Book Description
May we exist like a lotus, / At home in the muddy water. / Thus we bow to life as it is. This verse is an important reminder, says Ezra Bayda, of what the spiritual life is truly about: the willingness to open ourselves to whatever life presents—no matter how messy or complicated. And through that willingness to be open, we can discover wisdom, compassion, and the genuine life we all want. In At Home in the Muddy Water , Bayda applies this simple Zen teaching to a range of everyday concerns—including relationships, trust, sexuality, and money—showing that everything we need to practice is right here before us, and that peace and fulfillment is available to everyone, right here, right now, no matter what their circumstances.
Customer Reviews:
Practical Advice.......2005-09-16
Easy to read, understand, and put into practice. Common sense, practical advice. Similar content as his "Being Zen" book.
Not too abstract, Not too nuanced - Just Right!.......2005-04-04
I was truly inspired and edified by reading this book. Mr. Bayda's insights into the principles of Buddhism are gentle, accessible and practical. These books are informative and I am glad they were recommended to me by a friend. I would also say that while many Buddhism books are either too abstract or too nuanced, this book comfortably falls in the middle providing real insight. I highly recommend it.
Ezra the Great.......2004-11-10
Reviewing a book such as this is no easy feat. Quasi-spiritual, semi-self help books are a dime a dozen, and many of them are terrible. They attempt to reduce common sense to a formula that, once applied to one's individual life circumstances, permanently alters the course of one's life.
Do you know anyone whose life has radically changed as a result of reading a self help book?
I bought this book (along with Being Zen, Ezra Bayda's previous title) because I am interested in Zen Buddhism. I bought them rather randomly, having never heard of Mr. Bayda before (these books did not, however, serve as an introduction to Buddhism for me; I have been interested in the practice for many years). I am extremely impressed, however, by Mr. Bayda's simplicity and practicality; I don't think I've read a more accessible book on Buddhist practice. I would argue, in fact, that he does it better than Pema Chodron (whom he credits as a source of inspiration). Mr. Bayda's books are the result of some fantastic writing and editing.
Mr. Bayda says that these two books are really Parts 1 and 2 of the same work, and I would agree: You should read both of them, so that the important concepts are really hammered home. After all, these books are not intended to be feel-good, airy-fairy words to make one "feel better"; this, in fact, is what I believe to be the "strength" of Buddhism---the fact that its primary goal is not to make one feel better, but rather to point us toward residing in the ordinariness and pain of every day life. Mr. Bayda's effort is directed at pointing us in the direction of an "authentic life," as opposed to the "substitute life" which so many of us are accustomed to living. Mr. Bayda offers sound, succint, and challenging advice on how we can apply the principles of Buddhism to our lives in a practical and compelling way, without ever using exclusively Buddhist terminology. A person of any faith would find this book both accessible and informative.
In the end, I cannot recommend either of his two books highly enough. While reading these two books (or any other books for that matter) have not and will not change my life, taking to heart the teachings really could.
A great tool for anyone willing to use it.......2004-01-27
As with my dad's first book, BEING ZEN, I could read AT HOME IN THE MUDDY WATER countless times and always find it useful. There always seems to be something or someone in life that I want to change. I see repetitive patterns in the way I relate to others and to life. I watch myself react and put up defenses and strategies of control. I think I am clear, with a good analysis of the situation, of myself, and of others. And yet, the same patterns return. The same difficulties and questions come again and again, varying only in the circumstances under which they arise, but not in the base emotions and beliefs themselves. AT HOME IN THE MUDDY WATER helps me to see and experience my difficulties on a deeper level, getting to the very base, the very core of my hurt, my fear, my anger and my pain. This book, like BEING ZEN, helps me to deal with life daily, whether it be with reacting to something as small as being cut off on the freeway to something larger, like depression, self-doubt, and difficulties with relationships. Many times, I must admit, the equanimity my dad speaks of in his books feels out of reach. But I know it is possible to achieve because I have watched him in spiritual practice for over 27 years. My dad still feels pain; he still gets hurt, angry, disappointed and filled with fear. But he relates to all of these things differently than most. His spiritual practice, as so clearly laid out in these books, allows him to experience life in all of its colors and shapes, in happiness or in grief, in peace or in total chaos. The practice is always the same: simply to BE HERE. The tools are out there, but it is up to each of us to put them to use for ourselves. AT HOME IN THE MUDDY WATER is such a tool.
