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Glow
By David Ritz, Rick James. 1979
Best known for his song "Super Freak," hitmaker, singer, innovator, producer, award-winning pioneer in the fusion of funk groove and…
rock, the late Rick James collaborated with music biographer David Ritz in this posthumously published, wildly entertaining, and profound expression of a rock star's life and soul.He was the nephew of Temptations singer Melvin Franklin; a boy who watched and listened, mesmerized from underneath cocktail tables at the shows of Etta James and Miles Davis. He was a vagrant hippie who wandered to Toronto, where he ended up playing with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and he became a household name in the 1980s with his hit song "Super Freak." Later in life, he was a bad boy who got caught up in drug smuggling and ended up in prison. But since his passing in August 2004, Rick James has remained a legendary icon whose name is nearly synonymous with funk music--and who popularized the genre, creating a lasting influence on pop artists from Prince to Jay-Z to Snoop Dogg, among countless others. In Glow, Rick James and acclaimed music biographer David Ritz collaborated to write a no-holds-barred memoir about the boy and the man who became a music superstar in America's disco age. It tells of James's upbringing and how his mother introduced him to musical geniuses of the time. And it reveals details on many universally revered artists, from Marvin Gaye and Prince to Nash, Teena Marie, and Berry Gordy. James himself said, "My journey has taken me through hell and back. It's all in my music--the parties, the pain, the oversized ego, the insane obsessions." But despite his bad boy behavior, James was a tremendous talent and a unique, unforgettable human being. His "glow" was an overriding quality that one of his mentors saw in him--and one that will stay with this legendary figure who left an indelible mark on American popular music.Defiant Spirits
By Ross King. 2010
Beginning in 1912, Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of…
Seven, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, over a dozen years in Canadian history. Working in an eclectic and sometimes controversial blend of modernist styles, they produced what an English critic celebrated in the 1920s as the "most vital group of paintings" of the 20th century. Inspired by Cézanne, Van Gogh and other modernist artists, they tried to interpret the Ontario landscape in light of the strategies of the international avant-garde. Based after 1914 in the purpose-built Studio Building for Canadian Art, the young artists embarked on what Lawren Harris called "an all-engrossing adventure": travelling north into the anadian Shield and forging a style of painting appropriate to what they regarded as the unique features of Canada's northern landscape.Rigorously researched and drawn from archival documents and letters, Defiant Spirits constitutes a "group biography," reconstructing the men's aspirations, frustrations and achievements. It details not only the lives of Tom Thomson and the members of the Group of Seven but also the political and social history of CanadaPlease Pass the Biscuits, Pappy: Pictures of Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel
By John Anderson, Bill Crawford. 2004
Long before movie stars Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger became governors of California, a popular radio personality with no previous…
political experience—who wasn't even registered to vote—swept into the governor's office of Texas. W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel was a 1930s businessman who discovered the power of radio to sell flour. His musical shows with the Light Crust Doughboys (which launched the career of Bob Wills) and his radio homilies extolling family and Christian values found a vast, enthusiastic audience in Depression-era Texas. When Pappy decided to run for governor in 1938 as a way to sell more flour—a fact he proudly proclaimed throughout the campaign—the people of Texas voted for him in record numbers. And despite the ineptitude for politics he displayed once in office, Texans returned him to the governorship in 1940 and then elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1941 in a special election in which he defeated Lyndon Johnson, as well as to a full term as senator in 1942.Violence Girl
By Alice Bag. 2011
The proximity of the East L.A. barrio to Hollywood is as close as a short drive on the 101 freeway,…
but the cultural divide is enormous. Born to Mexican-born and American-naturalized parents, Alicia Armendariz migrated a few miles west to participate in the free-range birth of the 1970s punk movement. Alicia adopted the punk name Alice Bag, and became lead singer for The Bags, early punk visionaries who starred in Penelope Spheeris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. Here is a life of many crossed boundaries, from East L.A.'s musica ranchera to Hollywood's punk rock; from a violent male-dominated family to female-dominated transgressive rock bands. Alice's feminist sympathies can be understood by the name of her satiric all-girl early Goth band Castration Squad. Violence Girl takes us from a violent upbringing to an aggressive punk sensibility; this time a difficult coming-of-age memoir culminates with a satisfying conclusion, complete with a happy marriage and children. Nearly a hundred excellent photographs energize the text in remarkable ways. Alice Bag's work and influence can be seen this year in the traveling Smithsonian exhibition "American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music."Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends of West Texas Music
By Christopher J. Oglesby. 2006
In this book, Christopher Oglesby interviews twenty-five musicians and artists with ties to Lubbock to discover what it is about…
this community and West Texas in general that feeds the creative spirit. Their answers are revealing. Some speak of the need to rebel against conventional attitudes that threaten to limit their horizons. Others, such as Joe Ely, praise the freedom of mind they find on the wide open plains. "There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up a pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played," he says. Still others express skepticism about how much Lubbock as a place contributes to the success of its musicians. Jimmie Dale Gilmore says, "I think there is a large measure of this Lubbock phenomenon that is just luck, and that is the part that you cannot explain."Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation
By Ben Watson. 2013
This brilliant biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about…
jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and recordsession guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. Today his anti-idiom of "Free Improvisation" has become the lingua franca of the "avant" scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore among his admirers.The Interior Castle
By Ann Hulbert. 1992
An important moment in American literary history takes life in this stunning biography of Jean Stafford, one of the most…
successful, admired--and troubled--of the brilliant and influential midcentury circle of writers and critics that included Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Peter Taylor, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell, Stafford's first husband. Ann Hulbert shows us how Stafford, raised in Colorado, the daughter of a failed writer of Westerns, came of literary age in the East, yet fiercely maintained her connection with her provincial background, forging the unique style that marked her highly acclaimed first novel, Boston Adventure; her Masterpiece, The Mountain Lion; her third novel, The Catherine Wheel; and the stories she published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, which were honored in 1970 with a Pulitzer Prize. We follow Stafford through the early experiences to which she returned again and again in her fiction, and which helped shape her disenchanted vision--her father's sudden loss of his fortune; her shame as an adolescent, living in a boardinghouse in Boulder run by her mother; her aesthetic experimentation as a member of the intellectually maverick "Barbarians" at the University of Colorado; her exciting but troubling Wanderjahr in Nazi Germany, where she watched civilization crumbling. We see her take her place as a forceful, attractive, witty, yet also insecure woman among a group of spirited young writers who were learning from and challenging their older mentors--the increasingly powerful Southern critics and the Partisan Review circle in New York. With her marriage to Lowell at twenty-four, she embarked on a feverishly creative but ill-fated coursethat held auguries of his and his fellow poets' tragic paths: she struggled with Catholicism, confronted domestic violence, battled with alcoholism and mental instability, and throughout it all wrote formally impeccable fiction. And we see her as she finds some happiness with her third husband, the writer A. J. Liebling, part of the New Yorker world that had become her home in the late 1940s. Throughout, we are made aware of Stafford's constant search for a bastion of order--a safe place, an escape from the unsettling sense of vulnerability that engulfed her, an interior castle--from which to approach her life and her art.Halfway Home: My Life 'til Now
By Ronan Tynan. 2002
Yes, I am a singer. But I am also a horseman, an athlete, and a doctor. I am a son,…
a brother, and a friend. I can sing as I do only because of the life that I've led. With each decade, I've found myself in very different, evermore challenging arenas, but the many stages of my life have always intertwined. I have moved from one stage to the next as if on a wild steeplechase, keeping my eye fixed straight ahead and above me. If there is a single line connecting all the episodes and main events of my life it is this -- a gift both given and received. -- from the IntroductionInHalfway Home,a beautifully written memoir, Ronan Tynan, a member of the enormously popular Irish Tenors, shares his remarkable story of overcoming adversity and attaining worldwide success in several different areas. Diagnosed with a lower limb disability at birth, Ronan Tynan had his legs amputated below the knee when he was twenty years old. Eight weeks later, he was climbing the stairs of his college dorm, and within a year, he was winning races in the Paralympic Games, amassing eighteen gold medals and fourteen world records. After becoming the first disabled person ever admitted to the National College of Physical Education, he served a short stint in the prosthetics industry and began a new career in medicine. He continued his studies at Trinity College, where he specialized in orthopedic sports injuries. After earning his medical degree, Ronan chose music for the next act in his life. Less than one year after he began studying voice, he won both the John McCormick Cup for Tenor Voice and the BBC talent showGo for It. He went on to win the prestigious International Operatic Singing Competition in France, and in 1998 his debut Sony album,My Life Belongs to You,became a top-five hit in England within just two weeks and eventually went platinum. Later that year, he was invited to join The Irish Tenors, furthering a journey that started in a small Irish village and has brought him to the world's grandest stages. InHalfway Home,Tynan movingly describes his life story, which Barbara Walters called "so amazing you may find it hard to believe. "Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
By Peter Schickele. 1976
What little-known son of a famous genius has been called:"A musical blight""A one-man plague""History's most justifiably neglected composer""The worst musician…
ever to trod organ pedals" "A pimple on the face of music"In this long-awaited hoax, possibly the most unimportant piece of scholarship in over two thousand years, Professor Peter Schickele has finally succeeded in ripping the veil of obscurity from the most unusual -- to put it kindly -- composer in the history of music: P.D.Q. Bach, the last and unquestionably the least of the great Johann Sebastian Bach's many children.From the Trade Paperback edition.Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings
By Louis Kaplan. 1995
Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist…
and theorist's multifaceted life and work--an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy's signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy's artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott
By Horace Tapscott. 2001
Songs of the Unsung is the autobiography of Los Angeles jazz musician and activist Horace Tapscott (1934-1999). A pianist who…
ardently believed in the power of music to connect people, Tapscott was a beloved and influential character who touched many yet has remained unknown to the majority of Americans. In addition to being "his" story, Songs of the Unsung is the story of Los Angeles's cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century, of the origins of many of the most important avant-garde musicians still on the scene today, and of a rich and varied body of music. Tapscott's narrative covers his early life in segregated Houston, his move to California in 1943, life as a player in the Air Force band in the early fifties, and his travels with the Lionel Hampton Band. He reflects on how the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the "Ark"), an organization he founded in 1961 to preserve and spread African and African-American music, eventually became the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension--a group that not only performed musically but was active in the civil rights movement, youth education, and community programs. Songs of the Unsung also includes Tapscott's vivid descriptions of the Watts neighborhood insurrection of 1965 and the L. A. upheavals of 1992, interactions with both the Black Panthers and the L. A. P. D. , his involvement in Motown's West Coast scene, the growth of his musical reputation abroad, and stories about many of his musician-activist friends, including Billy Higgins, Don Cherry, Buddy Collette, Arthur Blythe, Lawrence and Wilber Morris, Linda Hill, Elaine Brown, Stanley Crouch, and Sun Ra. With a foreword by Steven Isoardi, a brief introduction by actor William Marshall, a full discography of Tapscott's recordings, and many fine photographs, Songs of the Unsung is the inspiring story of one of America's most unassuming twentieth-century heroes.Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
By Wendy Lesser. 2011
Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime…
under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voiceslooks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a "diary, the story of his soul. " The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works. Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience,Music for Silenced Voicesis a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.Marilyn & Me
By Lawrence Schiller. 2012
An intimate memoir recalling a young photographer's relationship with Marilyn Monroe just months before her death, with extraordinary photographs, some…
of which have never been published."With the precision of a surgeon, Schiller slices through the façade of Marilyn Monroe in his unflinching memoir. Revealing and readable, it's a book I couldn't put down." --Tina BrownWhen he pulled his station wagon into the 20th Century-Fox studios parking lot in Los Angeles in 1960, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Schiller kept telling himself that this was just another assignment, just another pretty girl. But the assignment and the girl were anything but ordinary. Schiller was a photographer for Look magazine and his subject was Marilyn Monroe, America's sweetheart and sex symbol. In this intimate memoir, Schiller recalls the friendship that developed between him and Monroe while he photographed her in Hollywood in 1960 and 1962 on the sets of Let's Make Love and the unfinished feature Something's Got to Give, the last film she worked on. Schiller recalls Marilyn as tough and determined, enormously insecure as an actress but totally self-assured as a photographer's model. Monroe knew how to use her looks and sexuality to generate publicity, and in 1962 she allowed Schiller to publish the first nude photographs of her in over ten years, which she then used as a weapon against a studio that wanted to have her fired--and ultimately succeeded. The Marilyn Schiller knew and writes about was adept at hiding deep psychological scars, but she was also warm and open, candid and disarming, a movie star who wished to be taken more seriously than she was. Accompanying the text are eighteen of the author's own photographs, some never previously published. Many writers have tried to capture her essence on the page, but as someone who was in the room, a young man Marilyn could connect with and trust, Schiller gives us a unique look at the real woman offscreen."In this short, splendid memoir, Lawrence Schiller offers us another cut on the scintillating diamond that is Marilyn Monroe. In clear honest straightforward prose, Schiller allows us to dwell in the heart of another time. He captures Marilyn, both in photographs and words, and in so doing he gives us intimate access into one of the great stories of the 20th century: the complicated cocktail of joy and sadness that goes along with both beauty and fame." --Colum McCannFrom the Hardcover edition.Christian Lacroix and the Tale of Sleeping Beauty
