Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 520 pages. Whitney Balliett's long-awaited 'big book.' In it are all the jazz profiles he has written for The New Yorker during the past 24 years. These include his famous early portraits of Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen, Earl Hines, and Mary Lou Williams, done when these giants were in full flower; his recent reconstructions of the lives of such legends as Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden, Zoot Sims, and Dave Tough; His quick but indelible glimpses into the daily (or nocturnal) lives of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus; and his vivid pictures of such on-the-scene masters as Red Norvo, Ornette Coleman, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Art Farmer, Michael Moore, and Tommy Flanagan. Also included are such lesser known but invaluable players as Art Hodes, Jabbo Smith, Joe Wilder, Warne Marsh, Gene Bertoncini, Joe Bushkin, and Marie Marcus. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. San Francisdo, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 240 pages. Founded in 1960 by Chris Strachwitz, the one-man operation Arhoolie Records eventually produced more than four hundred albums during more than forty years in operation, exploring the far corners of American vernacular music--blues, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, hillbilly, Texas-Mexican norteno music, and more. From the very beginning, Strachwitz brought his camera along with recording equipment as he met and recorded now-legendary artists such as Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Clifton Chenier, and Big Joe Williams. This book collects more than 150 of his best, most intimate, and exciting images--many never-before-seen--each with rich captions by Strachwitz and award-winning music journalist Joel Selvin, along with a substantial 20,000-word essay by Selvin about Arhoolie, Strachwitz, and the music. Bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , Macmillan, 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth stamped in black. Color frontispiece and 2 b&w plates (not credited), 299 pages. The adventure of Zeb Pike, a young officer sent to explore the Mississippi and to make treaties with the Indians he meets on the way. Light soil to top edge otherwise clean, very good.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 147 pages, b&w photos throughout. When photojournalist and writer Roby Page first started trekking to Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week in 1985, the counterculture gathering was dominated by rogues, ruffians, and rebels. Now the leather-clad biker rumbling down Atlantic Avenue might be a doctor or a lawyer. More than a half-million enthusiasts arrive at Daytona Beach every March, a number swelled by new bikers from the American mainstream. Page sets out on his Harley-Davidson to search for what it really means to be a biker. Part memoir, part narrative history, and part photo essay, the book not only chronicles Bike Week, but also vividly documents the evolution of two American icons--the Harley and the biker. Remainder dot on bottom edge, light crease to back cover, otherwise like new.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In a clear, straightforward style, Katz describes the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys (covering Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) by African Americans seeking freedom, including biographical sketches of men and women who formed churches, started schools, or were politically active in their region. Some of these settlers were fugitive slaves; several set up stations on the Underground Railroad with the aid of the Quakers; others were farmers, poets, and soldiers. In several states, they helped form black regiments in the Civil War. Chronologically arranged, the book introduces many lesser-known personages not found in most collective biographies and places them in a broader context of U.S. history as a whole.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In a clear, straightforward style, Katz describes the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys (covering Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) by African Americans seeking freedom, including biographical sketches of men and women who formed churches, started schools, or were politically active in their region. Some of these settlers were fugitive slaves; several set up stations on the Underground Railroad with the aid of the Quakers; others were farmers, poets, and soldiers. In several states, they helped form black regiments in the Civil War. Chronologically arranged, the book introduces many lesser-known personages not found in most collective biographies and places them in a broader context of U.S. history as a whole.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. Taken from 1939 to 1943 under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, these 175 "lost" photos feature shots by Russell Lee, Andreas Feininger and Marion Post Wolcott, using the then-revolutionary technology of Kodachrome film. Color photographs taken before 1939 have largely deteriorated, so these surviving photos are later than the most familiar b&w Depression-era shots. This 11 3/4 "x8 1/2 " volume thus "colorizes" one's normally black-and-white impressions of a very vibrant time, as Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) notes in his introduction. The logic behind the arrangement of the photos, which at first seems largely random, as it follows neither photographer, location nor chronology, becomes clear by the end of the book: the U.S.'s industrial rise. Images of urban lethargy and farmhands picking cotton under hot blue skies (the unbearable conditions of cotton-picking somehow seem more apparent in color) gradually give way to images of mobility, mechanization and a changing economy. Arnold T. Palmer's gleaming portraits of Rosie the riveter-like aircraft workers follow Jack Delano's earthier photos of male railroad workers, their sweaty and intent faces caked with soot. Tellingly, the book ends with photos of bombers flying over California.
Hardcover. Atlas, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans--blacks and whites, men and women--converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace." Collected here in a richly illustrated, large-format book featuring over seventy contemporary photographs, alongside the original mug shots, and exclusive interviews with former Freedom Riders, is that testament: a moving archive of a chapter in U.S. history that hasn't yet closed.
