University Press of Mississippi – förlag

Bobby "Blue" Bland's silky-smooth vocal style and captivating live performances helped propel the blues out of Delta juke joints and into urban clubs and upscale theaters. Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland relates how Bland, along with longtime friend B. B. King, and other members of the loosely knit group who called themselves the Beale Streeters, forged a new electrified blues style in Memphis in the early 1950s. Combining elements of Delta blues, southern gospel, big-band jazz, and country and western music, Bland and the Beale Streeters were at the heart of a revolution. This biography traces how Bland scored hit after hit, placing more than sixty songs on the R&B charts throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. A four-time Grammy nominee, he received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Blues Foundation, as well as the Rhythm & Blues Foundation's Pioneer Award. He was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame. This biography at last heralds one of America's great music makers.

Diane di Prima (1934–2020) was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, and her career is distinguished by strong contributions to both literature and social justice. Di Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) edited The Floating Bear (1962–69), one of the most significant underground publications of the sixties. Di Prima’s poetry and prose chronicle her opposition to the Vietnam War; her advocacy of the rights of Blacks, Native Americans, and the LGBTQ community; her concern about environmental issues; and her commitment to creating a world free of exploitation and poverty. In addition, di Prima is significant due to her challenges to the roles that American women were expected to play in society. Her Memoirs of a Beatnik was a sensation, and she talks about its lasting impact as well.Conversations with Diane di Prima presents twenty interviews ranging from 1972 to 2010 that chart di Prima’s intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution. From her adolescence, di Prima was fascinated by occult, esoteric, and magical philosophies. In these interviews readers can see the ways these concepts influenced both her personal life and her poetry and prose. We are able to view di Prima’s life course from her year at Swarthmore College; her move back to New York and then to San Francisco; her studies of Zen Buddhism; her fascination with the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah; and her later engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and work with Chogyam Trungpa. Another particularly interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore di Prima’s career as an independent publisher—she founded Poets Press in New York and Eidolon Editions in California—and her commitment to promoting writers such as Audre Lorde. Taken together, these interviews reveal di Prima as both a writer of genius and an intensely honest, direct, passionate, and committed advocate of a revolution in consciousness.

Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives makes available for the first time to English readership a selection of viewpoints from media practitioners, designers, educators, and scholars working in the East Asian Pacific. This collection not only engages a multidisciplinary approach in understanding the subject of Japanese animation but also shows ways to research, teach, and more fully explore this multidimensional world.Presented in six sections, the translated essays cross-reference each other. The collection adopts a wide range of critical, historical, practical, and experimental approaches. This variety provides a creative and fascinating edge for both specialist and nonspecialist readers. Contributors' works share a common relevance, interest, and involvement despite their regional considerations and the different modes of analysis demonstrated. They form a composite of teaching and research ideas on Japanese animation.

Many studies of African-American gospel music spotlight history and style. This one, however, is focused mainly on grassroots makers and singers. Most of those included here are not stars. A few have received national recognition, but most are known only in their own home areas. Yet their collective stories presented in this book indicate that black gospel music is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary American song. Its author Alan Young is a New Zealander who came to the South seeking authentic blues music. Instead, he found gospel to be the most pervasive, fundamental music in the contemporary African-American South. Blues, he concludes, has largely lost touch with its roots, while gospel continues to express authentic resources. Conducting interviews with singers and others in the gospel world of Tennessee and Mississippi, Young ascertains that gospel is firmly rooted in community life. Woke Me Up This Morning includes his candid, widely varied conversations with a capella groups, with radio personalities, with preachers, and with soloists whose performances reveal the diversity of gospel styles. Major figures interviewed include the Spirit of Memphis Quartet and the Reverend Willie Morganfield, author and singer of the million-selling ""What Is This?"" who turned his back on fame in order to pastor a church in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. All speak freely in oral-history style here, telling how they became involved in gospel music and religion, how it enriches their lives, how it is connected to secular music (especially blues), and how the spiritual and the practical are united in their performances. Their accounts reveal the essential grassroots force and spirit of gospel music and demonstrate that if blues springs from America's soul, then gospel arises from its heart.

