| Popis: |
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. |
