Starting the Conversation

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black History ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Deep South ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
Ideological Conflict ◽  
The Way

Beginning with a reading of Black cultural documentarian Roland L. Freeman’s poem “Don’t Forget the Blues” (1997), this chapter explores a pair of opposed slogans, “Blues is black music” and “No black. No white. Just the blues,” that together constitute the principal ideological conflict within contemporary blues culture. At a moment when blues music has been thoroughly globalized with the help of events like the annual International Blues Challenge in Memphis and when African American players and fans represent a greatly attenuated minority within that global cohort, who speaks for the blues? What role do the burdens of Black history, including slavery and segregation, which critically impacted the blues’ formation and development, play in this new global blues order? Seeking to honor the complexities and dialectical thrust of the blues as evoked by the line, “You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover,” the author asks readers to suspend their ideological reflexes and attend to the music’s paradoxes, even while using writings and interviews by August Wilson, B. B. King, and Honeyboy Edwards to illustrate the way in which the blues—as racial feeling, not just music—emerges from Black lives in the Deep South.

scholarly journals La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Black Music USA: From African to African American Music

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Robert Sacré
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Deep South ◽  
African American Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Work Songs

This chapter discusses the history of African American Music. Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. As such, every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree. Work songs and the related prison songs are precursors of the blues. One can assume that primitive forms of pre-blues appeared around 1885, mostly in the Deep South and predominantly in the state of Mississippi. However, it was several more years before the famous AAB twelve-bar structure appeared, and when it did, one of its leading practitioners was Charley Patton.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
The South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
New Negro Renaissance ◽  
The Way

The invention and reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy reveals numerous pathways African American entertainers faced during the first half of the twentieth century. After Broonzy left the South for Chicago, his 30-year career as a pioneer in blues music would be shaped by his own ambitions and those held by others. Both consciously and unconsciously, Big Bill became a full participant in Chicago and America’s critically vital New Negro Renaissance. Along the way, his reinventions would help negotiate African American celebrity and modernity in a manner that would hasten the transformation of his ever-expanding black consciousness.

Whose Blues?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Way

Whose Blues is about the way in which we define, interpret, and make sense of the blues in a postmodern moment more than a century removed from the music's origins in the Deep South. If "Blues is black music," as some contemporary claimants insist, what should we make of the International Blues Challenge held annually in Memphis, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as another familiar meme would have us believe, why do some Chicago blues people hear that proclamation not as a call to transracial fellowship, but as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and the erasure of traumatic racial histories sounded by the music? In Whose Blues, author Adam Gussow, an award-winning blues scholar and blues harmonica player, surveys the contemporary blues scene and the long and tangled history out of which it emerged, keeping his eye out for the paradoxes--the "bad facts"-- that enable revisionist scholarship and unsettle conventional understandings. Using blues literature as a cultural anchor, Gussow also offers a plain-language introduction to the tradition's major writers and themes, including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Black Arts Movement.

scholarly journals Exploring Condom Use Behaviors Among African American Adolescent Boys in the Deep South

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 155798832110090
Author(s):  
Jessica Thames Chambliss ◽  
Retta Evans ◽  
Anneliese Bolland ◽  
Martha S. Wingate ◽  
John M. Bolland
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Condom Use ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Unplanned Pregnancy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Adolescent Boys ◽  
African American Adolescent ◽  
Factors Associated ◽  
Increased Risk

Risky sexual behaviors among adolescents can increase adverse outcomes including unplanned pregnancy or contraction or transmission of disease. Adolescents who engage in risky sexual activities are at increased risk for adverse health and social outcomes compared to those who do not engage. Despite declines in adolescent pregnancy and birth rates, the diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is steadily increasing among adolescents. Moreover, African American adolescent boys in the United States, specifically in the southeastern region are disproportionally at greater risk for STIs, and STI diagnosis within this population has increased over time, compared to their white counterparts. This study sought to identify factors associated with condom use among adolescent boys in the Deep South. Using data from the Mobile Youth Survey, a longitudinal adolescent community-based survey, this study assessed the relationship between personal, behavioral, and environmental factors and condom use among African American adolescent boys (14–19 years). Younger participants (14–15 and 16–17) were more likely to use a condom during the last sexual intercourse compared to older participants (18–19 years). High positive attachment to boy/girlfriend was associated with increased condom use. The number of sexual partners, age at their first sexual encounter, recent sexual behavior, and having an STI were also associated with increased condom use among participants. The study provides further insights into factors associated with condom use among African American adolescent boys and results can inform the development of sexual health interventions.

Conclusion and Continuation

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-168
Author(s):  
Steven Loza
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The World ◽  
Black Man ◽  
The Way

In this chapter, the author reflects on Wilson's impact on music and the world, and the way in which he accomplished this. Wilson passed away on September 8, 2014. The author describes Wilson as a mosaic. He came from a very African American context, a place, a heritage—something that molded him and that he proceeded to mold into life. Wilson never stood still, always seeking change and renewal, challenges and learning, innovative newness and tradition. Wilson's art can also be described as mestizo as well as cosmopolitan But there remains a dimension of his ideology that dominates the above labels and analytical concepts. And that is his primal identity as a black man.

The Big Bang and Real Jazz

Boom's Blues ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Wim Verbei
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
Netherlands Introduction

This chapter details the Netherlands' introduction to African American blues music. Most people believe that that the Netherlands' first became acquainted with African American blues music in the second half of the 1960s, during the American Folk Blues Festivals (AFBFs). However, AFBF of 1965 was not the first blues concert in the Netherlands. That privilege fell to the guitarist/singer Big Bill Broonzy, who more than a decade earlier had conquered the Netherlands on his own. The chapter also describes the beginning of the Dutch blues era in 1926 and Amsterdammer Frans Boom's attendance of Duke Ellington concert in 1939.

Learning Is an All-Black Thing

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-90
Author(s):  
E. James West
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Black History ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Black Revolution ◽  
Black World ◽  
Black Public Intellectual

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.

Thyra Edwards’s Spanish Civil War Scrapbook

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-122
Author(s):  
Anne Donlon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Black History ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the life of African American social worker Thyra Edwards, who traveled to Spain during its civil war, and returned home to fund-raise and organize. She created a scrapbook, a public-facing record of African American women’s efforts on behalf of Republican Spain, made up of photographs prepared for publication and articles about her efforts circulated in newspapers. This feminist perspective of the “folks at home” is a crucial addendum to black history of the war in Spain. Edwards’s scrapbook is a multifaceted document: a kind of autobiography that is self-conscious in its historical record-keeping, an account of a very broad black Popular Front, and a black feminist history of the Spanish Civil War.

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