By Christian Lacroix, Camilla Morton. 2011
About the Fashion Fairy Tale Memoir Series Each book in this inspired series from fashion writer Camilla Morton inventively reimagines…
one of our favorite "Once Upon a Time" stories, blending with it the real-life story of a famed fashion designer. Lushly illustrated by the designers themselves, these tales illuminate each iconic individual's creative magic while celebrating his unique life and career. The result is an intriguing combination of whimsy and memoir. In this contemporary twist on the tale of Sleeping Beauty, Monsieur Lacroix exercises a stunningly diverse array of artistic styles, revealing many more mesmerizing sides to his fertile imagination than those we have already seen in his magnificent fashions.Virgil Thomson: Library of America #277
By Tim Page, Virgil Thomson. 1927
An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by America's greatest composer-critic. Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of…
Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson's other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America's musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic, here presented in its revised edition of 1962, discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson's time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson's autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I-era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson's final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English--especially American English--to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson's magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984--thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books.From the Hardcover edition.Elvis Presley
By Bobbie Ann Mason. 2003
A vibrant, sympathetic portrait of the once and future king of rock ?n? roll by the award-winning author of Shiloh…
and In Country To this clear-eyed portrait of the first rock ?n? roll superstar, Bobbie Ann Mason brings a novelist?s insight and the empathy of a fellow Southerner who, from the first time she heard his voice on the family radio, knew that Elvis was ?one of us. ? Elvis Presley deftly braids the mythic and human aspects of his story, capturing both the charismatic, boundary-breaking singer who reveled in his celebrity and the soft-spoken, working-class Southern boy who was fatally unprepared for his success. The result is a riveting, tragic book that goes to the heart of the American dream. .Secret Lives of Great Composers
By Mario Zucca, Elizabeth Lunday. 2009
True tales of murder riots heartbreak and great music With outrageous anecdotes about everyone…
from Gioachino Rossini draft-dodging womanizer to Johann Sebastian Bach jailbird to Richard Wagner alleged cross-dresser Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy steamy and gritty history behind the great masters of international music You ll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives that John Cage was obsessed with fungus that Berlioz plotted murder and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church s organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes This is one music history lesson you ll never forgetSing It!: A Biography of Pete Seeger
By Meryl Danziger. 2016
A tall, skinny man in blue jeans stands on a stage, one hand on his banjo, the other raised to…
the crowd of 15,000 people who have come to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. "Sing it!" he shouts, and everyone sings. How did a humble, banjo-playing Harvard University dropout become one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century? This is the story of Pete Seeger--singer, songwriter, social activist, environmentalist--who filled his toolbox with songs and set out to repair whatever in the world was broken. His story intertwines with a century of American history, and readers will be surprised to discover how many familiar songs, people, and projects somehow connect back to this one individual. What was it like for a city boy like Pete to hope freight trains with Woody Guthrie, the free-spirited composter of "This Land Is Your Land"? "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a song beloved by people all over the world, might have been lost to history had it not been for Pete Seeger. The Hudson River is cleaner than it used to be; what did Pete do to help that happen? Through learning of his life of activism, readers will become links in the chain, inspired to reflect on their own power to make change.From the Hardcover edition.Stars of the Rock 'n' Roll Highway
By Victoria Micklish Pasmore. 2015
If Memphis is the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, it certainly spent its adolescence along U.S. Highway 67. Known today…
as Rock 'n' Roll Highway 67, it runs from Newport, Arkansas, to the Missouri border. It is here that the first rock 'n' rollers honed their skills, playing the small towns along the two-lane road. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins--These were just a few of the young musicians who performed their music in the school gyms, honky-tonks, and clubs that dotted Highway 67 with such colorful names as Bloody Bucket, Silver Moon, Porky's Rooftop, and the Skylark Drive In Theater. Presley, Cash, Lewis and Perkins--Sun Records' "Million Dollar Quartet"--toured together while nurturing such local talent as Sonny Burgess, Bobby Brown, Narvel Flats, and Charlie Rich. In these pages, author Vicki Pasmore takes you on a guided tour of the Rock 'n' Roll Highway to meet 20 of the entertainers who gave it its name.Romaine Brooks: A Life
By Cassandra Langer. 2015
The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in…
the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist--and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms. Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.