Robert Dance’s new evaluation of Joan Crawford looks at her entire career and—while not ignoring her early years and tempestuous personal life—focuses squarely on her achievements as an actress, and as a woman who mastered the studio system with a rare combination of grit, determination, beauty, and talent.Crawford’s remarkable forty-five-year motion picture career is one of the industry’s longest. Signing her first contract in 1925, she was crowned an MGM star four years later and by the mid-1930s was the most popular actress in America. In the early 1940s, Crawford’s risky decision to move to Warner Bros. was rewarded with an Oscar for Mildred Pierce. This triumph launched a series of film noir classics. In her fourth decade she teamed with rival Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, proving that Crawford, whose career had begun by defining big-screen glamour, had matured into a superb dramatic actress. Her last film was released in 1970, and two years later she made a final television appearance, forty-seven years after walking through the MGM gate for the first time. Crawford made a successful transition into business during her later years, notably in her long association with Pepsi-Cola as a board member and the brand’s leading ambassador. Overlooked in previous biographies has been Crawford’s fierce resolve in creating and then maintaining her star persona. She let neither her age nor the passing of time block her unrivaled ambition, and she continually reimagined herself, noting once that, for the right part, she would play Wally Beery’s grandmother. But she was always the consummate star, and at the time of her death in 1977, she was a motion picture legend and a twentieth-century icon.

Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood’s Real Cowboy is the definitive biography of Ben Johnson (1918–1996), the only man to win both an Academy Award and a world rodeo championship. Born on a historic Oklahoma ranch, Johnson could rope cattle before he could read, and his horsemanship took him straight to Hollywood when tycoon Howard Hughes needed horses for The Outlaw in 1943. What started as a behind-the-scenes gig turned into an acting career that spanned six decades.Discovered by legendary director John Ford, Johnson became a fixture in classic Westerns alongside John Wayne, before stepping into more complex roles with filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Bogdanovich—who guided him to his Oscar-winning performance in The Last Picture Show. Though he worked with Hollywood greats like Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, and Clint Eastwood, Johnson remained rooted in the authenticity of the American West, both on and off screen.Drawing from a wealth of interviews with costars, directors, and rodeo companions, Kathryn Jones captures the grit, grace, and enduring legacy of a man who didn’t just play a cowboy—he was one. Tall in the Saddle is a rich, cinematic portrait of a Hollywood legend whose real-life story is as unforgettable as any role he played.

Outsider art has exploded onto the international art scene, gaining widespread attention for its startling originality and visual power. As an expression of raw creativity, outsider art remains associated with self-taught visionaries, psychiatric patients, trance mediums, eccentric outcasts, and unschooled artistic geniuses who create things outside of mainstream artistic trends and styles. Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma provides a comprehensive guide through the contested terrain of outsider art and the related domains of art brut, visionary art, ""art of the insane,"" and folk art. The book examines the history and primary issues of the field as well as explores the intersection between culture and individual creativity that is at the very heart of outsider art definitions and debates.Daniel Wojcik's interdisciplinary study challenges prevailing assumptions about the idiosyncratic status of outsider artists. This wide-ranging investigation of the art and lives of those labeled outsiders focuses on the ways that personal tragedies and suffering have inspired the art-making process. In some cases, trauma has triggered a creative transformation that has helped artists confront otherwise overwhelming life events. Additionally, Wojcik's study illustrates how vernacular traditions, religious worldviews, ethnic heritage, and popular culture have influenced such art. With its detailed consideration of personal motivations, cultural milieu, and the potentially therapeutic aspects of art making, this volume provides a deeper understanding of the artistic impulse and human creativity.

From the late 1920s through the thirties, Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was the biggest star in Hollywood. She stopped making films in 1941, at only thirty-six, and thereafter sought a discreet private life. Still, her fame only increased as the public and press clamored for news of the former actress. At the time of her death, forty-nine years later, photographers continued to stalk her, and her death was reported on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.In The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood, Robert Dance traces the strategy a working-class Swedish teenager employed to enter motion pictures, find her way to America, and ultimately become Hollywood’s most glorious product. Brilliant tactics allowed her to reach Hollywood’s upper-most echelon and made her one of the last century’s most famous people. Garbo was discovered by director Mauritz Stiller, who saw promise in her nascent talent and insisted that she accompany him when he was lured to America by an MGM contract. By twenty she was a movie star and the epitome of glamour. Soon Garbo was among the highest-paid performers, and in many years she occupied the number one position. Unique among studio players, she quickly insisted on and was granted final authority over her scripts, co-stars, and directors. But Garbo never played the Hollywood game, and by the late twenties her unwillingness to grant interviews, attend premieres, or meet visiting dignitaries won her the sobriquet the Swedish Sphinx.The Savvy Sphinx, which includes over a hundred beautiful images, charts her rise and her long self-imposed exile as the queen who abdicated her Hollywood throne. Garbo was the paramount star produced by the Hollywood studio system, and by the time of her death her legendary status was assured.

