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Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

ISBN-13: 9780252041631
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Sandra Jean Graham
Price: AUD $271.00
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 16/04/2018
Format: Hardback 360 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Music [AV]

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Google Preview: Showbiz shaping sacred song's soaring success

Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in postCivil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies.

In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they laid the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century.

A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/

Publication of this book is supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; by the Babson Faculty Research Fund; and by a grant from the H. Earle Johnson Fund of the Society for American Music.; "Sandra Graham breaks new ground in her nuanced examination of the white-controlled spiritual or jubilee industry, and of claims for musical and cultural authenticity by black college and independent jubilee groups, as well as white and black performers of blackface minstrelsy, American folk music, and European classical traditions."--Portia K. Maultsby, coeditor of Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation and African American Music: An Introduction, second edition

"A detailed, cogent, and fascinating history of the popularization of Negro spirituals [that is] thoroughly documented and covers a truly vast range of information. One of the especially distinctive features of Graham's approach is its careful consideration of musical elements and how they figure in defining objects under study." --Thomas L. Riis, author of Frank Loesser; Google Preview content

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Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry