
- Blind Boy Fuller (1)
- Blind Willie Johnson (1)
- Deford Bailey (1)
- Franklin "Baby" Seals (1)
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- Jaybird Coleman (1)
- Joe Evans and Arthur McCain (1)
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- The Sparks (1)
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- – Blues history (42)
- – Did you know ? Blues facts from within (16)
- – Key figures (7)
- Butler May (1)
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- H. C. Speir (1)
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- – Key Songs and Albums (3)
- Stagger Lee (1)
- Sweet Home Chicago (1)
- The Boll Weevil Song (1)
- – Pre Blues era (24)
- – Technology and Marketing (5)
- Minstrelsy (5)
- Vaudeville (5)
- – Artists (23)
Category Archives: – Key Songs and Albums
– How Stagger Lee helped to survive the Jim Crow system
Each culture has its myths and folk heroes. They are an expression of the social and economic systems and their evolution in which they are given shape. In Western Europe for instance we are familiar with the good bandit Robin Hood who stole from the poor to give it to the rich. A similar figure […]
Posted in Stagger Lee
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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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– Kokola blues : from Baltimore to Sweet Home Chicago
There is perhaps no other song which is more iconic to the blues than “Sweet Home Chicago“. Is there any blues artist who doesn’t (didn’t) have it on his/her repertoire? At one time, more than 75 different versions of the song have been counted! Just try for fun looking up the song in any internet […]
Posted in Sweet Home Chicago
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