self-help.......2003-09-17
This book is excellent for someone who is practicing without a teacher. I found the discussion of how to deal with a "dry spot" in your practice especially helpful. It's difficult for a solo practioner to step outside the self thing and see what's sabotaging your practice. I am thankful to Mr. Bayda for his ability to articulate so well what's going on.
Book Description
The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters, who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, who invented electric blues and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle, is brought into sharp focus in this widely acclaimed biography. - A book praised equally for its stylishness, its richly entertaining narrative, and its impeccable scholarship. - As a filmmaker, Robert Gordon directed the PBS American Masters documentary Muddy Waters Can't Be Satisfied and the award-winning blues documentary All Day and All Night, featuring B. B. King and Rufus Thomas.
Customer Reviews:
Chicago Blues and Mississippi Mud.......2007-06-23
Combining life history with a social history of Chicago's blues scene of the late 1940s through early 80s, Gordon's book is a highly readable and carefully documented biography. He uses a great variety of published and unpublished sources as well as his own interviews with Muddy's family members, friends, and fellow musicians to provide an excellent understanding of Muddy Waters' contributions to Chicago's blues scene. Because this is a biography, the focus is necessarily on Waters' influences on other musicians. These contributions are important as the guitarist, singer, and songwriter had a huge impact on the music. Gordon demonstrates how some of the major influence that Muddy Waters had on the blues was through an indirect route -- via England. He vividly demonstrates how the music of Muddy Waters was a major inspiration for the British Blues-Rock music of the 1960s, showing, in turn, how this affected Muddy Waters' own career. This is an important part of the story, and its emphasis is very relevant to Muddy Waters' life history. However, I would have liked a bit more discussion of Muddy Waters' relationship to other blues players throughout his career. This information can be gleaned out of a reading of other blues musicians' biographies, so it's not necessarily a major problem with this fine book. In fact, the way this book sparks the reader's curiousity about other Chicago players may be another strength to this well-told story.
Impressive Research.......2006-12-29
Gordon did his homework in writing this book, and I was glad to see that he tried to grasp Muddy as a man, not just as a music icon or a stereotypical rags-to-riches story. I feel as though I was given a full look at Muddy Waters, warts and all.
The one problem I have with the book is the writing style. The endless grand similes were brutal; I found myself wincing at some of them. I suppose the self-indulgent, flowery style fits the idea of writing about an artistic subject, but the similes seemed like a crutch. "Show, don't tell" is one of a writer's best adages. Grand similes, to me, scream "shortcut." Like a rusty dagger thrust between two ribs, then twisted so that the oxidized edge of the blade could be felt grabbing flesh and grinding against moist bone, it bugged me.
That one criticism aside, I, as an amateur historian, author, and blues musician, applaud Mr. Gordon's efforts and highly recommend that you read this book to understand one of the key people in American music.
The Birth of the Chicago Blues............2006-02-07
From the first line to the last, Robert Gordon transports you back in time....to the birth of a legend, a culture and a way of life.
This book is absolute excellence. I very highly recommend it to the deep blues fan as well as the novice.
Well Documented Biography.......2005-04-14
How can one document the life of someone who spent the first 30+ years of his life as a poor, peasant cotton farmer? It's not easy to get a good biography on such an individual, but blues fans and historians have for years been tracking down information on the life of Muddy Waters for decades, and in this book that information is compiled in a well written, informative biography.
This book explores Muddy's life on the plantation, his early interest in music, his love life, his family life, his desire to become a famous blues musician, his travels, his successes and his failures.
