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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.

Mississippi's Most Daring Man: Paul J. Rainey, American Adventurer brings to light the extraordinary life of a nearly forgotten American adventurer whose story intersected with some of the most dramatic events of the early twentieth century. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Rainey (1877–1923) lived in a world transformed by exploration, war, and revolution. In 1910, Rainey ventured to the Arctic in the wake of the bitter controversy over who first reached the North Pole. Two years later, he broke new ground in cinema, producing the first-ever wildlife motion picture, Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt, a film so successful that his producer, Carl Laemmle, used its profits to launch Universal Studios. At the outbreak of World War I, Rainey joined the Harjes Ambulance Corps, making him one of the first Americans to volunteer on the Western Front. In 1918, he undertook a covert mission to Russia under the newly established Bolshevik government, where he became the first to film the last residence of Czar Nicholas II just weeks after the imperial family’s assassination. Although his adventures took him around the globe, Rainey maintained a strong connection to Mississippi through Tippah Lodge, his ten-thousand‑acre estate in Tippah and Union counties, which served as a base for his hunting expeditions. Though largely passed over by history, Rainey’s legacy endures in the Paul J. Rainey Gates at the Bronx Zoo, in the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in southwest Louisiana, and in big-game hunting museums and literature. Mississippi's Most Daring Man restores Rainey to his rightful place as a pivotal, if overlooked, figure whose life reflected the daring and turbulence of his era.

Conversations with Pauline Kael brings together roughly half of Kael's published interviews along with a lively debate between Kael and Jean-Luc Godard. Collectively, the interviews provide rewarding perspectives on Kael's aesthetics, her politics, and her perceptions about what it is she does as a critic. They also contain discussions of films that Kael did not have the chance to review or that were released after her retirement in 1991.This collection of her interviews will provide new and renewed pleasures for readers who have valued Kael's critical voice and her challenges to consensus during the second half of the twentieth century.

As an American singer, conductor, composer, and actor, Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1944–2016) had a long and successful music career and was recognized for his many contributions to American popular song. Yet, his own star has often been overshadowed by his world-famous father. The first book ever published about Frank Sinatra, Jr., Let Me Be Frank: The Extraordinary Life and Music of Frank Sinatra, Jr. details how this complex and often misunderstood artist dealt with professional struggles, personal demons, and endless comparisons with his father to emerge as a thriving performer who finally made peace with the name "Sinatra."Let Me Be Frank chronicles Frank Sinatra, Jr’s life and music career including the lifetime loyalty of his friends and bandsmen, and his notorious womanizing. It also, of course, details the challenging relationship with his father, including an incident with his father that may have changed Frank, Jr., forever. He ran from comparisons to his father and lost work due to his refusal to sing his father’s songs. The book also details Frank, Jr.’s kidnapping in 1963 when he was nineteen.Included are over forty interviews with Frank, Jr.’s friends, family, and colleagues. It also features a compelling narrative from Andrea Kauffman, Frank, Jr.’s personal manager and close friend of thirty-one years, and an in-depth musical analysis of four decades of Frank, Jr.’s recordings and stage shows. Let Me Be Frank finally sets the record straight about a brilliant man and a brilliant performer who never truly got the credit he deserved.

Contributions by Kylie Cardell, Aaron Cometbus, Margaret Galvan, Sarah Hildebrand, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Tahneer Oksman, Seamus O'Malley, Annie Mok, Dan Nadel, Natalie Pendergast, Sarah Richardson, Jessica Stark, and James Yeh In a self-reflexive way, Julie Doucet's and Gabrielle Bell's comics, though often autobiographical, defy easy categorization. In this volume, editors Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O'Malley regard Doucet's and Bell's art as actively feminist, not only because they offer women's perspectives, but because they do so by provocatively bringing up the complicated, multivalent frameworks of such engagements. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and worldview, the essays in this book investigate their shared investments in formal innovation and experimentation, and in playing with questions of the autobiographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist, known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Meanwhile, Bell is a British American cartoonist best known for her intensely introspective semiautobiographical comics and graphic memoirs, such as the Lucky series and Cecil and Jordan in New York. By pairing Doucet alongside Bell, the book recognizes the significance of female networks, and the social and cultural connections, associations, and conditions that shape every work of art. In addition to original essays, this volume republishes interviews with the artists. By reading Doucet's and Bell's comics together in this volume housed in a series devoted to single-creator studies, the book shows how despite the importance of finding ""a place inside yourself"" to create, this space seems always for better or worse a shared space culled from and subject to surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities.

New in paperback, the first biography of the Confederate general branded as incompetent for surrendering the South's strategic river post to Grant It was the sad fate of General John C. Pemberton (1814-1881), a northerner serving in the Confederate army, to die in disgrace and humiliation. Because he surrendered Vicksburg to General Grant, many Confederates considered him a traitor. Because he lost this strategic southern port on the Mississippi, Pemberton was branded as an incompetent. In this biography, the first to examine Pemberton's life and career in full scope, Michael B. Ballard credits Pemberton for military prowess that previous Civil War scholars have denied him. Here his strength is shown to be in administration, not in the theater of combat. Ballard persuasively argues that if Pemberton's abilities had been properly used, he could have made a positive contribution to the Confederate cause. Ballard focuses upon Pemberton's theory of command in South Carolina, where his foremost conviction was the preservation of his army. Pressure from both state officials and the Confederate War Department in Richmond, however, dictated that he must hold Charleston at all costs. Submitting to his superiors, Pemberton carried this new philosophy to Mississippi for his next assignment, where his main objective was to defend Vicksburg, a city whose river defenses blocked Union commerce along the Mississippi River. Throughout the winter of 1862-63 Pemberton's forces held off Ulysses S. Grant's army, but in spring of 1863 Grant's complex diversions confused Pemberton and allowed the Union to gain a beachhead on the east bank of the river and to launch an inland campaign that trapped Confederates in Vicksburg. Remembering the lesson of Charleston, Pemberton tried to save this river city but lost both Vicksburg and his men. Ballard's slant on Pemberton's life, fair and revisionist, must be considered in future assessments, for it details fateful moments in Pemberton's career and offers new insights gained from family papers and manuscripts not previously examined. ""I find the author's arguments to be convincing,"" says Civil War historian Herman Hattaway, ""and like him, I am led to a keener appreciation of Pemberton than I ever had before.

From the first Union attack on Vicksburg in the spring of 1862 through Benjamin Grierson's last raid through Mississippi in late 1864 and early 1865, this book traces the campaigns, fighting, and causes and effects of armed conflict in central and North Mississippi, where major campaigns were waged and fighting occurred.The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles will be a must-read for any Mississippian or Civil War buff who wants the complete story of the Civil War in Mississippi. It discusses the key military engagements in chronological order. It begins with a prologue covering mobilization and other events leading up to the first military action within the state's borders. The book then covers all of the major military operations, including the campaign for and siege of Vicksburg, and battles at Iuka and Corinth, Meridian, Brice's Crossroads, and Tupelo. The colorful cast of characters includes such household names as Sherman, Grant, Pemberton, and Forrest, as well as a host of other commanders and soldiers. Author Michael B. Ballard discusses at length minority troops and others glossed over or lost in studies of the Mississippi military during the war.

When Elvis Presley first showed up at Sam Phillips's Memphis-based Sun Records studio, he was a shy teenager in search of a sound. Phillips invited a local guitarist named Scotty Moore to stand in. Scotty listened carefully to the young singer and immediately realized that Elvis had something special. Along with bass player Bill Black, the trio recorded an old blues number called ""That's All Right, Mama."" It turned out to be Elvis's first single and the defining record of his early style, with a trilling guitar hook that swirled country and blues together and minted a sound with unforgettable appeal. Its success launched a whirlwind of touring, radio appearances, and Elvis's first break into movies. Scotty was there every step of the way as both guitarist and manager, until Elvis's new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, pushed him out. Scotty and Elvis would not perform together again until the classic 1968 ""comeback"" television special. Scotty never saw Elvis after that.With both Bill Black and Elvis gone, Scotty Moore is the only one left to tell the story of how Elvis and Scotty transformed popular music and how Scotty created the sound that became a prototype for so many rock guitarists to follow. Thoroughly updated, this edition delivers guitarist Scotty Moore's story as never before

