This work deals with a musical genre that borders jazz, gospel and blues, so-called soul-jazz, which peaked in popularity in the 1960s in the USA and as a predominantly afro-american art form went almost unnoticed by the mainstream critics and journalists. The aim of the analysis is to specify it’s characteristics, introduce it’s representatives out of guitarists and describe their musical careers and style. The output of the thesis will be enrichment of my own style in both improvisation and composition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Memphis State University, 1986. / Typescript (photocopy). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-188).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Memphis State University, 1986. / Typescript (photocopy). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-188).

This thesis concerns African-American fife and drum band music, a pre-blues genre that was a fixture at summer picnics in the Mississippi hill country from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century. The picnics held a unique place in African-American life, a crossroads of juke joints and churches, blues and gospel, individuality and family. Using the African-American paradigm of a Saturday night / Sunday morning people, I describe the Otha Turner Family Picnic, the last picnic to feature fife and drum band music, locating it and the music in-between the secular and sacred aspects of African-American life from both a musical and a social standpoint.

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No description available.

Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues demonstrates that the cultural phenomenon of the blues is an indigenous way of knowing that offsets the hidden logic of racialized dominance within modern Christian understandings of revelation. In distinction from the Christian, Religious, and racialized understandings of the blues, this dissertation focuses on the space in which the blues emerges, the Delta Region of the United States. By attending to space, this dissertation shows how critical consideration of geography and region can reveal nuances that are often veiled behind racialized and theologized ways of understanding the people of the Delta Region. Reading the blues in space discloses the ways in which the blues dislocates the confines of interpreters that label it a racialized phenomenon on one hand, and “the devil's music” on the other. By wresting the blues from colonialist and racist logics, this dissertation contends that the space that produces the blues can be recovered as a viable resource for reimagining a theology of revelation. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology / PhD; / Dissertation;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 194 p.; also includes music. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: James Akins, School of Music. Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-194).

The concept of authenticity has been central to the human capacity to communicate for over two millennia, and it continues to enjoy wide usage throughout popular culture today. “Authenticity” typically conveys a sense that one has reached solid bedrock, the unchanging foundation of an object or inner-self that transcends the context of the moment. In this sense, the search or struggle for authenticity is a quest for VIP access to the ineffable “real” that language can only inadequately gesture toward. This study investigates the contemporary struggle for authenticity, or what can be described as the “rhetoric of authenticity,” by exploring the way authenticity is negotiated, constructed, and contested through various symbolic resources. More specifically, it focuses on how authenticity is negotiated in the U.S. blues community, a complex cultural site where the struggle over authenticity is especially salient and materializes in a variety of complex ways. Drawing on a number of philosophical perspectives and critical theories, the study employs the methods of rhetorical criticism and oral history as it seeks to answer three central questions: First, what are the major rhetorical dimensions of authenticity? Second, what does rhetorical analysis reveal about the relationship between authenticity and its various signifiers? And third, what does our desire for authenticity teach us about ourselves as symbol-using creatures? The study employs a case study approach that moves inductively in order to discover the larger rhetorical dimensions of authenticity. The case studies examine the relationship between authenticity and the blues’ larger historical trajectory; between aesthetics and authenticity in the oral history narratives of professional blues musicians in Austin, Texas, especially as they converge along a style/substance binary; between identity and authenticity in the editorial policy of Living Blues magazine; and finally, between imitation and authenticity in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. The study concludes by exploring how authenticity is contextual, aesthetic, ideological, and political, and frames a rhetorical theory of authenticity that can be applied widely throughout popular culture. / text