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| Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics
ISBN: 9781587290312
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Afro-Americans -- Music -- History and criticism; Jazz -- History and criticism; Blues (Music) -- History and criticism;
Poet, critic, novelist, editor and professor of English at Bucknell, Carruth, like the late Philip Larkin, is a devoted, knowledgeable aficionado of jazz, and in some of his best writing he relates black music to English and American literature, Afro-American culture and the nature of artistic imagination. In these reprinted essays and poems, he explores the origins, forms and influences of jazz and the blues, the principles of improvisation and spontaneity, the nature of expressiveness and the contributions of Earl Hines, Bessie Smith, Maxine Sullivan, Joe Turner, Ben Webster and other musicians. Some jazz fans may find this book scholarly, but the more literate will be enthralled by Carruth's comparing the playing ofPee Wee Russell with the poetry of Alexander Pope and William Butler Yeats. (October (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Poet and critic Hayden Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1921. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1943 and a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. His first poetry collection, The Crow and the Heart, was published in 1959. He wrote about 30 books of poetry throughout his lifetime that addressed a wide range of subjects including madness, loneliness, death, and fragility of the natural world. Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry in 1996. He also wrote a novel entitled Appendix A. He was the poetry editor of Harper's from 1977 to 1983 and the advisory editor for The Hudson Review from 1971 until his death on September 29, 2008 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) |
