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Prince : life & times
\"Prince: Life & Times is a large format, lavishly illustrated, authoritative chronicle of this visionary musician's career, covering every album, every movie, and every tour. It includes profiles of key collaborators, assesses his various business dealings, and details his many side-projects--on stage, on record, on screen, and beyond. This updated second edition includes detailed information on Prince's life from 2008 to 2016.\"--Back cover.
Book
Women drummers
In 1942, drummer Viola Smith sent shock waves through the jazz world by claiming in Down Beat magazine that “hep girls” could sit in on any jam session and hold their own. In Women Drummers: A History from Rock and Jazz to Blues and Country, Angela Smith takes Viola at her word, offering a comprehensive look at the world of professional drumming and the women who had the courage and chops to break the barriers of this all-too-male field. Combining archival research with personal interviews of more than fifty female drummers representing more than eight decades in music history, Smith paints a vivid picture of their struggles to overcome discrimination—not only as professional musicians but in other parts of their lives. Women Drummers outlines the evolution of female drumming from pre-biblical times when women held important leadership roles to their silencing by the church during the Middle Ages to spearheading the fight for women’s rights in the modern era. The stories and personal accounts of female drummers who bucked tradition and societal norms are told against the backdrop of the times in which they performed and the genres they represented, from rock and jazz to blues and country. Although women have proven time and time again that they can more than hold their own against their male counterparts, female drummers not only remain a minority, but their contributions have been obscured by the traditional chauvinistic attitudes in the music business and gender stereotypes that surround the drum itself as a “male” instrument. Women Drummers takes a major step forward in undoing this misconception by acknowledging the talent, contribution, and growing power of women drummers in today’s music environment.
eBook
Mo' meta blues : the world according to Questlove
Mo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture. More than just a memoir, this is a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with post-modern blues.
Book
Comin' Right at Ya
A six-foot-seven-inch Jewish hippie from Philadelphia starts a Western swing band in 1970, when country fans hate hippies and Western swing. It sounds like a joke but—more than forty years, twenty-five albums, and nine Grammy Awards later—Asleep at the Wheel is still drawing crowds around the world. The roster of musicians who’ve shared a stage with the Wheel is a who’s who of American popular music—Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, George Strait, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and so many more. And the bandleader who’s brought them all together is the hippie that claimed Bob Wills’s boots: Ray Benson. In this hugely entertaining memoir, Benson looks back over his life and wild ride with Asleep at the Wheel from the band’s beginning in Paw Paw, West Virginia, through its many years as a Texas institution. He vividly recalls spending decades in a touring band, with all the inevitable ups and downs and changes in personnel, and describes the making of classic albums such as Willie and the Wheel and Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The ultimate music industry insider, Benson explains better than anyone else how the Wheel got rock hipsters and die-hard country fans to love groovy new-old Western swing. Decades later, they still do.
eBook
Dwight Yoakam
From his formative years playing pure, hardcore honky-tonk for mid-’80s Los Angeles punk rockers through his subsequent surge to the top of the country charts, Dwight Yoakam has enjoyed a singular career. An electrifying live performer, superb writer, and virtuosic vocalist, he has successfully bridged two musical worlds that usually have little use for each other—commercial country and its alternative/Americana/roots-rocking counterpart. Defying the label “too country for rock, too rock for country,\" Yoakam has triumphed while many of his peers have had to settle for cult acceptance. Four decades into his career, he has sold more than 25 million records and continues to tour regularly, with an extremely loyal fan base. In Dwight Yoakam, award-winning music journalist Don McLeese offers the first musical biography of this acclaimed artist. Tracing the seemingly disparate influences in Yoakam’s music, McLeese shows how he has combined rock and roll, rockabilly, country, blues, and gospel into a seamless whole. In particular, McLeese explores the essential issue of “authenticity\" and how it applies to Yoakam, as well as to country music and popular culture in general. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with Yoakam and his management, while also benefitting from the perspectives of others closely associated with his musical success (including producer-guitarist Pete Anderson, Yoakam’s partner throughout his most popular and creative decades), Dwight Yoakam pays tribute to the musician who has established himself as a visionary beyond time, an artist who could title an album Tomorrow’s Sounds Today and deliver it.
eBook
Mojo Hand
In a career that took him from the cotton fields of East
Texas to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall and beyond,
Lightnin' Hopkins became one of America's greatest bluesmen,
renowned for songs whose topics effortlessly ranged from his
African American roots to space exploration, the Vietnam War,
and lesbianism, performed in a unique, eccentric, and
spontaneous style of guitar playing that inspired a whole
generation of rock guitarists. Hopkins's music directly and
indirectly influenced an amazing range of artists, including
Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane,
Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, as well as bands such as the Grateful
Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and ZZ Top, with whom Hopkins
performed.
Mojo Hand follows Lightin' Hopkins's life and music
from the acoustic country blues that he began performing in
childhood, through the rise of 1950s rock 'n' roll, which
nearly derailed his career, to his reinvention and
international success as a pioneer of electric folk blues from
the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors draw on 130 vivid oral
histories, as well as extensive archival and secondary sources,
to provide the fullest account available of the development of
Hopkins's music; his idiosyncratic business practices, such as
shunning professional bookers, managers, and publicists; and
his durable and indelible influence on modern roots, blues,
rock 'n' roll, singer-songwriter, and folk music.
Mojo Hand celebrates the spirit and style,
intelligence and wit, and confounding musical mystique of a
bluesman who shaped modern American music like no one else.
eBook
Prince A to Z
Shares facts about the iconic rock star, including his influence on fashion, his collaborations with other artists, and his lasting legacy.
Book
Pretty Good for a Girl
The first book devoted entirely to women in bluegrass, Pretty Good for a Girl documents the lives of more than seventy women whose vibrant contributions to the development of bluegrass have been, for the most part, overlooked. Accessibly written and organized by decade, the book begins with Sally Ann Forrester, who played accordion and sang with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys from 1943 to 1946, and continues into the present with artists such as Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, and the Dixie Chicks. Drawing from extensive interviews, well-known banjoist Murphy Hicks Henry gives voice to women performers and innovators throughout bluegrass's history, including such pioneers as Bessie Lee Mauldin, Wilma Lee Cooper, and Roni and Donna Stoneman; family bands including the Lewises, Whites, and McLains; and later pathbreaking performers such as the Buffalo Gals and other all-girl bands, Laurie Lewis, Lynn Morris, Missy Raines, and many others.
eBook