Quotes from Elijah Wald

To blues purists, the Chambers Brothers, Lightnin' Hopkins—even, at a stretch, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry—were authentic exponents of an ethnic folk culture, while Bloomfield, Butterfield, and Bishop, talented as they might be, were interpreters. That Butterfield had two black musicians in his band proved he was genuinely linked to the tradition, not that he was genuinely part of it.

Ta práce byla ?istá prostituce... prostituce m?že být zcela v poÃ…â"¢ádku pro profesionál(k)y - ale je riziková pro amatéry.

For northern liberals, Vietnam was a much more divisive issue than voting rights and integrated drinking fountains, and many supported Johnson's effort to stem the spread of international Communism.

Ty nejlepÅ¡í nové písnÄ› se zapíÅ¡ou do pamÄ›ti, budou putovat od jednoho zpÄ›váka k druhému, vylepÅ¡ovat se a dopl?ovat. A za sto let možná pÃ…â"¢ijde nÄ›jaký folklorista a nazve je folkovými písni?kami. NáÅ¡ prach proti tomu nebude nic namítat.

virtually all southern rural music shows signs of Afro-European interchange.

the shift from banjo to guitar played a significant role in the rise of blues: Banjos have very fast sound decay, which means that one has to play relatively quickly and cannot mimic the drawn-out contours of a vocal performance. The guitar has greater sustain, making it more appropriate for slow songs, and also has a warmer tone, making it more suitable for accompanying sentimental ballads or moaning hollers.

Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, "The blues ain't nothing but a low-down, aching chill.

Ida Cox, sang that the blues was nothing but "your lover on your mind" and "a slow aching heart disease.

The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.

However hallowed by history, though, the idea that blues is fundamentally a musical heart-cry has some problems. For one thing, along with some of the most moving, cathartic music on earth, the American blues tradition has produced thousands of comical party songs and upbeat dance music.

the first published blues was a song called "I Got the Blues," which appeared in New Orleans in 1908. Its composer was an Italian American named Antonio Maggio, and it began with a twelve-bar section using a melody that is a clear predecessor of W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues.

There is also a purely musical definition of blues: a progression of chords consisting of four bars of the tonic (I), two bars of the subdominant (IV), two bars of the tonic (I), a bar of the dominant seventh (V7), a bar of the subdominant (IV), and two final bars of the tonic (I).

We were learning firsthand that the so-called national 'folk boom' had more to do with celebrity than with any deep grassroots interest.

It was records, though, that made blues a dominant force in the African American entertainment business and the model for later pop trends from R&B to hip-hop.

Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as "Crazy Blues.

Mainstream pop favored romantic dreams, but blues dealt with the sorrows and joys of real relationships: cheating, abandonment, and abuse were balanced by exuberant physical pleasure.

A specifically rural-sounding blues style did not reach a mass audience until 1926, with the first recordings of a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson.

His most influential song, "Matchbox Blues," popularized an image that had first appeared in one of Rainey's lyrics and would be recycled by everyone from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Carl Perkins, and the Beatles: "I'm sitting here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes / I ain't got so many matches, but I've got so far to go.

You don't need a weatherman—to know which way the wind blows.

And then there was Ray Charles.

Sometimes I think that you're too sweet to die, Sometimes I think that you're too sweet to die, And another time I think you ought to be buried alive.

The idea that the English rockers were steering white Americans to authentic African American traditions would become a commonplace of rock history, but very few people were making that case in 1964 or 1965, and certainly not at Newport, where Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were familiar faces.

Legend says this man sold his soul to the Devil. I don't know about that. All I can say is, when he died, the members of this church had love in their hearts and gave him a resting place, and God wrote that down. Now, I don't know what Robert Johnson told the Lord. You don't know what Robert Johnson told the Lord. We all have come short of the glory of God.

jukeboxes—industry estimates suggest that up to half of all the records sold in the United States in the later 1930s went into commercial music machines—and the early electric speakers were particularly suited to the percussive power of a piano.