An insightful work that connects contemporary culture to an old-school genre.
A blues scholar and musician navigates the muddy waters of the genre’s racial divisions.
Blues music, writes Gussow, is in the midst of a fraught debate between what he calls “Black bluesism,” the notion that only Black musicians have standing to play the music, and “blues universalism,” the idea that the music speaks to themes of heartbreak and loss everybody experiences. The former ideology denies contributions White artists have brought to the genre; the latter blithely ignores the music’s complex relationship to Black history. Gussow doesn’t pick a side, nor does he exactly synthesize the two. Rather, across 12 chapters (cannily called “bars”), he discusses the pervasive mythologies that surround blues music, its role in American literature, and the role of race in programming blues festivals. If it doesn’t quite add up to a cohesive argument, Gussow does do an intriguing job of troubling the waters. He counters ideas that the blues are rooted in Black suffering (blues songs are as much about pleasure as pain), that it was a rural form that migrated to the city (Bessie Smith’s experience suggests it was the other way around), and that W.C. Handy “invented” the blues; it’s more correct to say he established a particular version of it. The author is also insightful on how Black writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston all integrated blues music in different ways—though Wright, for his part, was a terrible blues lyricist. Gussow discusses how he’s implicated in this as a White blues harmonica player who has spread the music’s word globally. Though he doesn't present a sustained grand unified theory about race and blues music, the book's range proves his point that the blues is an unsettled genre, open to a host of arguments.
An insightful work that connects contemporary culture to an old-school genre.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4696-6036-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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