The author is blunt. Obviously an admirer of Muddy Waters, the author does not hide the more shameful behavior of the great musician. Coming out of this book, I admire Muddy Waters as a musician and band leader. As a friend, a father, a husband, a person he is a disappointment.
A mix of good & bad traits........2005-03-24
Mr. Gordon's bio of Chicago Blues icon Muddy Waters (given name McKinley Morganfield) is a good narrative of a fascinating life that, unfortunately, falls short of the work the man deserved. Gordon fails to explore, and barely mentions, the impact of Waters' commercial success on the racial climate of the 60s & 70s.
The index is very weak, omitting several topics that appear in the text.
Gordon's work is entertaining, but serves mainly to demonstrate that a solid, scholarly biography of the great bluesman still remains to be written.
Average customer rating:
- An Impressionistic Portrait
- very deep
- Very Informative and a must for every blues fan.
- A must read for any jazz or blues fan!!!
- a must read for any fan of music
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Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man
Sandra B. Tooze
Manufacturer: ECW Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads
ASIN: 1550222961 |
Book Description
A sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, a bootlegger, gambler, ladies' man, and dynamic blues singer and guitarist-Muddy Waters's life is traced in this original biography of the legendary blues man from the early twentieth century to his death in 1983. Interviews with key industry figures such as James Cotton, Willie Smith, Junior Wells, Jimmy Rogers, B. B. King, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, and Marshall Chess prove to be a source of priceless anecdotes and lend substance and texture to this compelling portrait of a blues pioneer.
Customer Reviews:
An Impressionistic Portrait.......2002-04-26
Tooze's new biography is most useful for its ample use of primary accounts from Waters and those close to him. The book works best as a loving tribute to some of the most influential music of the twentieth century. Yet a facile prose style and a lack of contextualization make this a frustratingly one-dimensional biography. One finishes with only an impressionistic sense of this singularly important individual. Tooze pays virtually no attention to the women in Waters' life, and misinforms the reader by repeating apocryphal tall-tales. Mojo Man is a poorly written and shallow portrait of a mighty and deep historical figure.
very deep.......2001-03-12
a must read for sure on one of Musics Greatest Creative forces ever.this is a book that is very essential for folks who are moved by Great Talents&Muddy Waters is one of the Greatest.
Very Informative and a must for every blues fan........2000-03-17
I found this book hard to put down. Ms Tooze does an excellent job of portraying Muddy through a series of interviews with his bandmates. All of Muddy's former bandmates are full of praise for Muddy with the exception of the brilliant drummer Francis Clay who did not really get along very well with Muddy. What I particularly liked about the style of the book is the way Ms Tooze introduces Muddy's bandmates as they join his band. Marshall Chess chips in with quite a few interesting insights on the relationship of Muddy with Phil & Leonard Chess. I might not agree with all of Ms Tooze's reviews of Muddy's albums, but then it's simply a question of personal taste. Cheers & keep up the good work.
A must read for any jazz or blues fan!!!.......1999-10-08
I loved the book it almost reads itself. Good information and insight into Muddy.
a must read for any fan of music.......1999-06-27
I have never read a book about Muddy Waters that proved to be so informative. I've been reading about Muddy for years and this book offered up new information of which I had not been aware. Ms. Tooze did a heck of a job researching this book. I beleive she had her MOJO workin'.
Average customer rating:
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Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters
James Rooney
Manufacturer: Da Capo Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0306804271 |
Customer Reviews:
Boss Book.......2000-06-14
Like countless musician profiles, Bossmen utilizes a standard interview question and answer format; but it's as if Jim Rooney were the first writer to actually hear what these men were saying about their their lives, their art and the cost they paid for their brilliance. The result is an extended conversation with two American icons that reveals far more about each than any work previously or subsequently. Rooney manages to honor the work and the power of the men who created it without lapsing into careless adoration. This is a great book about American music in particular, creativity in general. It was a crime that the work of Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe was neglected for so long and it's a crime that Rooney's book is out of print.
Product Description
Hurricane Katrina, closely followed by Hurricane Rita, was, without doubt, the most catastrophic natural disaster in U.S. history. It devastated the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, inflicted serious losses in Florida and Alabama as well as the harder-hit states at the core of the disaster, and all but destroyed a city unique in American culture. Through it all, health-care providers in the Gulf States and those who had come to help continued to assess what one responder called "a lifetime of lessons in a single storm." This oral history of the public health response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the flooding of New Orleans provides an unprecedented glimpse into what really happened.These public health heros lived, in real time, through the dramatically and rapidly unfolding events of the storms. And as they were in the experience, they absorbed the enormity of this disaster, reacting instinctively, often courageously, to what had to be done, under conditions few had ever experienced. Their accounts will provoke further questions about how we are training ourselves to be disaster responders. A portion of the sales price of this book will be donated to a Hurricane Relief Fund.
Product Description
30 tunes: Evil Got My Mojo Working Honey Bee I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man more. Baby, Please Don't Go Blow, Wind, Blow Champagne And Reefer Close To You (I Wanna Get) Deep Down In Florida Evil Good News Got My Mo Jo Working Honey Bee I Can't Be Satisfied I Feel Like Going Home I Just Want To Make Love To You I Want To Be Loved I'm Ready I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man Long Distance Call Louisiana Blues Mannish Boy My Home Is On The Delta My Love Strikes Like Lightning Rollin' And Tumblin' Rollin' Stone (Catfish Blues) Sad, Sad Day Screamin' And Cryin' She's Nineteen Years Old Still A Fool Streamline Woman The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock And Roll The Same Thing You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had
Customer Reviews:
BEST OF MUDDY.......2007-08-15
TRANSCRIPTIONS ARE SPOT ON, GREAT SELECTION OF SONGS. IF YOU DIG MUDDY WATERS AND YOU WANT TO LEARN FROM A NATURAL GENIUS OF BLUES, BUY THIS RIGHT NOW. I SUGGEST YOU DO NOT DELAY ANY LONGER!
Page - Year - Title - - Tuning - Capo.......2006-04-26
Chess Years Disk 1:
018 1948 - I Can't Be Satisfied (Open G)
023 1948 - I Feel Like Going Home (Open G)
026 1948 - Streamline Woman (Open G)
034 1950 - Rollin' and Tumblin' {Part 1} (Open G, capo 2)
Chess Years Disk 2:
039 1950 - Rollin' Stone (Std.)
043 1950 - Louisiana Blues (Open G, capo 1)
048 1951 - Long Distance Call (Std., capo 1)
051 1951 - Honey Bee (Std., capo 1)
059 1951 - Still a Fool (Std., capo 1)
Chess Years Disk 3:
064 1953 - Baby, Please Don't Go (Std., capo 2)
068 1953 - Blow Wind Blow (Std. Tuning, capo 2)
072 1954 - I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man (Std., Capo 5)
074 1954 - I Just Want to Make Love to You (Std.)
Chess Years Disk 4:
076 1956 - Got My Mojo Working (Std.)
081 1957 - Evil (Std., capo 2)
085 1957 - Good News (Std.)
090 1959 - Close to You (Std.)
095 1962 - You Shook Me (Std.)
Chess Years Disk 7:
099 1963 - My Love Strikes Like Lightning (Std.)
106 1963 - My Home Is in the Delta (Std.)
Chess Years Disk 9:
115 1964 - The Same Thing (Std., capo 8)
118 1964 - You Can't Lose what You Ain't Never Had (Std., capo 8)
Hard Again/Blue Skies, etc:
123 1977 - The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock & Roll (Std.) (Hard Again)
131 1977 - Deep Down in Florida (Open G) (Hard Again)
139 1977 - I Want to Be Loved (Std.) (Hard Again)
144 1977 - Screamin' and Cryin' (Std., capo 1) (I'm Ready, & Blue Sky)
151 1977 - Mannish Boy (Std.) (Hard Again)
156 1978 - I'm Ready (Std.) (I'm Ready)
160 1979 - She's 19 Years Old (Std, capo 3) (Live Mississippi)
167 1981 - Champagne & Reefer (Std., capo 5) (King Bee)
173 1981 - Sad, Sad Day (Std.) (King Bee)
Excellent. End of story.
A Fundamental Document.......2000-04-05
This collection of guitar transcriptions from the recorded works of Muddy Waters is, simply, a must have for any blues guitarist. In fact, any musician with an interest in fundamental American recorded music will find this document to be a primary text for Chicago Blues, the development of the electic guitar, and the basic beginnings of American (and Brit) rock n roll.
Muddy Waters: Deep Blues contains guitar transcriptions from 31 songs performed and recorded by Waters and his sidemen from 1948's "I Can't Be Satisfied" to "Sad, Sad Day" off a 1981 session w/ Johnny Winter. Studying these transcriptions has given me - a mediocre amateur - new insights into the varied styles of the famous sidemen like Jimmy Rogers and Buddy Guy and a newfound excitement in the discovery of some lesser-known and under-rated guitar gods. The transcription of Earl Hooker's shimmering guitar on "You Shook Me" (1962) is a particular treasure.
A general outline of Muddy's guitar style is excellent; there are explanations of the Delta open G tuning, use of the slide, and illustrative samples of how other musicians treat Muddy's style in their own fashions. This one of the most enjoyable and useful books of music that I have ever encountered.
Book Description
In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied for influence over the public imagination in this century.
Filene builds his story around a fascinating group of characters—folklorists, record company executives, producers, radio programmers, and publicists—who acted as middlemen between folk and popular culture. These cultural brokers "discovered" folk musicians, recorded them, and promoted them. In the process, Filene argues, they shaped mainstream audiences' understanding of what was "authentic" roots music.
Filene moves beyond the usual boundaries of folk music to consider a wide range of performers who drew on or were drawn into the canon of American roots music—from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Challenging traditional accounts that would confine folk music revivalism to the 1930s and 1960s, he argues instead that the desire to preserve and popularize America's musical heritage is a powerful current that has run throughout this century's culture and continues to flow today.
Customer Reviews:
Strong and Engaging, and Very Readable.......2004-10-15
Benjamin Filene's account of the origins of the category of "American roots music" is inexorably aimed at peeling away discursive layers within that very term itself to reveal the historical continuities and disjunctures at the heart of it. As Filene puts it: "What makes the formation of America's folk canon so fascinating, though, is that just as isolated cultures became harder to define and locate in industrialized America. the notions of musical purity and primitivism took on enhanced value, even in avowedly commercial music. Twentieth-century Americans have been consistently searching for the latest incarnation of 'old-time' and 'authentic' music." And Filene shows deftly how these categories are heavily inflected with racial and class issues.
But Filene's work begins much earlier, with the early 19th century effort in the US and later in the UK to collect and collate British folk song texts and sometimes the tunes that went this them. He demonstrates that this effort was thoroughly infused with romanticism--an attempt to record and preserve a "better" culture before capitalism, greed, irreligion and science came along. This grew from the German philosophical fascination with the 'Kultur des Volkes,' and into an impulse to forge a British national culture based on the English peasantry---even sometimes as found in the American Appalachian population (!)---and of course, an undertone, made explicit here and there--of racial purity.
This is especially significant in that popular interest in anything like folk song appears to have begun for African-American forms before Anglo ones--but was apparently stopped by the mythic valorization of whites as true folk. It seems that Anglo songs edged out other types as the basis of this new mythic canon that was forming, even as the Fisk singers and blackface minstrelsy became more popular in the 1870's. In fact, Filene argues convincingly that the way in which Black folk songs (spirituals) were collated preserved an idea of Black passivity and the exotic gaze in whites. Of course blackface minstrel performances reinforced this. The only other challenge was Lomax's collection of cowboy ballads, which he unsuccessfully tried to peg to the spirit of English rural culture. In the 1920's attempts at using a more racially and geographically inclusive cultural building with rural songs, white, black, and latino, were undertaken by poet Carl Sandburg.
