Lonnie Johnson is a blues legend. His virtuosity on the blues guitar is second to none, and his influence on artists from T-Bone Walker and B. B. King to Eric Clapton is well established. Yet Johnson mastered multiple instruments. He recorded with jazz icons such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and he played vaudeville music, ballads, and popular songs.In this book, Julia Simon takes a closer look at Johnson’s musical legacy. Considering the full body of his work, Simon pres...

Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. He composed operas and other musical pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote at length about musical theory. Critical analysis of Rousseau’s work in music has been principally the domain of musicologists, rarely involving the work of scholars of political theory or lit...

Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement of call and response, the expressive bends and wails of voice and instruments or the synergistic relationship between audience and performers, the blues embody a kind of "living in the moment" aesthetic. At the same time, the blues genre has always responded in a unique way to its historical moment, its formal characteristics, figures, and devices constantly emerging from--and speaking to--the s...

A powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee HookerBorn in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father's shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper's son who became known for hit songs like “Boogie Chillin,” “I'm in the Mood,” and “Boom Boom,” and in 1972, he and his father performed live and recorded an album in Soledad Prison. Junior seemed to have a golden ticke...

While all music genres incorporate religious imagery, the blues has its origin in the soil of the church. In its infancy, the blues was often dismissed as undermining the church’s gospel songbook. The initial resistance, however, could not suppress the organic development of a genre of music born from suffering. The great Mississippi Delta bluesman, Muddy Waters, once said, "The blues was born behind a mule." Behind a beast of burden, the working man found in the blues a way to console the...

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’. The authors examine how tradition is used and adapted, invented and re-invented; how meaning can leak from past to present; the ways in which people’s agencies differ as they make decisions; and the process of bricolage in making new arrangements. These themes are illustrated through a variety of case studies, ranging...

This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come.Placing blues music within its historical context of the post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment...

Millions know Simone “Simca” Beck as Julia Child’s French partner in creating the two unforgettable volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Simca’s Cuisine offers the delectable recipes that Beck personally treasured most. She presents family specialties from the well-thumbed notebooks of her mother and grandmother as well as recipes from her life in Normandy, Alsace, and Provence where she gardened, cooked, and entertained. Skillfully adapting French ways to Amer...

Some moments burn in the mind for ever. The landing is dark. Light comes from a window at the far end, enough to run by. Breath comes hard. From the stairs sound heavy footfalls in pursuit. The landing ends in a last doorway. There is no more running, only the need to hide...Imagine not knowing the father of your child. Not knowing his name. What he looks like. Or what sort of person he is. Although she is desperate for a baby, that is something that Kate Powell cannot acc...

Julia McKenzie and Simon Carter star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E Nesbit’s much-loved children’s novel.‘an enchanting adaptation’ Independent on SundayOn a hot, Edwardian summer’s day, five children are playing in a gravel pit when they dig up something very peculiar: a funny, furry, fat litte creature with the feet of a monkey and bat’s ears! The Psammead is a magical sand fairy who has the power to grant wishes: but the children can only have ...

Welcome to Vizby's world!Welcome to Vizby's world! Vizby is one of the happiest, naughtiest and cleverest dogs of them all. Vizby is an irrepressible Hungarian Vizsla. She just lives her life to the maximum and everyone loves her. Here you will join Vizby's universe in New Farm (Brisbane) with her amazing Ma and neighbours. Find out just how naughty Viz can be!Aimed at 7 to 12-year olds, this book is great fun for all and i...

Vizby: The Naughty Dog - Book 3Wow, Book 3! Welcome back! Firmly established now as one of the happiest, naughtiest and cleverest dogs of them all, Vizby runs riot. Vizby meets Hedges (her first Vizsla friend), she finds out about clean bed sheets, and I won't even mention what she does with the mud and the stick.Aimed at 7 to 12 year olds, this book is great fun for all and is centred arou...