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51 books match the query 'Songs' and 3 start with d
Deeper Blues
The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread HarrisAndrea Swensson
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
The emotional, epic story of James “Cornbread” Harris—a self-proclaimed “blessed dude” and one of Minneapolis’s most influential musicians
From the heart of the Minnesota blues comes the story of James “Cornbread” Harris Jr., the songwriter, pianist, and consummate bluesman whose seventy years making music helped to shape the Minneapolis Sound. “I am a blessed dude,” Cornbread tells Andrea Swensson, taking us along on his musical journey from a first “gig” entertaining his fellow soldiers during World War II to his subsequent years playing music for audiences across Minnesota. Following Cornbread’s extraordinary life story, Deeper Blues is a unique history of Minnesota music that evolves into a heartfelt tale of reconciliation and forgiveness, all to the tune of the legendary musician’s signature sound.
Cornbread’s career started in the 1950s, when he played with the Augie Garcia Quintet and cowrote their hit “Hi Ho Silver.” A tireless entertainer, he has been performing live ever since, influencing an entire generation of musicians credited with putting Minneapolis on the map in the 1980s—including his long-estranged son, Grammy-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III. Going beyond the music, Deeper Blues turns toward family, atonement, and peace when Cornbread reunites with Jimmy Jam after a five-decade separation and they perform together on stage.
Through conversations with Cornbread, Jimmy Jam, and many others, Swensson reveals a story of perseverance and unfailing grace, a firsthand account of making music in the face of racism and segregation, and a hard-won acceptance of the personal sacrifices that are often required when dedicating one’s life to making music. As the man himself says, “All of my hardships ended up to be blessings.”
A rich mix of present-day anecdotes and historical vignettes, animated by voices from Cornbread’s life and the Twin Cities music scene, underscored by the bluesman’s original lyrics of heartache and hope, and featuring never-before-seen photographs of Cornbread and Jimmy Jam, Deeper Blues tells a singular story—one imprinted on the history, heart, and soul of the Minneapolis Sound.
Distant Cycles
Schubert and the Conceiving of SongRichard Kramer
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Returning the songs to their original keys, Kramer reveals linkages among songs which were often obscured as Schubert readied his compositions for publication. His analysis thus conveys even familiar songs in fresh contexts that will affect performance, interpretation, and criticism. After addressing problems of multiple settings and revisions, Kramer presents a series of briefs for the reconfiguring of sets of songs to poems by Goethe, Rellstab, and Heine. He deconstructs Winterreise, using its convoluted origins to illuminate its textual contradictions. Finally, Kramer scrutinizes settings from the Abendrote cycle (on poems by Friedrich Schlegel) for signs of cyclic process. Probing the farthest reaches of Schubert's engagement with the poetics of lieder, Distant Cycles exposes tensions between Schubert the composer and Schubert the merchant-entrepreneur.
Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same
The Musical Moment in FilmAmy Herzog
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Musical spectacles are excessive and abstract, reconfiguring time and space and creating intense bodily responses. Amy Herzog's engaging work examines those instances where music and movement erupt from within more linear narrative frameworks. The representational strategies found in these films are often formulaic, repeating familiar story lines and stereotypical depictions of race, gender, and class. Yet she finds the musical moment contains a powerful disruptive potential.
Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same investigates the tension and the fusion of difference and repetition in films to ask, How does the musical moment work? Herzog looks at an eclectic mix of works, including the Soundie and Scopitone jukebox films, the musicals of French director Jacques Demy, the synchronized swimming spectacles of Esther Williams, and an apocalyptic musical by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. Several refrains circulate among these texts: their reliance on clichés, their rewriting of cultural narratives, and their hallucinatory treatment of memory and history.
Drawing on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, she explores all of these dissonances as productive forces, and in doing so demonstrates the transformative power of the unexpected.