Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Music

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical...

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical...

In recent years, Scott Ian's "Speaking Words" club tours have drawn a devoted crowd of metal fans who...

Universally recognized as one of the greatest blues artists, Memphis Minnie (1897-1973) wrote and recorded hundreds of songs. Blues people as diverse as Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Big Mama Thornton, and Chuck Berry have acknowledged her as a major influence. At a time when most female vocalists sang Tin Pan Alley material, Minnie wrote her own lyrics and accompanied her singing with virtuoso guitar playing. Thanks to her merciless imagination and dark humor, her songs rank among the most vigorous and challenging popular poetry in any language.

Woman with Guitar is the first...

Yes, Storm Large is her real name, though she's been called many things. As a performer, the majority of descriptions have led with "Amazon," "powerhouse," "a six-foot Vargas pinup come to...

"An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night," reported the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press. This man was named Harris, and The Guardians--written in the years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and ended his life--is Sarah Manguso's heartbreaking elegy.

Harris was a man who "played music, wrote software, wrote music, learned to drive, went to college, went to bed with girls." In The Guardians, Manguso grieves not for family or for a lover, but for a best friend. With startling humor and...

When Elvis Presley first showed up at Sam Phillips's Memphis-based Sun Records studio, he was a shy teenager in search of a sound. Phillips invited a local guitarist named Scotty Moore to stand in. Scotty listened carefully to the young singer and immediately realized that Elvis had something special. Along with bass player Bill Black, the trio recorded an old blues number called -That's All Right, Mama.- It turned out to be Elvis's first single and the defining record of his early style, with a trilling guitar hook that swirled country and blues together and minted a sound with...

When Elvis Presley first showed up at Sam Phillips's Memphis-based Sun Records studio, he was a shy teenager in search of a sound. Phillips invited a local guitarist named Scotty Moore to stand in. Scotty listened carefully to the young singer and immediately realized that Elvis had something special. Along with bass player Bill Black, the trio recorded an old blues number called -That's All Right, Mama.- It turned out to be Elvis's first single and the defining record of his early style, with a trilling guitar hook that swirled country and blues together and minted a sound with...

Wilbur C. Sweatman (1882-1961) is one of the most important, yet unheralded, African American musicians involved in the transition of ragtime into jazz in the early twentieth century. In That's Got 'Em , Mark Berresford tracks this energetic pioneer over a seven-decade career. His talent transformed every genre of black music before the advent of rock and roll---pickaninny- bands, minstrelsy, circus sideshows, vaudeville (both black and white), night clubs, and cabarets. Sweatman was the first African American musician to be offered a long-term recording contract, and he dazzled...

For the first four years of her life, Georgette had two adoring parents who showed her off at every opportunity, and between her parents, grandparents, older sisters, and cheering fans, Georgette's feet seldom hit the ground.

But as in every fairy tale, dark forces were just around the corner. Her parents fought, and George drank. George and Tammy divorced when Georgette was four, and it...