Catalog Search Results
1) Crossroads
Pub. Date
[2004]
Description
A young classically trained guitarist learns the blues from an old bluesman who supposedly got his talent to play the blues from the devil.
Author
Description
It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
7) Bessie
Description
Bessie Smith's transformation from a struggling young singer into 'The Empress of the Blues', who became one of the most successful recording artists of the 1920s and is an enduring icon today.
Pub. Date
[2005]
Description
After Jake Blues is released from prison, he and brother Elwood go to visit the old home where they were raised by nuns. They learn the church is no longer supporting the institution and will sell the place to the education authority. The only way to keep the place open is if the $5000 tax on the property is paid within the next 11 days. The brothers want to help and decide to put their blues band back together and raise the the money by staging a...
10) The Temptations
Pub. Date
1999, c1998
Description
Presents a history of the rhythm and blues group, the Temptations, including their meteoric rise to fame and the rivalries that threatened to tear them apart.
Pub. Date
2005
Description
After Jake Blues is release from prison, he and brother Elwood go to visit the old home where they were raised by nuns. They learn the church is no longer supporting the institution and will sell the place to the education authority. The only way to keep the place open is if the $5000 tax on the property is paid within the next 11 days. The brothers want to help and decide to put their blues band back together and raise the the money by staging a...
13) Black Snake Moan
Pub. Date
©2007.
Description
Lazarus is an extremely religious man who is broken hearted after his wife leaves him for his own brother. Rae is the town slut, apparently afflicted with the "disease" of uncontrollable nymphomania. After a night of hard partying and sleeping around, Rae, is beaten up and left by the roadside near Lazarus' house. Lazarus takes her in and chains her to his radiator while trying to "cure" her insatiability. Eventually, the two become friends and help...