Brian Bisesi, an Italian-American guitar player from New Jersey who was part of the Muddy Waters Band from 1978 to 1980 in Out of the Blue shares a very vivid and often rough but real portrait of how life was when on tour with this blues master. Bisesi, today still a musician and a music […]
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Category: B. R. Music
The Soundies: A History and Catalog of Jukebox Film Shorts of the 1940s by Mark Cantor (2023)
The small-screen world of the short musical film, a form of media presentation usually associated with coin-operated cinematic machines of the 1940s and later decades, keeps fascinating historians, media researchers, music experts and sociologists. Even if nowadays media, video clips, music in all variations and formats, and modes of presentation are easily available on a […]
Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story by Caroline and David Stafford (2023)
Authors Catherine and David Stafford’s new title on one of Britain’s most important bass players, Ronnie Lane (1946-1997), successfully fills some information gaps rock music lovers may have encountered, concerning show biz and London’s music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Their Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story tells of his humble beginnings as […]
Funkiest Man Alive: Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul by Matthew Ruddick (2023)
Memphis, Tennessee, will always stand out as a city important for popular American music. Here W.C. Handy was a work here, later music history was written by quite a few local musicians who excelled in blues, rock’n’roll, soul and funk. One of them was singer/songwriter and master entertainer Rufus Thomas (1917-2001) who now with this […]
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood (2023)
One of the greatest but least researched American record labels, Paramount from Grafton, Wisconsin, is the subject of Scott Blackwood’s title at hand, that introduces itself as a blend of solid historical research, good artist presentation and a bit of fiction. Maybe it has to do with Blackwoods’s first calling as a writer of novels, […]
The Jordanaires: The Story of the World’s Greatest Backup Vocal Group by Gordon Stoker … (2022)
The list of famous singers with biographies is huge and gets longer almost every day. Even so, there are just a few books on those voices that built the solid, reliable and harmonic background for countless hits. It is hardly possible to imagine songs such as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Don’t be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” […]
Paul Weller and Popular Music. Identity, Idiolect and Image by Andrew West (2023)
There is hardly another active English musician who can look back on a catalog of great music and social comment like Paul Weller, former front man of significant bands of the 1970s, 1980s and well-known solo artist of the 2000s, and also as a political voice addressing important issues. On roughly 160 pages author Andrew […]
Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise by Joel Selvin ...
By introducing numerous future songwriters, musicians, and music producers, Joel Selvin presents a very colorful and intense picture of a California long gone. When with what he calls the “University High School class of 1958” the groundwork for the powerful American pop music of the 1960s and 1970s was laid, as some of that group […]
Rock’n’Roll Plays Itself: A Screen History by John Scanlan (2022)
When in the mid-1950s rock’n’roll as both commercial force and incarnation of teenage style invaded the charts and cinema screens, the new category was a bit too much for most common and well-aged (British and American) entertainment shows and representations on screen. In the early days, neither TV nor the film industry would grasp the […]