This book tells a fascinating story of how music traveled with mankind through history. Features little known facts, personal and professional bits of interesting information.

In Louis Armstrong, Blues Music, and the Artistic, Political, and Philosophical Debate During the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. Michael Decuir explores the interrelationship of the literary, visual, and performing arts; politics; and opposing philosophies during the Harlem Renaissance. His research documents the West African roots of blues and jazz music to New Orleans and Louis Armstrong. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in New Orleans, Decuir details the related cultural behaviors and their manifestations during the Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, blues music’s importation to New Orleans and the incorporation of the West African stratified rhythmic and improvisational approach to its performance. Decuir connects historical events such as James Reese Europe’s creativity during World War I and its relevance to the events of the summer of 1919 and subsequent rebirth of the New Negro ideology. The research examines how the New Negro spirit helped infuse an examination and debate about the quality and validity of the period’s arts. Decuir expounds on the impact of the discussion in some of the period’s salient authors and essayists’ writings. They include Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, and Langston Hughes, among others. Decuir discusses the correlation between the debate and the increasing popularity of blues music and Armstrong’s role as one of the arts’ principal aquifers. Specifically, Armstrong’s salient recordings, “Texas Moaner Blues,” “St. Louis Blues” (accompanying Bessie Smith), “Black and Blue,” “West End Blues,” and “Blue Yodel No. 9” (with Jimmie Rodgers). Decuir also explores blues music as an existential idiom indicative of the African American use of music for more than entertainment or aesthetic fulfillment. Specifically, the enslaved use of song texts to relay messages of escape and danger, the use of field songs to ease the burden of labor, and blues music’s role as a vehicle to identify and solve the ills of life in an oppressive existence.

In the annals of rock ‘n’ roll there have been a lot of strange characters, but there probably hasn’t been anyone as bizarre as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and this is his story. Known mostly for a single record, I Put A Spell On You, and emerging from a coffin to perform on stage, Screamin’ Jay was a whirlwind performer, lusty singer, prolific songwriter and a man who was total stranger to the truth.

This book picks up where Musicology 2101 ended and takes readers from Mexico to Brazil before landing in New Orleans' world of Jazz. Readers will be amazed to see how the record industry exploded through the talents of unique individuals.

A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.