Search

    Start Over Subject Term blues

    1. "Reggae got Blues": The blues aesthetic in African American literature as a lens for the reggae aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean literature

    <span class="translation_missing" title="translation missing: en.bibleaves.discover_item">Discover Item</span>
    Collection:
    Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
    Contributers:
    Washington,Lynn (Author)
    Format:
    Dissertation/Thesis
    Publication Date:
    2013
    Published:
    Maryland: Morgan State University
    Location:
    African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Journal Title:
    ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
    Notes:
    193 p., Kwame Dawes coined the term "reggae aesthetic" to explain the paradigm shift in 1960s-70s Caribbean literature that also dovetailed the rise of reggae music in Jamaica. By exploring the impact of popular music on the social developments in late 1960s and early 1970s Jamaica, Dawes offered a new method of Caribbean literary analysis reminiscent of the extant blues tradition in African American literature--similar to the way that reggae music borrows from the blues--and in so doing, highlighted the artistic and cultural influences that link people of color across the "Black Atlantic." This dissertation builds on Dawes's theory by exploring the history and function of music as an aesthetic form and narrative trope in literature of the Black Atlantic. Blues and reggae in contemporary fiction manifest the oral tradition in African storytelling.

    2. Before Elvis: The prehistory of rock 'n' roll

    <span class="translation_missing" title="translation missing: en.bibleaves.discover_item">Discover Item</span>
    Collection:
    Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
    Contributers:
    Birnbaum,Larry, (Author)
    Format:
    Book, Whole
    Publication Date:
    01/01; 2013
    Published:
    Lanham: Scarecrow Press
    Location:
    African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Notes:
    Surveys the origins of rock 'n' roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Dispelling common misconceptions, this book examines rock's origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock 'n' roll appeared. This study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock 'n' roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music until then played only by and for black audiences. Here, Birnbaum argues a more complicated history of rock's evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and R&amp;B—a melange of genres that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into R&amp;B.