Most of the book deals with the legacy of the cult of authenticity created and shaped by the Lomaxes from their field recordings and artist promotion. Their zeal for collecting and promoting their ideas of "true folk singers" cannot be underestimated, and in doing so, they shifted the canon away from whiteness, or so it seemed. Filene's account of The Lomaxes and Lead Belly perhaps best demonstrates the role of exoticism in producing authentic "American"ness at that particular time. The tours undertaken by the Lomaxes emphasize Lead Belly's virtuosity and expansive knowledge, but simultaneously construct him as a primitive, exotic "Heart of Darkness" figure that lay at the core of authentic American folk-song, and by extension lay at the periphery of contemporary, decadent, urban white Modernist America. When they started to get not only recording techonology, but official government and Library of Congress support, that added an entire new dimension of national culture building, as well as "documentary"-style authoritativeness to their work--as they literally began constructing a usable musical past for the United States.
In fact, Filene's analysis fits perfectly with Jacques Attali's theories on music, insofar as Lead Belly's music could be said to be a constructed and promoted by Lomax as a sublimated form of `animal nature' (ancestor) and racialized `primitive violence' (demon), exhibited in spectacle for the consumption of middle-brow and high-brow white audiences. Filene connects this racialized legacy of "authenticity" with the commonly found ideology that "roots" musicians even today are expected to be overly emotive, premodern, and non-commercial. In other words, they must perform "Otherness" for their predominantly white, bourgeois audiences in order to be authentic. To be fair, this impulse waxed strong in 1930's American. James Agee and Walker Evans. Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," a number of popular magazines--, all played into this impulse. To be popular though, you couldn't be too successful, or you might compromise your authenticity. Sound familiar? The paradox of Roots music and Leftist politics, in the 1930's, both together in the Popular Front.
Moreover, it is perhaps speculative, but nonetheless provocative, to note that Lead Belly's popularity took place in the wane of the Harlem Renaissance (and into the 1940's), and quite possibly signaled for white consumption a sign of (or the `return' of) a more racialized `authentic n*ggerness' inscribed in black bodies, in contrast to the earlier "New Negro" and the later post-WWII racial agitators. For future artists, like Muddy Waters, the legacy of transformation took more commercial, but similar sets of turns. As Waters grew in popularity, his music shifted from Mississippi delta through country inflection--from acoustic to electric, in an attempt to adopt to urban styles...and then pressure to go back again to his more "primitive" beginnings for sales purposes. From the influence of Lomax to the commercial propagation of Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, Filene follows Waters through his career to see the larger effect of "roots" discourse upon him and perceptions of him. We get an especially big eyeful when Filene takes extra time out to analyze Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man", just one of many popular songs invoking pagan, magical, feral and occult tropes to signify both danger and desire for the listening subject. Waters influence on the Rolling Stones and The Beatles is noted, and we begin to see how folk constructions of authenticity gain a larger influence in Rock and Roll, even as black artists in that genre fail to catch fire with white youth as strongly as later white rock musicians did--or as even strongly as white folk artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.
Later parts of the work demonstrate the emergence of folk institutionalism in Washington, from the Federal Writers Project, the Resettlement Administration, and the Library of Congress all contributing to this effort within the framework of New Deal politics, and the growing idea that folklore always has a functional element to play in a given society. Rather then "vestigial," folklore becomes "germinal." The search for musical folklore takes these institutions to the city for perhaps the first time in "roots" discourse. And also to war, as government agencies came under increasing pressure to turn all aspects of policy towards the effort in WWII. At the same time, a push to professionalize folklore in academia gained ground as well--graduate programs in folklore were established, thus created a contentious political history for every field of culture impacted by contemporary folklore studies, no less than in American Studies. Richard M. Dorson, an early Americanist, was also an early "Folklore" specialist, and worked tirelessly to construct methodologies for subsequent use. Lomax, too, became an academic--an early methodologist in 1960's ethnomusicology. And with the establishment of Folklore in the Academy of Letters, the annual Folk Festival is born, largely again, through the aegis of the Smithsonian---yet another example of government sponsorship and cultivation of Kulturvolk as national basis, continuing to the present day. The modern day so-called "folk revival" is born as well through the efforts of Pete Seeger, who carried on the functionalist tradition of the Lomaxes in his efforts. Folk cultures have literally become American cultures--in the sense that they may even suck all the air out of that category, leaving little for other than these constructed myths.