When Elvis Presley first showed up at Sam Phillips's Memphis-based Sun Records studio, he was a shy teenager in search of a sound. Phillips invited a local guitarist named Scotty Moore to stand in. Scotty listened carefully to the young singer and immediately realized that Elvis had something special. Along with bass player Bill Black, the trio recorded an old blues number called ""That's All Right, Mama."" It turned out to be Elvis's first single and the defining record of his early style, with a trilling guitar hook that swirled country and blues together and minted a sound with unforgettable appeal. Its success launched a whirlwind of touring, radio appearances, and Elvis's first break into movies. Scotty was there every step of the way as both guitarist and manager, until Elvis's new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, pushed him out. Scotty and Elvis would not perform together again until the classic 1968 ""comeback"" television special. Scotty never saw Elvis after that.With both Bill Black and Elvis gone, Scotty Moore is the only one left to tell the story of how Elvis and Scotty transformed popular music and how Scotty created the sound that became a prototype for so many rock guitarists to follow. Thoroughly updated, this edition delivers guitarist Scotty Moore's story as never before

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.

As the creator of Tintin, Hergé (1907-1983) remains one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. When Hergé, born Georges Prosper Remi in Belgium, emerged from the controversy surrounding his actions after World War II, his most famous work leapt to international fame and set the standard for European comics. While his style popularized what became known as the ""clear line"" in cartooning, this edited volume shows how his life and art turned out much more complicated than his method.The book opens with Hergé's aesthetic techniques, including analyses of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundaneness between panels of action. Broad views of his career describe how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, while precise accounts of his life during Nazi occupation explain how the demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what a comics page could do. The next section considers a subject with which Hergé was himself consumed: the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these chapters situate his artistic legacy. A final section considers how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a Chinese American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated.Despite the attention already devoted to Hergé, no multi-author critical treatment of his work exists in English, the majority of the scholarship being in French. With contributors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, this volume's range will shape the study of Hergé for many years to come.

Throughout Cuban history, the mulata, a woman of mixed racial identity, features prominently in visual and performative culture. Tracing the figure through historical eras, Alison Fraunhar looks at the representation and performance in both elite and popular culture. She also tracks how characteristics associated with these women have accrued across the Atlantic world. Widely understood to embody the bridge between European Subject and African other, the mulata contains the sensuality attributed to Africans in a body more closely resembling the European ideal of beauty. This symbol bears far-reaching implications, with shifting, contradictory cultural meanings in Cuba. Fraunhar explores these complex paradigms, how, why, and for whom the image was useful, and how it was both subverted and asserted from the colonial period to the present. From the early seventeenth century through Cuban independence in 1899 up to the late revolutionary era, Fraunhar illustrates the ambiguous figure’s role in nationhood, citizenship, and commercialism. She analyzes images including key examples of nineteenth-century graphic arts, avant-garde painting and magazine covers of the Republican era, cabaret and film performance, and contemporary iterations of gender.Fraunhar’s study stands out for attending to the phenomenon of mulataje not only in elite Production such as painting, but also in popular forms: popular theater, print culture, later films, and other media where stereotypes take hold. Indeed, in contemporary Cuba, mulataje remains a popular theme with Cubans as well as foreigners in drag shows, foregrounding queerness as an intrinsic element of mulataje.

In Driftin’ on a Memory: Celebrating Seventy Years of the Isley Brothers, Trenton Bailey tells the story of this groundbreaking musical act. The Isley Brothers began recording as a vocal trio consisting of the brothers O'Kelly Isley Jr., Rudolph Isley, and Ronald Isley in the 1950s. They have covered a wide range of genres, including gospel, doo-wop, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, the Motown sound, funk, and disco, and their music has been sampled by numerous hip hop artists. The Isley Brothers achieved their first hit "Shout" in 1959 and have reached the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart with new music in six different decades, from the 1950s to the 2000s.The brothers experienced their golden age from 1973 to 1983 with the addition of three younger brothers. With three instrumentalists, including composer and arranger Chris Jasper, the Isleys became a self-contained band and released a string of platinum albums. Over the years, the Isley Brothers have adapted the group, adding and losing members over time, but have always included a brother. Today, Ernie and Ronald Isley are still performing, keeping the Isley Brothers a household name and remaining a serious force in pop culture. The remarkable longevity of the Isley Brothers has solidified their status as one of America's most influential musical groups.

Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been.This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work--including Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artifucial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter.Steven Spielberg: A Biography brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production.Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of these adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before.The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.

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.

Liv Ullmann (b. 1938) has played many roles over the course of her long life: actress, mother, activist, author, and director. Her lead performances in such Ingmar Bergman classics as Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Cries and Whispers kept her in close proximity to crafts involved in screenwriting, film direction, and production. In 1992, Ullmann directed her first film Sofie and, with the quick succession of such recent masterpieces as Private Confessions, Kristin Lavransdatter, and Faithless, Ullmann has emerged as one of the most challenging, startling filmmakers working today. Tracing her artistic evolution, Liv Ullmann: Interviews reveals how her acting and her personal life have shaped her filmmaking. She also does not shy away from exploring her complicated relationship with Bergman. Ullmann candidly discusses how Bergman's work—he wrote the screenplays for Private Confessions and Faithless—has influenced her own, but she also points out the ways in which she has diverged from his cinematic and moral vision. She talks about her feminist activism, her interest in Jewish culture, and her work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and how all of these experiences have affected her filmmaking. The volume features interviews and profiles from the early 1970s through 2004 and closes with a long interview conducted by the editor specifically for this volume. Liv Ullmann: Interviews provides an unusually intimate look at how a major filmmaker has developed her craft, both in front of and behind the camera. Robert Emmet Long is the author of over forty books, including James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies, The Films of Merchant Ivory, and Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present.

The Mississippi Secession Convention is the first full treatment of any secession convention to date. Studying the Mississippi convention of 1861 offers insight into how and why southern states seceded and the effects of such a breech. Based largely on primary sources, this book provides a unique insight into the broader secession movement.There was more to the secession convention than the mere act of leaving the Union, which was done only three days into the deliberations. The rest of the three-week January 1861 meeting as well as an additional week in March saw the delegates debate and pass a number of important ordinances that for a time governed the state. As seen through the eyes of the delegates themselves, with rich research into each member, this book provides a compelling overview of the entire proceeding.The effects of the convention gain the most analysis in this study, including the political processes that, after the momentous vote, morphed into unlikely alliances. Those on opposite ends of the secession question quickly formed new political allegiances in a predominantly Confederate-minded convention. These new political factions formed largely over the issues of central versus local authority, which quickly played into Confederate versus state issues during the Civil War. In addition, author Timothy B. Smith considers the lasting consequences of defeat, looking into the effect secession and war had on the delegates themselves and, by extension, their state, Mississippi.

In Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front, Timothy B. Smith examines Mississippi's Civil War defeat by both outside and inside forces. From without, the Union army dismantled the state's political system, infrastructure, economy, and fighting capability. The state saw extensive military operations, destruction, and bloodshed within her borders. One of the most frightful and extended sieges of the war ended in a crucial Confederate defeat at Vicksburg, the capstone to a tremendous Union campaign.As Confederate forces and Mississippi became overwhelmed militarily, the populace's morale began to crumble. Realizing that the enemy could roll unchecked over the state, civilians, Smith argues, began to lose the will to continue the struggle. Many white Confederates chose to return to the Union rather than see continued destruction in the name of a victory that seemed ever more improbable. When the tide turned, Unionists and African Americans boldly stepped up their endeavors. The result, Smith finds, was a state vanquished and destined to endure suffering far into its future.The first examination of the state's Civil War home front in seventy years, this book tells the story of all classes of Mississippians during the war, focusing new light on previously neglected groups such as women and African Americans. The result is a revelation of the heart of a populace facing the devastating impact of total war.

From the 1980s through the early 2000s, a golden era for southern roots music, producer and three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington recorded many of the period’s most iconic artists. Working primarily in Louisiana for Boston-based Rounder Records, Billington produced such giants as Irma Thomas, Charlie Rich, Buckwheat Zydeco, Johnny Adams, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Beau Jocque, and Solomon Burke. The loving and sometimes irreverent profiles in Making Tracks reveal the triumphs and frustrations of the recording process, and that obsessive quest to capture a transcendent performance.Billington's long working relationships with the artists give him perspective to present them in their complexity—foibles, failures, and fabled feats—while providing a vivid look at the environs in which their music thrived. He tells about Boozoo Chavis’s early days as a musician, jockey, and bartender at his mother’s quarter horse track, and Ruth Brown’s reign as the most popular star in rhythm and blues, when the challenge of traveling on the "chitlin’ circuit" proved the antithesis of the glamour she exuded on stage.In addition, Making Tracks provides a widely accessible study in the craft of recording. Details about the technology and psychology behind the sessions abound. Billington demonstrates varying ways of achieving the mutual goal of a great record. He also introduces the supporting cast of songwriters, musicians, and engineers crucial to the magic in each recording session. Making Tracks sings unforgettably like a "from the vault" discovery.

Irma Thomas is a beloved New Orleans icon with a career that now spans sixty years. Her self-penned "Wish Someone Would Care" was a national hit in 1964, though she did not win her first Grammy until 2007 for her post-Hurricane Katrina album, After the Rain. A contemporary of artists like Aretha Franklin and Etta James, she followed a different path to fame and acclaim. The course of Irma Thomas’s music career at first seems improbable. Born Irma Lee in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, her early years were spent shuttling between New Orleans and rural Greensburg. She showed early promise as an entertainer and singer, but her education was cut short when she became pregnant at the age of fourteen. By the time she was twenty, she had four children. She began recording while in her late teens, scoring a hit with the risqué "Don’t Mess with My Man," and subsequently working with producer/songwriter Allen Toussaint. Her biggest hits were recorded in Los Angeles, where she briefly moved in the early 1970s. Upon returning to New Orleans, she was caught in the wave of the discovery of New Orleans rhythm and blues by the world at large, and became a fixture at the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. Scott Billington, who was Thomas’s producer for over twenty years including when she won her Grammy, and Johnette Downing combine diligent research with an insider’s connection to Thomas’s story. The authors tell the story of both the person and the broader world of New Orleans music, as it evolved along with this treasured music legend.

This biographical portrait by a well known Civil War historian brings much deserved attention to an exceptional Confederate military figure who became one of the New South's most progressive leaders.Herman Hattaway's clear, swift narrative depicts Lee in brilliant performance at Second Manassas, Chickasaw Bayou, Nashville, and after the war as a leader who used his military skills and discipline to work in bringing prosperity and education into the defeated South.After the war Lee established a home in Mississippi and found fulfillment in his calling to be the first president of Mississippi A & M College (today Mississippi State University), where he preached the message of applying brain power to farming. His admirers bestowed upon him the title ""Father of Industrial Education in the South.""Though the significance of Stephen D. Lee was long overlooked in historical perspectives of the Civil War and the development of the New South, Hattaway's appreciative study has remedied a case of unintended neglect by previous historians.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) stands out as one of the most respected, influential authors of the twentieth century. Though primarily known as a children's book writer and illustrator, he did not limit himself to these areas. He saw himself first and foremost as an artist. In this collection of interviews - the first of its kind - Sendak presents himself as a writer, illustrator, set designer, and librettist. From his early work with Randall Jarrell and Ruth Krauss through his later work with Tony Kushner and Spike Jonze, Sendak worked as a collaborator with a passion for the arts.The interviews here, many of which are hard to find or previously unpublished, span from 1966 through 2011. They show not only Sendak's shifting artistic interests, but also changes in how he understood himself and his craft. What emerges is a portrait of an author and an artist who was alternately solemn and playful, congenial and irascible, sophisticated and populist. The man who showed millions of children and adults alike what's cooking in the night kitchen and where the wild things are, Sendak remains an American original who redefined the picture book and changed children's literature - and its readers - forever.