Hardcover. US, Atlas & Co, 6th, 2008, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.
Softcover. San Francisco, Backbeat Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages, b&w illustrations. Chasin' That Devil Music has the feel of a documentary about the making of a thrilling motion picture. The main focus is on the Delta blues singers of the early 20th century--artists such as Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson who've achieved near-mythic status in blues circles. In addition, many of the articles gathered in this splendidly illustrated volume capture the process and people involved in tracking long-lost recordings nearly as elusive as the performers who made them. Here, for example, is the story of author/blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow's three-year hunt for the death certificate of Robert Johnson, the celebrated Mississippi bluesman and a figure whose legend has grown greater with each year since his much-debated death in 1938. The text here is nearly as raw in spots as the music that sparked it, but, as with those sounds (which can be heard on a terrific CD sampler included with the book), enthusiasts will find Chasin' That Devil Music riveting. Clean, bright copy.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 208 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light shelf-wear and rubbing to wrappers, otherwise a clean, tight copy. Essays by Trudy Wilner Stack and Allen Tullos was published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the same name. Christenberry's paintings, photography, sculpture and instal lations address the Southern identity. They describe and examine the social and material culture of the deep South.
Hardcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 364 pages, b&w illustrations. A reprint of the classic survey published in 1947. In a bright dust jacket, clean.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Still in shrink-wrap. Spine faded. Else very good. As the acclaimed author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines (b. 1933) has been publishing stories and novels for more than sixty years. His brilliant portrayals of race, community, and culture in rural south Louisiana have made him one of the most respected and beloved living American writers. Ernest J. Gaines: Conversations brings together the author's own thoughts and words in interviews that range from 1994 to 2017, discussing his life, his work, and his literary legacy. The interviews cover all of Gaines's works, including his two latest books, Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays (2005) and The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017). The book provides a retrospective of his work from the viewpoint of a senior writer, now eighty-five years old, and gives an important international perspective on Gaines and his work.
Hardcover. Jackson MS, University of Mississippi, 1st, 1987, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages. Gathers interviews with the Tennessee short story writer in which he discusses his career, writing, character development themes, settings, and growing older. Clean copy.
Softcover. University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 320 pages. Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic. Clean, bright copy.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 168 pages. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers sang in barbershop quartets. This book describes how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz. Clean, like new.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi , 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 235 pages. Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing with a barbershop quartet on the streets of New Orleans was foundational to his musicianship. Until now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said, "I figure singing and playing is the same," or, "Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet." Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony shows that Armstrong understood exactly the relationship between what he sang and what he played, and that he meant these comments to be taken literally: he was singing through his horn. Clean copy, like new.
Hardcover. Benteli Verlags , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Oblong hardcover with a pictorial label, 192 pages. The faded remnants of a glorious past are captured in all their morbid beauty, in images that manifest the ephemeral and go beyond all conventional associations and conceptions of the American South: Days Gone By combines carefully crafted photographs from the past ten years with a cultural history of the region's social and structural changes. With an unflinching gaze, Jorg Rubbert presents the demise of countless small towns between Georgia, Mississippi and Texas, their suffering particularly tangible following the financial crisis. Rural towns, idyllic at first glance, are soon revealed as forgotten relics of times long past.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated with b/w photography throughout. 83 pages. Maggie Lee Sayre was born deaf near Paducah, Kentucky, in 1920. She lived 51 years of her life on a river houseboat as her family made a living fishing throughout Kentucky and Tennessee. This collection of her photos, accompanied by descriptive captions from Sayre, reveals a traditional river culture that is rooted in subsistence living. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Exton PA, Schiffer Publishing, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 271 pages. Black and white and color photos throughout. A history and study of the making and use of duck decoys along the Mississippi flyway, looking at makers in regions such as Canada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Hardcover. University Press of Mississippi,, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 260 pages, b&w illustrations. Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, Hubbard Brothers, 1st, 1888, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark brown cloth stamped in black and gilt design, 443 pages plus 53 page appendix, b&w plates with a folding map (in excellent condition). B&w frontispiece portrait of the author, blue floral endpapers. Clean, tight copy with minor wear to corners. Title page says 1888, copyright page states 1887. Still believed to be a first printing. Early exploration through Chippewa country, source of the Mississippi, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis. Saint Paul, La cRosse, Rock Island, Saint Louis, Memphis, Natchez to Baton Rouge, New Orleans.
Hardcover. Columbia, Univeristy of Missouri Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 142 pages. B&W photography and illustrations throughout. pictorial dust jacket, slightly worn at corners and spine. Price clipped. Black boards with silver gilt title to spine. Frontispiece. Overall, a nice, clean copy.
Hardcover. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with light edgewear. 180 pages, b&w photo by Feldman. Mild soil to rear panel of dust jacket, otherwise clean.