New Orleans Acoustic Blues Guitar:: The Babe Stovall Era 1964-1974 (Volume 1) [Paperback] Review

This is a complex and dense book, and way too short to satisfy most people's taste. What Collins says in one or two sentences aptly sums up the music politics of the city back in those days. This is the evidence and perspective of just one performer---but the plot of ground he has found for new orleans folk music in the city's jazz history is going to yield huge dividends for those writers coming afterwards. The book is obviously a text book written to accompany some sort of visual instruction. And thus, maybe hard to follow. The 8 song examples are really not enough, and Snooks Eaglin leads do not get much attention.Stovall and Lonnie Johnson material can be found elsewhere, as well. The book at times seems sandwiched in between discocography and references. Collins is aware that he cannot take the reader everywhere. But I agree this is a good place to start.

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Product Description:
The folk era of the mid to late 1960s in New Orleans has received little attention from historians and educators compared to the folk scenes of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.The book focuses on styles of Babe Stovall, Snooks Eaglin, and Lonnie Johnson and is the companion book for a university course on acoustic blues...

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City Limits [Paperback] Review

I enjoyed Terry Teachout's book of autobiographical essays "City Limits". There is nothing terribly important in the book, but its tone and pace are leisurely & enjoyable and his stories reveal interesting details about an important cultural critic whose influence is rising each year through his books and articles in "Commentary", "The Wall Street Journal" and other influential conservative journals of opinion. Teachout's writing reminds me of my favorite writer, Joseph Epstein (it is probably no coincidence that you often find their pieces in the same issues of publications). Both writers are extremely culturally fluent with a lot of interesting things to say. Their writing is also very accessable to the average, educated person who is looking to learn more about literature, music, theater, art, and the good life in general.

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Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael [Paperback] Review

We owe Richard Sudhalter for preserving the often-forgotten history of America's early jazz pioneers and composers. His subjects are white musicians, but he doesn't write about them with a nasty political agenda. He just doesn't want their contributions to be forgotten. Along the way, he pays warm tribute to the black musicians who led the musical revolution. Unfortunately, politically-charged reviewers refuse to see this.
I especially love this Sudhalter work. Sadly, Hoagy is becoming a forgotten genius of American song. Duke Ellington once called him America's greatest songwriter, and Sudhalter goes a long way in providing the evidence to such a claim. I especially enjoyed the focus on Hoagy's home state of Indiana, which was an amazing hotbed for jazz in the 1920s. One should take this book and drive around Bloomington, Indiana, and find all of the haunts described in rich detail by Sudhalter. Then go to Indianapolis, and Richmond, Indiana. Sudhalter really did us all a huge favor in providing such a wonderful document.

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Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" [Paperback] Review

This is one of the rare books for it can be enjoyed by just about anyone who picks it up.Its the amazing account of the life of Jelly Roll Morton, one of the best jazz pianists of all time.Though a braggart and troubled man, he created some of the very best pieces of jazz.The book goes into his life from his childhood and his time working at Storyville to the very troubled end in the early forties.You learn about his family, his troubled relationships with Anita and Mabel and how he went from being wildly successful to dying virtually forgotten.Voodoo, New Orleans, jazz and Creole culture, its all here.
Written with flair and never boring, Mr. Jelly Roll is a book that you will read more than once.Its a look at a legend and a glimpse into a world we can only know of through books and music.Get this if you want a good read and a look at Mr. Morton's life.A true classic.

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Product Description:
When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.

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