I appreciate the way that Filene goes about his project, using a combination of comparative visual analysis of photographs, and album covers, as well as musical and lyrical analysis. His willingness to take into account close readings of song collections (like 'American Ballads', 'Our Singing Country', and 'American Songbag'), and productions of early government/corporate partnerships in radio programming (such as "We Hold These Truths") speak to the power of his interdisciplinary method. And in uncovering more than just two periods of attention to folk music (the 1930s and the 1960s) he demonstrates a longer, more resilient undercurrent of American modernity and its self-renewal.
Clamoring for more from Filene.......2002-03-18
This is a historically thorough yet immensely enjoyable work. Filene's take on "roots music" is refreshing--honest and free of gushing hyperbole; just cynical enough without ever becoming acerbic.
The stories Filene chooses to tell are illuminating and often funny--Leonard Chess faking his way through Blues hitmaking; Leadbelly being marketed as a country bumpkin in overalls when he preferred to wear suits.
There are so many more stories to be told, though--musicians to discuss, angles of the folk boom to expand, that I wish Filene would write more--perhaps another volume.
The Roots Behind Roots Music.......2000-08-23
Most books about popular music fall into one of two categories. You have your pretentious rock n' roll critic who writes in impenetrable and cryptic prose (Hello Anthony DeCurtis and Robert Christgau) or you have purely academic writings that miss the heart of what is often music felt at a gut level. Then along comes Benjamin Filene. Filene offers up a brilliant discussion of the ways in which folk music became a part of our American consciousness. Profiling the careers of such artists as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, "Romancing the Folk" presents an extremely lively, readable and well thought out discussion of the way folk music was presented to the American public and ultimately accepted as a valid art form in its own right. In doing so, Filene breaks from the stale world of traditional popular music writing and gives you a fine read while you listen to "Blood on the Tracks," "Goodnight Irene," "Hoochie Coochie Man" or "Talking Union."
Book Description
Transcribed from 78 rpm recordings and preserved here long after many of the records have disappeared, this collection of nearly three hundred songs from more than one hundred singers celebrates the diversity of feeling and form that defines the blues. Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters are represented with their lesser-known contemporaries—Barefoot Bill, Barbecue Bob, Bumble Bee Slim, and Black Ivory King. This complete anthology also features lyrics by Blind Blake, Victoria Spivey, Blind Willie Johnson, “Funny Paper” Smith, Texas Alexander, Lightning Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Ma Yancey, King Solomon Hill, Skip James, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Son House, Willie Brown, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis, Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson, Kokomo Arnold, Tampa Red, Howlin’Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Patton, and more than 100 others. Dozens of illustrations are included.
Customer Reviews:
WHY IS THIS WONDERFUL BOOK OUT OF PRINT???.......2000-10-26
I've been trying to buy this book for the last 5 years but I can't find a copy of it to buy. I finally found a copy to borrow from a local library. The book is wonderful and any blues lover will enjoy it. So if anyone who reads this can do anything to get this book back into print, PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!
A wonderful anthology.......2000-05-14
The lyrics to almost three hundred blues are in this substantial book, which should be enough to convince anyone to get it. Need more persuading? Okay, how about visual art: all of the lyrics are typeset in innovative and original ways that really bring out the spirit of the music, and there are rough, striking illustrations of many of the artists represented in this work (which, incidentally, includes just about anyone you can think of).
An unexpected but very welcome addition is the final section, entitled 'A Survey of Sorts: Various Voices', which has quotes from everyone from Basho to Blind Blake on the nature of poetry and melancholy.
This book is truly unique among lyric collections, well presented and full of surprises. Get it if you're even remotely interested in music.
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Books Index
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