Blues – The Bell Bookshop

Holding the note

Emma — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

ESSAYS ON ARETHA FRANKLIN, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, BOB DYLAN, PAUL MCCARTNEY, LEONARD COHEN, BUDDY GUY, MAVIS STAPLES, PATTI SMITH

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winnning journalist and editor of The New Yorker, writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.

He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

Constructing a nervous system

Emma — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLAND’This is one of the most imaginative – and therefore moving – memoirs I have ever read’ – Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce AttachmentsMargo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be – as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.’Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of “imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you’ – Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts’If you want to know who we are and where we’ve been, read Margo Jefferson’ – Edmund White, author of A Previous Life’This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman’s mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many’ – Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone

Constructing a Nervous System

Emma — Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLANDShortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022’This is one of the most imaginative – and therefore moving – memoirs I have ever read’ – Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce AttachmentsMargo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be – as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.’Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of “imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you’ – Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts’If you want to know who we are and where we’ve been, read Margo Jefferson’ – Edmund White, author of A Previous Life’This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman’s mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many’ – Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone

My Amy

Emma — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Written with a searing honesty and published for the tenth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, My Amy is an evocative portrait of unbreakable lifelong friendship – and a devastating study into fame, addiction and self-sabotage.

Only one person knows what really happened to Amy, other than Amy herself. He is Tyler James, Amy’s best friend from the age of thirteen. They met at stage school as two insecure outsiders, formed an instant connection and lived together from their late teenage years right up until the day she died, aged just twenty-seven.

Tyler was there by her side through it all. From their carefree early years touring together to the creation of the multiple Grammy-winning Back To Black, which she wrote on their kitchen floor. From her volatile marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil through her escalating addictions, self-harm and eating disorders as the toxic nature of fame warped Amy’s reality. For the last three years of her life, Tyler was with her every day when she’d beaten drugs and was close to beating alcoholism too. He also knew better than anyone the real Amy Winehouse who the tabloid-reading public rarely saw – the hilarious, uncompromising force-of-nature busy taking care of everyone else.

We all think we know what happened to Amy Winehouse, but we don’t. This definitive insider’s story tells us all, finally, the truth.

‘Heartbreaking’ – The Times

Bessie Smith

Emma — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.

Scotland’s National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived.

‘A gem of a book . . . beautiful.’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO
‘A wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.’ ROBERT WYATT
‘Kay’s book is the amplifier that Smith’s voice deserves.’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read.’ IAN CARR, BBC MUSIC

BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan.

As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.

‘Biographies don’t usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.’
PEGGY SEEGER

‘What a life! What gulpable storytelling! Exactly the kind of writing about music we need: personal, ardent, playfully confrontational, questioning, undogmatic. A love song to a complicated idol.’
KATE MOLLESON

‘Pure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith.’
HELEN LEWIS