The early 1980s saw a revolution in mainstream comics--in subject matter, artistic integrity, and creators' rights--as new methods of publishing and distribution broadened the possibilities. Among those artists utilizing these new methods, Chester Brown (b. 1960) quickly developed a cult following due to the undeniable quality and originality of his Yummy Fur (1983-1994).Chester Brown: Conversations collects interviews covering all facets of the cartoonist's long career and includes several pieces from now-defunct periodicals and fanzines. It also includes original annotations from Chester Brown, provided especially for this book, in which he adds context, second thoughts, and other valuable insights into the interviews. Brown was among a new generation of artists whose work dealt with decidedly non-mainstream subjects. By the 1980s comics were, to quote a by-now well-worn phrase, ""not just for kids anymore,"" and subsequent censorious attacks by parents concerned about the more salacious material being published by the major publishers--subjects that routinely included adult language, realistic violence, drug use, and sexual content--began to roil the industry. Yummy Fur came of age during this storm and its often-offensive content, including dismembered, talking penises, led to controversy and censorship.With Brown's highly unconventional adaptations of the Gospels, and such comics memoirs as The Playboy (1991/1992) and I Never Liked You (1991-1994), Brown gradually moved away from the surrealistic, humor oriented strips toward autobiographical material far more restrained and elegiac in tone than his earlier strips. This work was followed by Louis Riel (1999-2003), Brown's critically acclaimed comic book biography of the controversial nineteenth-century Canadian revolutionary, and Paying for It (2011), his best-selling memoir on the life of a john.

Canadian cartoonist Gregory Gallant (b. 1962), pen name Seth, emerged as a cartoonist in the fertile period of the 1980s, when the alternative comics market boomed. Though he was influenced by mainstream comics in his teen years and did his earliest comics work on Mister X, a mainstream-style melodrama, Seth remains one of the least mainstream-inflected figures of the alternative comics' movement. His primary influences are underground comix, newspaper strips, and classic cartooning.These interviews, including one career-spanning, definitive interview between the volume editors and the artist published here for the first time, delve into Seth's output from its earliest days to the present. Conversations offer insight into his influences, ideologies of comics and art, thematic preoccupations, and major works, from numerous perspectives--given Seth's complex and multifaceted artistic endeavours. Seth's first graphic novel, It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, announced his fascination with the past and with earlier cartooning styles. Subsequent works expand on those preoccupations and themes. Clyde Fans, for example, balances present-day action against narratives set in the past. The visual style looks polished and contemplative, the narrative deliberately paced; plot seems less important than mood or characterization, as Seth deals with the inescapable grind of time and what it devours, themes which recur to varying degrees in George Sprott, Wimbledon Green, and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists.

Robert Bloch (1917–1994) will forever be remembered as the author of Psycho—the novel that inspired one of the most influential horror films of the twentieth century—but his legacy extends far beyond that singular work. A master of imagination and craft, Bloch was one of the century’s most versatile and groundbreaking literary voices, admired for his wit, warmth, and innovation. His influence can be traced through the works of Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others.Spanning six decades, from the depths of the Great Depression to the dawn of the digital age, Bloch’s career produced an astonishing range of work: hundreds of short stories, novels, teleplays, screenplays, and essays across genres as varied as horror, mystery, crime, thriller, and science fiction. His versatility positioned him as a central figure in shaping modern popular fiction. To understand the arc of American genre writing in the twentieth century, one must understand Robert Bloch.Psycho Century: Robert Bloch, American Horror Master is the first full literary biography of this immensely influential author. It situates Bloch within the larger landscape of twentieth-century horror and suspense while tracing how he continually reinvented his stories for new audiences in television and film. Through these transformations, the book reveals Bloch’s evolving literary sensibilities—ones that both reflected and shaped the shifting tastes of his era. At once a biography and a cultural history, the volume offers a vivid portrait of a writer whose work defined and redefined American genre fiction.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977) is undoubtedly one of the most widely acclaimed African writers of the twenty-first century. Best known for her insightful fiction, viral TED talks, and essays on feminism, she is also a notoriously outspoken intellectual. As she puts it in an interview with Lia Grainger, in her characteristically straightforward style: "I have things to say and I'll say them."Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the first collection of interviews with the writer. Covering fifteen years of conversations, the interviews start with the publication of Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), and end in late 2018, by which time Adichie had become one of the most prominent figures on the international literary scene. As both scholars and passionate readers of the author's work are bound to find out, the opinions shared by Adichie in interviews over the years coalesce into a fascinating portrait that presents both abiding features and gradual transformations.Reflecting the political and emotional scope of Adichie's work, the conversations contained in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including colonialism, race, immigration, and feminism. Collectively, these interviews testify both to the author's ardent wish to strive for a more just and equal world, and to her deep interest in exploring our common humanity. As Adichie says in her 2009 interview with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: "When people call me a novelist, I say, well, yes. I really think of myself as a storyteller." This book invites Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to tell her own literary story.