Magic City Gospel


Book Description

"A love song to Birmingham, the Magic City of the South. In traditional forms and free verse poems ... [the author] takes readers on a historical, geographical, cultural, and personal journey through her life and the life of her home state [of Alabama]"--




Reparations Now!


Book Description

What is the price of a life, a stolen culture, a stolen heart? In formal and nontraditional poems, Reparations Now! asks for what is owed. Moving between voices and through intersecting histories, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones offers perspectives both sharp and compassionate, exploring the difficulties of navigating our relationships with ourselves and others. From the murder of Mary Turner in 1918 to a case of infidelity to the oppressive nationalist movement of the present, Jones holds us accountable.




dark // thing


Book Description

dark // thing is a multifaceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued. This work, full as it is of slashes of all kinds, ultimately separates darkness from thingness, affirming and celebrating humanity.




The Third Coast


Book Description

Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.




Gospel Fictions


Book Description

Are the four canonical Gospels actual historical accounts or are they imaginative literature produced by influential literary artists to serve a theological vision? In this study of the Gospels based upon a demonstrable literary theory, Randel Helms presents the work of the four evangelists as the "supreme fictions" of our culture, self-conscious works of art deliberately composed as the culmination of a long literary and oral tradition.Helms analyzes the best-known and the most powerful of these fictions: the stories of Christ's birth, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion, death and resurrection. In Helms' exegesis of the Gospel miracle stories, he traces the greatest of these - the resurrection of Lazarus four days after his death - to the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by the god Horus.Helms maintains that the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about the writers' attitudes concerning Jesus. Helms examines each of the narratives - the language, the sources, the similarities and differences - and shows that their purpose was not so much to describe the past as to affect the present.This scholarly yet readable work demonstrates how the Gospels surpassed the expectations of their authors, influencing countless generations by creating a life-enhancing understanding of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.




Greater Than Magic


Book Description

Power. Everyone wants it. The masses are chasing after it. Few ever access it. Even fewer experience it as a lifestyle. The only vehicle for authentic spiritual power--the Church--must awaken to what it already possesses and start activating it: Faith. Let this awakening begin with you! If anyone should be living out a power-full lifestyle, it should be the Spirit-empowered, faith-filled believer in Jesus Christ. In Greater Than Magic, author Becky Dvorak reveals through Scripture the key to unlocking the supernatural power of God in our everyday lives through faith.




Bob Dylan


Book Description

Between 1979 and 1981, Dylan produced and released three of his most controversial albums--Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love--toured the world, and played the most contentious shows of his career. Remarkably, this entire period was perhaps the most fastidiously well-documented of his career, with every studio session, every live show, and every single rehearsal recorded on Dylan's behalf. For the first time, that material has been excavated, reviewed, and accessed by "perhaps the world's leading authority on all things Dylan" (Rolling Stone). Serving as an invaluable companion to the latest Sony Bootleg Series (November 2017), Trouble in Mind is the first book to focus on the life and works of Dylan as a born-again Christian from the perspective of both his artistic growth and the development of his eschatological worldview. It will draw on previously undocumented song drafts, rehearsal tapes, and new interviews with engineers, musicians, and girlfriends. Aside from his definitive biography, Dylan Behind the Shades (Simon & Schuster, 1991; new edition HarperCollins, 2001), which remains in print more than twenty years after publication, Clinton Heylin has published multiple books on Dylan. He has been an invited speaker at Dylan conventions around the world and was chosen as the annotator of the 2013 forty-nine CD box set Dylan's Complete Columbia Recordings by Sony, for which he was nominated for the 2014 ASCAP Drew Taylor Award.




Insert Boy


Book Description

Black -- Papa's lil' -- Ruined -- Rent -- Lover -- Again.




Magic City


Book Description

Magic City is the story of one of American music's essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. He also celebrates the contributions of local educators, club owners, and civic leaders who nurtured a vital culture of Black expression in one of the country's most notoriously segregated cities. In Birmingham, jazz was more than entertainment: long before the city emerged as a focal point in the national civil rights movement, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of independence, innovation, achievement, and empowerment. Blending deep archival research and original interviews with living elders of the Birmingham scene, Mathews elevates the stories of figures like John T. "Fess" Whatley, the pioneering teacher-bandleader who emphasized instrumental training as a means of upward mobility and community pride. Along the way, he takes readers into the high school band rooms, fraternal ballrooms, vaudeville houses, and circus tent shows that shaped a musical movement, revealing a community of players whose influence spread throughout the world.




Magic City Nights


Book Description

This exploration of rock 'n' roll music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama, is based on the oral histories of musicians, their fans and professionals in the popular music industry. Collected over a twenty-year period, their stories describe the coming of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, the rise of the garage bands in the 1960s, of southern rock in the 1970s, and of alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s. Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Magic City Nights provides an insider's view of the dramatic changes in the business and status of popular music from the era of the vacuum tube to twenty-first-century digital technology. These collective memories offer a unique perspective on the impact of a subversive and racially integrated music culture in one of the most conservative and racially divided cities in the country.