In Thomas Jefferson on Wine, John Hailman celebrates a founding father's lifelong interest in wine and provides unprecedented insight into Jefferson's character from this unique perspective. In both his personal and public lives, Jefferson wielded his considerable expertise to influence the drinking habits of his friends, other founding fathers, and the American public away from hard liquor toward the healthier pleasures of wine.An international wine judge and nationally syndicated wine columnist, Hailman discusses how Jefferson's tastes developed, which wines and foods he preferred at different stages of his life, and how Jefferson became the greatest wine expert of the early American republic. Hailman explores the third president's fascination with scores of wines from his student days at Williamsburg to his lengthy retirement years at Monticello, often using Jefferson's own words from hundreds of immensely readable and surprisingly modern letters on the subject. A new epilogue covers the ongoing saga of the alleged wine swindle involving bottles of Bordeaux purported to belong to Jefferson.

The Beat! was the first book to explore the musical, social, and cultural phenomenon of go-go music. In this new edition, updated by a substantial chapter on the current scene, authors Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson, Jr., place go-go within black popular music made since the middle 1970s--a period during which hip-hop has predominated. This styling reflects the District's African American heritage. Its super-charged drumming and vocal combinations of hip-hop, funk, and soul evolved and still thrive on the streets of Washington, D.C., and in neighboring Prince George's County, making it the most geographically compact form of popular music.Go-go--the only musical form indigenous to Washington, D.C.--features a highly syncopated, nonstop beat and vocals that are spoken as well as sung. The book chronicles its development and ongoing popularity, focusing on many of its key figures and institutions, including established acts such as Chuck Brown (the Godfather of Go-Go), Experience Unlimited, Rare Essence, and Trouble Funk; well-known DJs, managers, and promoters; and filmmakers who have incorporated it into their work. Now updated and back in print, The Beat! provides longtime fans and those who study American musical forms a definitive look at the music and its makers.

For the first time in English, the classic volume that developed a radical new understanding of free jazz and African American culture.1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli cowrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression.This analysis critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz/ Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists.

Whistle Stop traces the remarkable life of trumpeter and composer Kenny Dorham (1924–1972), whose journey from rural Texas to the forefront of modern jazz mirrors the broader story of Black resilience and creativity in twentieth-century America. Dorham was born in Freestone County to a sharecropping family whose roots stretch back to Reconstruction, when his great-grandfather owned and farmed land in East Texas. Raised there and in segregated East Austin, Dorham found his voice on the trumpet at Anderson High School, and after brief stops at Wiley College and in the army, he landed in New York just as bebop was transforming American music.Dorham quickly became a cornerstone of that transformation. From performing with Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, and Max Roach to mentoring younger talents like Joe Henderson, he played a defining role in shaping modern jazz. A gifted composer, collaborator, and teacher, Dorham also helped lay the foundation for formal jazz education. Yet despite his immense contributions and the respect given him by other musicians, he remained underrecognized by critics—even as he continued to influence the musical generations that followed him.Drawing on interviews, archival research, and family history, Whistle Stop offers a vivid portrait not only of a jazz innovator, but of a Texas family whose story stretches across emancipation, migration, segregation, and cultural transformation. More than fifty years after his passing, Kenny Dorham’s music and legacy continue to inspire—his whistle stop in jazz history still echoing.

Booker "Bukka" White (1905–1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White’s life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee.For years only a name on old 78 records—and believed by some to be dead—White was "rediscovered" by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album.In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of "slavery time," White told the author, ". . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now—something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on."The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B.B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century—the grandson of a slave—found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.

