From the son of a sharecropper to an itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy’s stories of good friends Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Robert Johnson are a godsend to blues fans. History buffs will marvel at his unique perspective and firsthand accounts of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, vagrancy laws, makeshift courts in the back of seed stores, plantation life, and the Depression.

    Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world.Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After opening with a fascinating analysis of the music from a key sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Kathryn Kalinak introduces readers not only to important composers and musical styles but also to modern theoretical concepts about how and why film music works. Throughout the book she embraces a global perspective, examining film music in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe and the United States. Key collaborations between directors and composers--Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Akira Kurosawa and Fumio Hayasaka, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, to name only a few--come under scrutiny, as do the oft-neglected practices of the silent film era. She also explores differences between original film scores and compilation soundtracks that cull music from pre-existing sources.

    During their six-year partnership, the two became close friends. Feinstein blossomed under Gershwin’s mentorship and Gershwin was reinvigorated by the younger man’s zeal for his and his brother George’s legacy. Now, in The Gershwins and Me, the only book of its kind, Michael Feinstein shares unforgettable stories and reminiscences from the music that defined American popular song, along with rare Gershwin memorabilia he’s collected through the years.     From “Strike Up the Band” to “Love Is Here to Stay,” each of the twelve chapters highlights one of the Gershwins’ classic songs, exploring the brothers’ lives, illuminating what the music meant to them, and telling the stories of how their iconic tunes came to life. Throughout the star-studded narrative, Feinstein unfolds the moving chronicle of his own life with the Gershwins, describing his vision for their enduring presence today. No other writer could give us such an authoritative inside perspective on these titans of American culture—and no other writer could include such a soulful collection of music as the accompanying CD packed with Feinstein’s original recordings of the twelve songs.     A timeless classic and the definitive account of the Gershwins and their legacy, The Gershwins and Me will having you humming with every turn of the page.

    The Vinyl Dialogues offers the stories behind 31 of the top albums of the 70s, including backstories behind the albums, the songs, and the artists. It was the 1970s: Big hair, bell-bottomed pants, Elvis sideburns and puka shell necklaces. The drugs, the freedom, the Me Generation, the lime green leisure suits. And then there was the music and how it defined a generation. The birth of Philly soul, the Jersey Shore Sound and disco. It's all there in "The Vinyl Dialogues," as told by the artists who lived and made Rock and Roll history throughout the decade.Throw in a little political intrigue - The Guess Who being asked not to play its biggest hit, "American Woman," at a White House appearance and Brewer and Shipley being called political subversives and making President Nixon's infamous "enemies list" - and "The Vinyl Dialogues offers a first-hand snapshot of a country in transition, hung over from the massive cultural changes of the 1960s and ready to dress outrageously and to shake its collective booty. All seen through the eyes, recollections and perspectives of the artists who lived it and made all that great music on all those great albums.

    It was an attempt to give a narrative to music that used the tools of rock but did something utterly different with it, broadening its scope by fusing elements of punk, dub, electronic music, minimalism, and more into something wholly new.Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Ros, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.'The doors were blown open for me on everything,' says Kieran Hebden (Fridge/Four Tet). 'I didn't think in terms of genre almost ever again.'Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, FEARLESS explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name.

    But an astonishing 540 of them closed down between 2004 and 2008. Last Shop Standing lifts the lid on an industry in tatters. Graham Jones has worked at the heart of record retailing since the golden era of the 1980s. He was there during the years of plenty and has witnessed the tragic decline of a business blighted by corruption and corporate greed. Undertaking a tour of the last remaining independent record shops in Britain, he has collected a wealth of entertaining stories that explain why the best are still standing, and how the worst of them blew it. In telling the tale of the industry's sad decline Graham Jones has unearthed wry anecdotes about dozens of rock stars and music industry figures, including The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Oasis, John Peel and many others. Last Shop Standing is a hilarious yet harrowing account by a man who has been there and sold that. It is a book that will bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has ever bought a CD or attended a concert, and still has the T-shirt to prove it.

    "Listen" makes music approachable by placing it in its cultural context with lavish illustrations, timelines, and maps. Equipped with a free Study Guide CD-ROM, the new edition is more accessible than ever, offering additional help in focused listening and in music fundamentals.

    Rock stars from Elvis to Bruce Springsteen have been profoundly affected by his work. This insightful book examines the power of Orbison's music--from his pioneer days to his fantastic comeback--and the events that lead to his untimely death.

    Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

    This book is not an adventure story with a fictitious hero, but is the story of one of the great nautical heroes of the eighteenth century, a man who discovered many of the islands of the Pacific, to say nothing of the great lands of Australia and new Zealand.

    The heartbreaking story of this mysterious sonata—Schubert’s last, and his most elusive and haunting—is the soundtrack of Andrea's story.Sonata is a breathtaking exploration of a “Janus-head miracle”—Andrea's extraordinary talent and even more extraordinary illness. With no cure for her R.A. possible, Andrea must learn to live with this disease while not letting it define her, even though it leaves its mark on everything around her—family, relationships, even the clothes she wears. And in this riveting account, she never loses her wit, humor, or the raw artistry of a true performer.As the goshawk becomes a source of both devotion and frustration for Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk, so the piano comes to represent both struggle and salvation for Andrea in her extraordinary debut.

    As a new Christian believer, she became estranged from her Jewish parents because of her faith, yet she never walked alone, always clinging to the hope she found in Christ. Throughout her music and that of her children, who together form the beloved and multi-award winning group The Isaacs, you hear the resonating inspirational legacy of this family's faith journey.An autobiographical look at Lily's life, from being a Jewish folk singer to serving as vocalist and matriarch of The IsaacsThe powerful account of her struggle with a once unknown faith and how she finally "cried her way to God from the church's back pew"The incredible insights behind heartbreaking moments which were her greatest opportunities of faith.

    The creator of such classics as La Mer and Clair de Lune, of Pelleas et Melisande and his magnificent, delicate piano works, he is the modernist everybody loves, the man who drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions--and the overbearing influence of Wagner--threatened to stifle it. As a central figure at the birth of modernism, Debussy's influence on French culture was profound. Yet at the same time his own life was complicated and often troubled by struggles over money, women, and ill-health. Walsh's engagingly original approach is to enrich a lively account of this life with brilliant analyses of Debussy's music: from his first daring breaks with the rules as a Conservatoire student to his mature achievements as the greatest French composer of his time. The Washington Post called Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky "one of the best books ever written about a composer." Debussy is a worthy successor.

    Generations have grown up with Cilla's music, TV shows, and performances. But how much do we really know about 'the girl with the bright red hair and the jet black voice'? What's It All About? is Cilla's own story, told for the first time ever. It's the story of a woman who has worked ceaselessly to stay at the top for forty years despite setbacks and personal tragedy; a life of incredible highs and terrible lows. In this deeply personal autobiography she tells her unique story in intimate and vivid detail for the very first time. This is the real Cilla Black.