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Bezig met laden... Woman with guitar : Memphis Minnie's blues (editie 2014)door Paul Garon
Informatie over het werkWoman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues door Paul Garon
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Universally recognized as one of the greatest blues artists, Memphis Minnie (1897-1973) wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, among them the famous "Bumble Bee Blues," "I'm Talking About You," and "What's the Matter with the Mill?" 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 write her own lyrics and accompanied her singing with magnificent guitar-playing. Thanks to her merciless imagination and dark humor, her songs rank among the most vigorous and challenging popular poetry in any language. Although organized feminism was at it's lowest ebb, Memphis Minnie, a black working-class woman, called no man master, defied gender stereotypes, and exemplified a radically adventurous life-style that makes most careers of the '20s and '30s seem dull by comparison.Woman with Guitar is the first full-length study of the life and work of this extraordinary free spirit, focusing on the lively interplay between Minnie's evolving artistry and the African American community in which she lived and worked. Drawing on folklore, psychoanalysis, critical theory, women's studies, and surrealism, the Garons' inspired explorations of Minnie's songs illuminate the poetics of popular culture as well as the largely hidden history of working-class women's self emancipation. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)782.421643092The arts Music Vocal music Secular Forms of vocal music Secular songs General principles and musical forms Song genres Western popular songs Blues History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Woman With Guitar is divided into two sections: the first 80 pages or so are devoted to a feminist-inflected recounting of Minnie's biography in the context of blues trends from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. To understand Minnie's importance, the Garons argue, you have to understand the trajectory of the blues: the first recorded blues artists, working in the early 1920s, tended to be female singers who performed in a theater, from a stage, and were backed by some minimal combination of instruments. This is now called the "Classic blues" or "vaudeville blues," and is represented by performers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter. Most Classic blues singers performed material written for them by Tin Pan Alley composers, although a few of them wrote their own songs. In the mid- to late-20s, a more grass-roots form of blues began to be recorded: called the "country," "lowdown" or "downhome blues," its musicians performed most often in parks, on street corners, and at casual community gatherings like backyard barbeques, while accompanying themselves on the guitar; as such, the country blues are often associated with class consciousness and individual expression. Early country blues musicians, though, were almost exclusively male, with Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and Lightnin' Hopkins being prominent examples. One of the reasons Minnie was such a striking figure is that she bridged these two forms: she was a woman who made a success as a country blues musician, playing the guitar "as good as any man" (she took the lead part in all her partnerships, specializing in complex multi-layered rhythms), acting as her own manager, and writing and performing her own material.
Another unusual aspect of Minnie's career is that it went on for an almost unheard-of length of time. While the recording careers of most Classic blues musicians were cut off by the advent of the Great Depression, which pretty much stopped the entire recording industry in its tracks from 1930 to 1934, Minnie was able to get through the lean years on live gigs, returning to the recording studio in the mid-30s and continuing to evolve her style through the 40s, helping to forge the "urban blues" of the post-war years and even the electrified Chicago Blues style of the 50s. The Garons do a good job of tracing this progress for the non-initiate of the blues scene, and they make some fascinating points along the way, acknowledging the complex and often contradictory forces at work in blues songs and blues culture. In one section, for example, they mention that the blues pseudonyms that have made the genre so recognizable (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Homesick James Williamson, Barbeque Bob) were often bestowed semi-arbitrarily by white record executives when the person first went in to record. When one stops to consider that many of these performers were born only thirty years or so after the abolition of slavery, which had its own conventions of whites re-naming black people, the practice takes on a particularly callous cast. At the same time, blues performers were able to transform these bestowed names into tools of subversion, as ways to avoid the systemic drawbacks of being named:
Whereas the first part of the Garons' book is fairly straightforward if politically aware biography, the latter two-thirds of the volume is devoted to a surrealist-influenced critical analysis of Minnie's work. I think both sections of the book are fascinating and feature valid approaches, but together they are a very odd combination. In particular, the first chapter of the second section, which sets out the Garons' methodological backgrounds, yanks the reader out of fact-based biography mode and into a jargon-filled crash course in French surrealists like André Breton and Alberto Giacometti. I have a fairly high tolerance for academic jargon, and I agree with the Garons' basic premise that any work of art exists at the nexus of artist and audience, but even I occasionally raised my eyebrows in the latter half of Woman with Guitar:
Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that, despite the Garons' sometimes-humorous overkill on psychoanalytic and surrealist buzzwords (and despite the somewhat DIY nature of the volume, which could have done with more editing for typos and grammar mistakes), I ended up getting A LOT out of the latter part of this book. I would go so far as to say it made me a better blues listener, which is pretty much the highest praise I can think of for this kind of study. Among the intriguing points brought up which might be particularly useful to modern listeners:
Perhaps above all, I appreciated the Garons' emphasis on the way the subject and/or object of a song, or the connotations of a metaphor or image, can shift during the course of a blues, and how those same images and metaphors are often informed by Southern folk beliefs as well as the reality of urban life. The blues is a subtle and complex poetics, but because it uses common words and is, on a surface level, accessible, it's easy to miss that subtlety, those shifts in setting or perspective, or those triple meanings that bring added depth to the experience. I think this is especially true because the subject matter—love, sex, alcohol, gambling, crime—is often considered "coarse" and erroneously dismissed as lacking in complexity. Despite their oddities, the Garons helped me to a new level of appreciation for this art form in general and Minnie in particular—now to collect more of her records!