From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unveiling the intimate mysteries of human nature, no new film by Kubrick ever failed to spark debate or to be deeply pondered. Kubrick (1928-1999) has remained as elusive as the subjects of his films. Unlike many other filmmakers he was not inclined to grant interviews, instead preferring to let his movies speak for themselves. By allowing both critics and moviegoers to see the inner workings of this reclusive filmmaker, this first comprehensive collection of his relatively few interviews is invaluable. Ranging from 1959 to 1987 and including Kubrick's conversations with Gene Siskel, Jeremy Bernstein, Gene D. Phillips, and others, this book reveals Kubrick's diverse interests -- nuclear energy and its consequences, space exploration, science fiction, literature, religion, psychoanalysis, the effects of violence, and even chess -- and discloses how each affects his films. He enthusiastically speaks of how advances in camera and sound technology made his films more effective.Kubrick details his hands-on approach to filmmaking as he discusses why he supervises nearly every aspect of production. ""All the hand-held camerawork is mine,"" he says in a 1972 interview about A Clockwork Orange. ""In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it virtually impossible to explain what I want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator. ""Neither guarded nor evasive, the Kubrick who emerges from these interviews is candid, opinionated, confident, and articulate. His incredible memory and his gift for organization come to light as he quotes verbatim sections of reviews, books, and articles. Despite his reputation as a recluse, the Kubrick of these interviews is approachable, witty, full of anecdotes, and eager to share a fascinating story.

Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and cultural sources of New Orleans jazz, Charters provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city's musical lineages--African American, white, and Creole--in jazz's formative years. Charters also maps the inroads blazed by the city's Italian immigrant musicians, who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the author's own interviews, begun in the 1950s, on the extensive material gathered by the Oral History Project in New Orleans, on the recent scholarship of a new generation of writers, and on an exhaustive examination of related newspaper files from the jazz era. The book extends the study area of his earlier book Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1957, and breaks new ground with its in-depth discussion of the earliest New Orleans recordings. A Trumpet around the Corner for the first time brings the story up to the present, describing the worldwide interest in the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the exciting resurgence of the brass bands of the last decades. The book discusses the renewed concern over New Orleans's musical heritage, which is at great risk after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters.

Dylan in Cincinnati takes a fresh approach to Bob Dylan’s performance art by asking what happens when we focus on a single city across six decades. When we think of Dylan in concert, we imagine Newport, New York, or London. But most of his shows were in places far from the spotlight—venues largely ignored by music critics and scholars. Cincinnati, a city with little fanfare in the heart of the American Midwest, becomes an ideal site for study. Its concerts and bootleg recordings tell a story of reinvention night after night, year after year. This history requires planting a shovel in one locale and digging down, layer after layer. What emerges is a portrait of Dylan as a restless itinerant artist who never abandoned audiences in flyover states. In fact, some of his strongest performances were given there. By recovering these overlooked shows, Dylan in Cincinnati documents not only the history of one city’s concerts but also the essence of Dylan’s enduring power as a live performer.

As one of the most iconic American singer-songwriters in history, Bob Dylan has been a major figure in music and one of the best-selling artists for over sixty years. Coming out of the Greenwich folk scene in the 1960s, Dylan’s music has evolved over the years and defies musical genres. While countless books have been written about Dylan, none have focused on how country music shaped his songwriting, performance style, and musical evolution. From his earliest years, Dylan was drawn to the country sounds he heard on the radio and on records. As he once said, Hank Williams was his first musical hero. Music historian Don Cusic traces this deep connection from Dylan’s childhood through his folk years, his Nashville recordings, and into his later work—revealing how country music has remained a consistent thread throughout Dylan's long and restless career. Now in his eighties and still performing, Dylan continues to draw from the well of country music, learning new songs and incorporating them into his live sets and recordings. This book offers fresh insight into Dylan’s artistry by examining the genre that has inspired and sustained him for decades.

Mississippi: The Closed Society is a book about an insurrection in modern America, more particularly, about the social and historical background of that insurrection. It is written by a Mississippian who is a historian, and who, on September 30, 1962, witnessed the long night of riot that exploded on the campus of the University of Mississippi at Oxford, when students, and, later, adults with no connection with the University, attacked United States marshals sent to the campus to protect James H. Meredith, the first African American to attend Ole Miss.In the first part of Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver describes how the state's commitment to the doctrine of white supremacy led to a situation in which the Mississippian found that continued intransigence (and possibly violence) was the only course offered to him. In these chapters the author speaks in the more formal measures of the historian. In the second part of the book, ""Some Letters from the Closed Society,"" he reproduces (among other correspondence and memoranda) a series of his letters to friends and family--and critics--in the days and weeks after the insurrection. Here he reveals himself more personally and forcefully. In both parts of the book are disclosed the mind and heart of the Mississippian who is as haunted as William Faulkner was by the moral chaos of his native land.

British comics writer Alan Moore (b. 1953) has a reputation for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity. Living hermit-like in the same Midlands town for his entire life, he supposedly refuses contact with the outside world while creating his strange, dense comics, fiction, and performance art. While Moore did declare himself a wizard on his fortieth birthday and claims to have communed with extradimensional beings, reticence and seclusion have never been among his eccentricities. On the contrary, for long stretches of his career Moore seemed to be willing to chat with all comers: fanzines, industry magazines, other artists, newspapers, magazines, and personal websites. Well over one hundred interviews in the past thirty years serve as testimony to Moore's willingness to be engaged in productive conversation.Alan Moore: Conversations includes ten substantial interviews, beginning with Moore's first published conversation, conducted by V for Vendetta cocreator David Lloyd in 1981. The remainder cover nearly all of his major works, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Marvelman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, From Hell, Lost Girls, and the unfinished Big Numbers.While Moore's personal life and fraught business relations are discussed occasionally, the interviews chosen are principally devoted to Moore's creative practices and techniques, along with his shifting social, political, and philosophical beliefs. As such, Alan Moore: Conversations should add to any reader's enjoyment and understanding of Moore's work.

Edward ""Kid"" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top ""hot"" band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, ""Muskrat Ramble,"" is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, Creole Trombone is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

The Texas Panhandle’s frontier days were fresh in memory when fiddler Eck Robertson (1887-1975) arrived. Cowboys still worked on ranches in the 1910s but barbed-wire fences abounded too. Robertson pursued a continually evolving strategy to profit from the feverish transformation of living history into marketable nostalgia. He adopted cowboy dress clothes for his first recording session in New York in 1922 and became known as a "Famous Cowboy Fiddler." His stubborn vision spawned traditional-yet-transformed Texas fiddling.Robertson criticized other fiddlers because their playing was "just the same thing over and over." Robertson insisted that his fiddling—his balance of cleaving to tradition while adding new content—was the way of the future. Author Chris Goertzen traces Robertson’s story through detailed biography, music transcriptions, and careful musical analysis. Though Robertson struggled to attain consistent financial success as a performer, he cultivated a varied repertoire which allowed him to balance offering the comfort of shared recollection with fresh excitement. His biggest hit, "Sally Goodin," was a game changer, both as played live and as the very first country music recording. With his undeniable talent and forward thinking, Robertson took a musical practice that already had a broad reach and a distinguished history in a direction that would guarantee a niche in modern American culture.

Perhaps the most gifted and invigorating of the American independent film directors of the past two decades, Jim Jarmusch (b. 1953) has presented moviegoers with his uniquely personal vision, from his first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), to his latest, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). As the interviews in this volume reveal, Jarmusch has always been interested in mixing very different cultural ingredients to form something uncategorizably new in films that transcend the boundaries between high and low cultures. Jarmusch half-mockingly described his movie Stranger Than Paradise (1984), the film that first brought him substantial notice, as ""a semi-neorealist black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European film director obsessed with Ozu, and familiar with the 1950s American television show The Honeymooners."" His unique approach to movie making jump-started the low-budget American independent film movement with Stranger Than Paradise, which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival. Ranging from 1981 to 2000 this collection chronicles the career and sensibility of a thoroughly independent filmmaker. It features one previously unpublished interview, two that have never appeared in English, and another two which are presented in their entirety rather than in the abridged forms in which they were published. Jarmusch discusses the actors with whom he has worked (Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker, and Roberto Benigni among them), the progression of his camera and editing techniques, his fascination with the co-existence of disparate and often opposing cultures, and his cult status as an independent movie director. He comes across as kind, modest, and attentive, with a warm sense of humor and an ever-glowing affection for and dedication to his art, and for all the small and marginalized aspects of the world. Ludvig Hertzberg is a freelance film critic and a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Will Eisner's innovations in the comics, especially the comic book and the graphic novel, as well as his devotion to comics analysis, make him one of comics' first true auteurs and the cartoonist so revered and influential that cartooning's highest honor is named after him. His newspaper feature The Spirit (1940-1952) introduced the now-common splash page to the comic book, as well as dramatic angles and lighting effects that were influenced by, and influenced in turn, the conventions of film noir. Even in his tales of crime fighting, Eisner's writing focused on everyday details of city life and on contemporary social issues. In 1976, he premiered A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of realist cartoon stories that paved the way for the modern ""graphic novel."" His 1985 book, Comics and Sequential Art, was among the first sustained analyses and overviews of the comics form, articulating theories of the art's grammar and structure. Eisner's studio nurtured such comics legends as Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, Lou Fine, and Jack Cole.Will Eisner: Conversations, edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, collects the best interviews with Eisner (1917-2005) from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the development of the graphic novel.

Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O’Connor, Allan Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn WillmottLynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry’s work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls "word with drawing" vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives.The essays in Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry’s work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry’s career and work from the point of view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry’s unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry’s imaginative praxis and offering readers their own.With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry’s work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections—Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry’s own mixed academic and creative investments—this book offers numerous inroads into Barry’s idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.

Tarot cards have been around since the Renaissance and have become increasingly popular in recent years, often due to their prevalence in popular culture. While Tarot means many different things to many different people, the cards somehow strike universal chords that can resonate through popular culture in the contexts of art, television, movies, even comic books. The symbolism within the cards, and the cards as symbols themselves, make Tarot an excellent device for the media of popular culture in numerous ways. They make horror movies scarier. They make paintings more provocative. They provide illustrative structure to comics and can establish the traits of television characters. The Cards: The Evolution and Power of Tarot begins with an extensive review of the history of Tarot from its roots as a game to its supposed connection to ancient Egyptian magic, through its place in secret societies, and to its current use in meditation and psychology. This section ends with an examination of the people who make up today's tarot community. Then, specific areas of popular culture-art, television, movies, and comics-are each given a chapter in which to survey the use of Tarot. In this section, author Patrick Maille analyzes such works as Deadpool, Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman, Disney's Haunted Mansion, Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, The Andy Griffith Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and King of the Hill. The cards are evocative images in their own right, but the mystical fascination they inspire makes them a fantastic tool to be used in our favorite shows and stories.

Decades after captivating the globe with the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling ignited fierce controversy by promoting anti-trans views through social media and her website. The ensuing debate prompted a re-reckoning of the series’ latent conservatism as devoted fans grappled with its lionized author’s online vitriol against a vulnerable group. In the wake of this controversy, Potter Stinks: Gender and Species in J. K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter" Series critically examines the limitations of the liberalism embedded within the series. At the same time, the book highlights what remains worthy of celebration and rekindles important conversations about the intersection of literature, ideology, and social change. Looking primarily at the original seven books, author Keridiana Chez discusses how gender and species discourses operate in wizarding society, intersecting with questions of class, technology, and labor as well as gender and species fluidity and trans identities. Potter Stinks serves as a vital contribution to Harry Potter scholarship, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of one of the most influential literary franchises of our time.

At the end of the Cold War, America no longer had the cultural demon it had terrorized itself with for decades. In 1992, the void was quickly filled by the culture wars and free-market economic policies that would forever change American society. Horror movies naturally responded to this change. Monsters in God’s Country argues that the union of politically driven policy and markets created a new breed of horror that still haunts the United States. Moving away from traditional psychoanalytical interpretations, this volume shows how national fear was manufactured and commodified by the American system itself. Monsters in the 1990s did not hide under the bed, in the closet, or in the shadows. Instead, they were the brokers of power who took public office, ran large companies, commanded the military, and made the most money. Through incisive case studies of four films—Needful Things, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Ravenous, and American Psycho—author Matthew W. Jarvis shows how morality was rewritten around cultural value and how the system others its victims in its cruelest acts of monstrosity. Monsters in God’s Country reclaims what has been characterized as a "lost decade" of horror by showing that the movies were diagnostics of active systemic decay. These films tell not a story about end-of-millennium America, but they offer a horrifying explanation about the monsters of the present day.