Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers—Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow—used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers’ statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the Supremes. Awkward sees Franklin’s early album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, released shortly after Washington’s death in 1964, as an attempt by a struggling young singer to replace her idol as the acknowledged queen of the black female vocal tradition. He contends that Green’s album Call Me (1973) reveals the performer’s attempt to achieve formal coherence by uniting seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his personal history, including his career in popular music and his religious yearnings, as well as his sense of himself as both a cosmopolitan black artist and a forlorn country boy. Turning to Snow’s album Second Childhood (1976), Awkward suggests that through covers of blues and soul songs, Snow, a white Jewish woman from New York, explored what it means for non-black enthusiasts to perform works considered by many to be black cultural productions. The only book-length examination of the role of remakes in American popular music, Soul Covers is itself a refreshing new take on the lives and work of three established soul artists.

Marvel at this collection of cover artwork, preliminary designs, and never-before-seen illustrations created exclusively for Titan Comics’ Dark Souls comic series. Featuring contributions from legends of the industry including Josh Cassara, Michael Walsh, Ben Templesmith, Nen Chang and interior artist Alan Quah. “Jaw-droppingly gorgeous from start to finish!” – We The Nerdy “Captures the mood and tone of the fan-favorite game trilogy.” – Newsarama p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Calibri} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Calibri; min-height: 14.0px}

In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.

The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1964, volume 3, contains messages and fellowship given by Brother Witness Lee from August 11 through December 10, 1964. During this period Brother Lee spent the majority of his time in Los Angeles, aside from a weekend trip to Tyler, Texas, in September, a weeklong trip in December to Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Eugene, and North Bend, Oregon, and a weekend to visit the saints in Las Vegas, Nevada. No record of his speaking on these trips has been found. The contents of this volume are divided into eight sections, as follows: 1. A series of five messages given on August 11 through 19 during the summer training in Los Angeles. These messages are included in this volume under the title Basic Principles for the Church Meetings. 2. A series of twelve messages given on August 18 through 30 during the summer training in Los Angeles. This series is included in this volume under the title The Oneness of the Body and the Service in the Church Life. 3. Messages given in Los Angeles on August 4 through 6 and September 13. Brother Lee gave four messages, which have been condensed into the three chapters of this section, entitled Prayer in Ephesians. 4. A series of twenty-four messages given from August 4 through September 2 during the summer training in Los Angeles. This series has been previously published under the title The Economy of God. 5. Three messages given in Los Angeles on August 2 and 3. These messages are included in this volume under the title Various Meetings in Los Angeles. 6. Miscellaneous messages given in Los Angeles on August 12 through 29. These messages are included in this volume under the title Miscellaneous Fellowship in Los Angeles. 7. A series of five messages given in Los Angeles on September 7 through 9. These messages are included in this volume under the title Fellowship concerning Migration. 8. Twelve messages given in various meetings in Los Angeles from September 15 through December 10. These messages are included in this volume under the title Various Fall Meetings in Los Angeles.

"Black Ephemera explores the crisis and the challenge of the Black Musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global import, yet the cultural DNA of that culture is becoming obscured in the transformation from analog to digital"--

Arranged in sixteen musical categories, provides entries for twenty thousand releases from four thousand artists, and includes a history of each musical genre.