Outside of Merigold, Mississippi, off an unmarked dirt road, stands Po’ Monkey’s, perhaps the most famous house in Mississippi and the last rural juke joint in the state, now closed to the public. Before the death of the lounge’s owner, Willie Seaberry, in 2016, it was a mandatory stop on the constant blues pilgrimage that flows through the Delta. Seaberry ran Po’ Monkey’s Lounge for more than fifty years, opening his juke joint in the 1960s. A hand-built tenant home located on the plantation where Seaberry worked, Po’ Monkey’s was a place to listen to music and drink beer—a place to relax where everyone was welcomed by Seaberry’s infectious charm. In Po’ Monkey’s: Portrait of a Juke Joint, photographer Will Jacks captures the juke joint he spent a decade patronizing. The more than seventy black-and-white photographs featured in this volume reflect ten years of weekly visits to the lounge as a regular—a journal of Jacks’s encounters with other customers, tourists, and Willie Seaberry himself. An essay by award-winning writer Boyce Upholt on the cultural significance of the lounge accompanies the images. This volume explores the difficulties of preservation, historical context, community relations, and cultural tourism. Now that Seaberry is gone, the uncertainty of the future of his juke joint highlights the need for a historical record.

Designed to introduce the young intermediate-level pianist to playing the blues, Jazzin' the Blues presents fifteen original blues compositions in various keys, styles and grooves together with downloadable recordings of 40 of the 50 examples in the book. The audio tracks are presented both with and without the lead piano part, so the student can play along with a professional rhythm section which includes piano, vibraphone, alto flute, drums, and bass. Historical and performance notes are provided with each blues composition. The author enlisted the skills of jazz pianist Charlie Freeman in editing the book and providing fingering for both the treble and bass piano parts, making these pieces more accessible to novice players. If your knowledge of blues theory or terminology is lacking, this is the book for you! Author Vince Corozine thoroughly explores and demonstrates: blues and pentatonic scale theory, blue notes, grace notes, pedal-points, tremolos, trills, syncopation, anticipation, delayed beats, slash chords, boogie-woogie left-hand patterns, walking bass, stride piano style, straight eighths, swing eighths, passing tones, rolled chords, riffs, "filler" chords, substitutions, and comping styles. This book also includes essential blues chord theory as well as tips on tasteful chord voicing presented in the context of accompanying a soloist (comping); in addition, the chord progressions represented by the written notation are carefully annotated in every example in the book. The Appendix includes helpful tips on comping, practice, and jazz soloing, plus a list of noteworthy jazz pianists, a key to chord symbols, and a glossary of jazz terms used in the book. If you are not a competent blues pianist when you first pick up this book, you will be by the time you complete it! Includes access to online audio.

More than twenty years in the making, Country Music Records documents all country music recording sessions from 1921 through 1942. With primary research based on files and session logs from record companies, interviews with surviving musicians, as well as the 200,000 recordings archived at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Frist Library and Archives, this notable work is the first compendium to accurately report the key details behind all the recording sessions of country music during the pre-World War II era. This discography documents--in alphabetical order by artist--every commercial country music recording, including unreleased sides, and indicates, as completely as possible, the musicians playing at every session, as well as instrumentation. This massive undertaking encompasses 2,500 artists, 5,000 session musicians, and 10,000 songs. Summary histories of each key record company are also provided, along with a bibliography. The discography includes indexes to all song titles and musicians listed.

Juke joint--two words often used, often abused. They convey an inherent promise of something real, edgy, from another time. All juke joints are blues clubs, but not all blues clubs are jukes. Here, artist recollections and insights delve below the murky surface to tell the tales, canonize the characters and explain the special brand of blues bottled in these quasi-legal establishments. Author Roger Stolle works from the inside to educate and entertain with a mix of history, anecdote and discovery. It's a wild ride.

Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of ""Crazy Blues"" is commonly thought to signify the beginning of commercial attention to blues music and culture, but by that year more than 450 other blues titles had already appeared in sheet music and on recordings. In this examination of early popular blues, Peter C. Muir traces the genre's early history and the highly creative interplay between folk and popular forms, focusing especially on the roles W. C. Handy played in both blues music and the music business. Long Lost Blues exposes for the first time the full scope and importance of early popular blues to mainstream American culture in the early twentieth century. Closely analyzing sheet music and other print sources that have previously gone unexamined, Muir revises our understanding of the evolution and sociology of blues at its inception.

In 1993, Dominic Stevenson left a comfortable life with his girlfriend in Kyoto, Japan, to travel to China. His journey took him to some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places in the world, from the poppy fields of the Afghan-Pakistan border to the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road, before he was arrested for drug smuggling while boarding a boat from Shanghai to Japan. After eight months on remand in a Chinese police lock-up, Stevenson was sentenced to two and a half years in one of the biggest prisons in the world, the Shanghai Municipal Prison aka 'The Monkey House'. There, he was imprisoned alongside just five westerners amongst five thousand Chinese criminals in a block for death row inmates and political prisoners, where the guards drank green tea and let the prison run itself. The experience led him to reflect on his previous life in Japan, India and Thailand, during which time he took on a varied array of jobs, including English teacher, karaoke-bar host, factory worker, busker, crystal seller and dope smuggler. From Afghan gun shops to Tibetan monasteries, Thai brothels and the stirrings of the rave culture in Goa, Monkey House Blues is a tale of discovery and rediscovery, of friendship and betrayal.

A kind-hearted little girl meets a seemingly "rude" monkey (or baboon) but quickly learns it's really a sad monkey (or baboon) and uses sympathy and kindness to make a new friend. A fun children's book with colorful and vibrant artwork that tells a charming little story about kindness and compassion.