{"title":"Adam Gussow","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the blues-infused world of Adam Gussow. Delve into the heart of blues music through insightful memoirs and instructional guides. Perfect for music lovers and harmonica enthusiasts alike.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"mister-satan-s-apprentice-book-adam-gussow-9780679450221","title":"Mister Satan's Apprentice","description":"\u003ci\u003eGrasses of the Intermountain Region\u003c\/i\u003e is a modification of the two grass volumes of the \u003ci\u003eFlora of North America\u003c\/i\u003e (FNA). It is designed for identifying members of the Poaceae in the region between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, and is intended for use by botanists working with the grasses in this intermountain region of North America. 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Read this book and you will too. --Shemekia Copeland\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This book bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the blues bar and the college seminar as few, if any, others do--eloquently arguing that blues music and blues communities can be significant galvanizing forces in the human experience. --Roger Wood, author of Texas Zydeco and Down In Houston: Bayou City Blues\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit.  With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Journeyman's Road tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold, new ways.  Taking its title from Gussow's self-described status as a \"journeyman,\"-a musician who has completed his apprenticeship and is well on his way to becoming a master-this new book brings together articles that Gussow wrote for publications such as Blues Access and Harper's, as well as critical scholarly essays, including the first comprehensive examination of William Faulkner's relationship with the blues.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At the heart of Gussow's story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling \"Mr. Satan\" Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities-black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship-but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York's mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics.  At once elegiac and forward-looking,  Journeyman's Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9\/11 and healing itself with the blues.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Filled with photographs and complete with a comprehensive bibliography, Journeyman's Road is an expedition through the evolution and culture of the blues, a trip filled with the genre's characteristic collisions and contradictions, paradoxes and multiplicities, innovative calls and often unexpected responses.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50309575672081,"sku":"CIN1572336250VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50392360812817,"sku":"CIN1572336250G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1572336250.jpg?v=1750719558"},{"product_id":"journeyman-s-road-book-adam-gussow-9781572335691","title":"Journeyman's Road","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eAdam Gussow has lived the Blues life. By some miracle he has also lived to\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e write about it. Whether his subject is a novel by Faulkner or the romance\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e of buying an amp, his prose is as dynamic as a guitar solo by Stevie Ray\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Vaughan.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e --Krin Gabbard, Author of Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Culture\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Adam not only knows the blues...he feels it. Read this book and you will too.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e --Shemekia Copeland\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Journeyman's Road tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold, new ways. 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Busker's Holiday is the story of McKay Chernoff, a Columbia University grad student with a harmonica in his pocket and a blues band in his background. Desolate and despairing after a disastrous romantic breakup, McKay decides to fly off to Paris and reinvent himself as a street performer. What follows is an epic summer voyage into the busking life, propelled by the mad exploits of Billy Lee Grant, a fearless young guitar shredder whose Memphis-to-Mississippi pedigree and Dylanesque surrealism make him, when he explodes into view, precisely the partner McKay has been yearning for. Burning like a latter-day Dean Moriarty, Bill goads McKay into a sun-drenched, all-night bender, stoked by wine, women, mushrooms, and trains, that careens down out of Avignon and across the French Riviera. What happens next--in Florence, Solingen, Amsterdam, Paris--is a story of purgatory, redemption, and love regained. Hope, in a word, as a modern troubadour returns from his wanderings, reborn.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50683112259857,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50683112587537,"sku":"GOR014034338","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51693874970897,"sku":"CIN0996712402G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0996712402.jpg?v=1750789045"},{"product_id":"beyond-the-crossroads-book-adam-gussow-9781469633657","title":"Beyond the Crossroads","description":"The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. 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Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's \"No black. No white. Just the blues\", as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if \"blues is black music\", as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?   In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. 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Far from mere laments about lost loves and \"hard times\", blues songs and literature emerge in this provocative work as vital responses to the violent realities and traumatic legacies of African American life in the Jim Crow South. Blues recording artist and critic Adam Gussow begins his story in the 1890s, when the spectacle lynching of blacks became an insidious part of Southern life. Although lynchings are seldom referred to directly in blues songs, veiled references to them abound, and Gussow identifies these scattered mentions, tying them to real-life incidents and historical events in the autobiographies of bluesmen and -women. Southern violence, he shows also enters the blues tradition through folklore about \"badmen\": African Americans who take the lives of white aggressors in self-defence. Blues songs and literature, meanwhile, teem with searing depictions of bloodshed, such as the cutting and shooting that blacks inflicted on one another in juke joints. For Gussow, such expressive acts of violence are the quintessential blues gesture - burning examples of racial and romantic anguish. As Langston Hughes once wrote, \"My love might turn into a knife\/instead of to a song\". With interpretations of classic songs and writings, from the autobiographies of W.C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B.B. King to the poetry of Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, \"Seems Like Murder Here\" should reshape our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51421706879249,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51421707600145,"sku":"CIN0226310981G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51905048281361,"sku":"CIN0226310981VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226310981.jpg?v=1750779564"},{"product_id":"mr-satan-s-apprentice-book-adam-gussow-9780679771777","title":"Mr Satan's Apprentice","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52621361381649,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52621361479953,"sku":"GOR012038438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780679771777.jpg?v=1761571375"},{"product_id":"my-family-and-i-book-adam-gussow-9798888457658","title":"My Family and I","description":"An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.  “A rousing invitation to see ourselves in one another and to summon the courage finally to forge the beloved community Dr. King envisioned—one sustained by hope, reciprocity, and the boundless possibility of our shared humanity.” —Thomas Chatterton Williams   What has happened to the dream of beloved community embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement of the early 1960s—the vision of a just, humane, and colorblind America, a nation of “black and white together” animated by the spirit of mutual respect and strengthened by the bonds of brotherly love? As Adam Gussow shows in this urgently needed new book, the dream, although pressured on every front, remains alive.    At the heart of My Family and I is Gussow’s determination, in King’s terms, to live out the true meaning of America’s creed—a quest for transracial brotherhood that takes him from a blues partnership forged on the streets of 1980s Harlem through graduate training at Princeton and, decades later, a transformative course on the blues literary tradition that he shares with inmates at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm.    Anchoring Gussow’s quest is a story of enduring love: a playful, soulful interracial romance between the newly hired professor at Ole Miss and his soon-to-be-wife Sherrie that blossoms with the birth of a musically gifted son, Shaun. As America explodes with protest and riots in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd, as social justice fundamentalists insist on stigmatizing whiteness and hardening the color line rather than healing the divisions that plague us, Gussow is forced to fight for what he loves—not just the sanctity of his family circle, but King’s dream of beloved community.    My Family and I gifts the reader with hope for a future beyond America’s seemingly insoluble racial dilemmas.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52961566753041,"sku":"GOR014670043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53665117372689,"sku":"NIN9798888457658","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798888457658.jpg?v=1766393963"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-adam-gussow.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}