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Urban Blues

by Charles Keil

ISBN: 0226429601
ISBN-13: 9780226429601
Format: Paperback

Summary

Originally written as a master's thesis and first published in 1966, Charles Keil's study of the blues' move from country to city, and of the consequences for its performers and its audience, should be required reading for anyone with a remote interest in the history of the genre. URBAN BLUES documents the careers, techniques, and output of contemporary bluesmen like B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland, tracing the origins of their music in the combination of West African and European idioms over two centuries of cultural cross-pollination. But Keil goes further than most studies of the idiom in his lively critiques of his fellow musicologists, many of whom he accuses of being "moldy figs," a term he uses for those who prefer their musical heroes infirm, uneducated, and musically primitive-in other words, "authentic." Keil's blues, the commercial aspects of which he lucidly lays out in chapters like the illuminating "Fattening Frogs For Snakes," is very much a living, breathing, vital art form, with all the contradictions and messiness this implies. In intellectually lively prose, Keil reveals a hierarchy of commerce virtually unchanged since his book was first conceived-substitute any current musical trend for "the blues," and URBAN BLUES could have been written yesterday.

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Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Published date: 1992
Size: 5.25 x 8 inches
Weight: 0.75 pounds

Publisher's Notes

Charles Keil examines the expressive role of blues bands and performs and stresses the intense interaction between performer and audience.

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Urban Blues (Phoenix Books)

Charles Keil

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