Great God A'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Jerry Zolten, Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences and Integrative Arts at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, is an educator, author, music and film producer, and screen and broadcast narrator. He writes extensively about American roots and vernacular music as both communication about culture and as an influence on contemporary pop music. Zolten's association with The Dixie Hummingbirds began during the late 1980s, initially as a producer of concert and festival appearances, then later as a chronicler of the group's history, culminating in the First Edition of Great God A'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (2003). Zolten contributed liner notes for the Grammy-winning two-volume The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volumes 1 & 2 from Jack White's Third Man Records. He is also a principle on-screen narrator in the film The Ballad of the Dreadnought, and co-producer and principle narrator of the documentary film How They Got Over: Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll.Zolten fluently unfolds this story, with its sundry subplots and themes. His descriptions of music are evocative, and he neither minimizes nor exaggerates the gospel world's fierce moral and showbiz competitiveness. He shows how, like all the top-flight gospel quartets, the Birds drilled on staging and presentation as well as music.... He makes a case that The Dixie Hummingbirds were exemplars and conveyors of cultural and musical change.
New York Times Book Review
This intriguing, fast-moving history is highly recommended for anyone interested in music, social history, gospel, or the American experience.
Library Journal
In this excellent history, Zolten carefully and lovingly details the almost 75-year history of the Hummingbirds, from their start in the Depression to their induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2000. This is a fine exploration of an important style and era in the history of American popular music and culture.
Publishers Weekly
A fabulously entertaining story of the Birds
and it's all here: the 1928 organization, 1938 addition of Ira Tucker, name changes in the early 1940s, Café Society in 1942, collaboration with Angelic Gospel Singers in 1950, Go Out of the Program in 1953, the Apollo Theatre in 1956, Newport Festivals in 1966 and 1972, Loves Me Like a Rock in 1973, and full-fledged concerts into the 1990s. This is an extraordinary and welcomed addition to African American gospel music history.Horace Clarence Boyer, author of The Golden Age of Gospel
Zolten fluently unfolds this story, with its sundry subplots and themes. His descriptions of music are evocative, and he neither minimizes nor exaggerates the gospel world's fierce moral and showbiz competitiveness. He shows how, like all the top-flight gospel quartets, the Birds drilled on staging and presentation as well as music.... He makes a case that The Dixie Hummingbirds were exemplars and conveyors of cultural and musical change.
New York Times Book Review
This intriguing, fast-moving history is highly recommended for anyone interested in music, social history, gospel, or the American experience.
Library Journal
In this excellent history, Zolten carefully and lovingly details the almost 75-year history of the Hummingbirds, from their start in the Depression to their induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2000. This is a fine exploration of an important style and era in the history of American popular music and culture.
Publishers Weekly
The 'Birds' story is also the story of black entertainment slowly entering the American pop-cultural mainstream.... Welcome this book with its generous discography to the pop-music shelves.
Booklist
A fabulously entertaining story of the Birds
and it's all here: the 1928 organization, 1938 addition of Ira Tucker, name changes in the early 1940s, Café Society in 1942, collaboration with Angelic Gospel Singers in 1950, Go Out of the Program in 1953, the Apollo Theatre in 1956, Newport Festivals in 1966 and 1972, Loves Me Like a Rock in 1973, and full-fledged concerts into the 1990s. This is an extraordinary and welcomed addition to African American gospel music history.Horace Clarence Boyer, author of The Golden Age of Gospel
All this is to say that those who read Great God A'Mighty in 2003 or sometime thereafter will want to pick up the second edition to absorb the new information, new images, updated discography, continuation of the Dixie Hummingbirds story, and how that story has become richer because of twenty-plus years of renewed interest in traditional gospel music.
Robert M. Marovich, Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal