Blues for smoke

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 ...

Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues---the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their...

John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson was one of the most popular blues harmonica players and singers from the late 1930s through the 1940s. Recording for the Bluebird Records and RCA Vi...

Abstract Smoke & Mirrors: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions is a book about how magic disappears from early Christian texts that feature the apostl...

Alcohol, opiates, cocaine and marijuana, among other drugs, have been used and abused for millennia. Prior to the disease model approach to drug addiction, which posits that addict...

“Brilliant Corners: Improvisation and Practices of Freedom” is a critique of John Edgar Wideman’s novel,Sent for You Yesterday. The chapter interrogates Wideman’s attempt to expose...

Timothy Dodge explores African American interest in and participation in country music dates from the earliest days of the recording industry’s racial segregation of vernacular mus...

Tom Waits's distinctive, bourbon-soaked growl, his unique persona, and his incorporation of musical styles from blues to experimental to vaudeville have secured for him a top-shelf...