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Heart & Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America 1930-1975
 
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Heart & Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America 1930-1975 [Deluxe Edition] [Hardcover]

Bob Merlis (Author), Davin Seay (Author), Etta James (Foreword)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)


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Book Description

August 1997
Heart & Soul celebrates the nearly half-cent ury (1930-1975) of flamboyant and extravagant flowering in A frican-American culture that enriched the entire world. From the Jackson Five to the Four Tops, it was an era of audacio us showmen. '

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About the Author

Bob Merlis, a graduate of Columbia University, was a senior executive at Warner Brothers Records for thirty years and is a board member of the Blues Foundation and a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee. A contibuting editor to the Catalog of Cool and its sequel, Too Cool, he writes for Automobile Magazine, Details and other magazines and was guest curator for the Petersen Automotive Museum's Cars and Guitars of Rock 'n Roll exhibition.

Davin Seay is a journalist and author who has worked in the music business for thirty years. His previous books include The Wanderer: Dion's Story; Take Me To The River, the biography of Al Green and The Doggfather in collaboration with rap superstar Snoop Dog.

Etta James, legendary vocalist and songwriter, began her musical carrer as a gospel prodigy at ae six. Ten yars later, she was a nationally known R&B star, renowned for such hits as Tell Mama and for working closely with artists such as Sam Cooke and Little Richard. A survivor in the truest sense of the word, Etta James overcame heroin addiction and took her career to new heights during the 1990s. She is the author of an autobiography, Rage to Survive.


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 378 pages
  • Publisher: Stewart Tabori & Chang; First Edition edition (August 1997)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1556705387
  • ISBN-13: 978-1556705380
  • Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 10.2 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,478,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Saturday night text-dancing, December 31, 1997
This review is from: Heart & Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America 1930-1975 (Hardcover)
I interrupted my wife's Sunday newspaper idyll to read aloud another's review of this book. My kids were stumped for birthday gift ideas. She put two and two together. What I expected was words that attempt to describe an art form. What I got was a date to a Saturday night text-dance and a trip down album-cover memory lane. This book is a "Land of 1,000 Dances" for the eyes. Stay away if you can't tap your feet and read at the same time.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Covers of color, January 29, 2006

A wrap-up of black music mixing all styles with the use of record covers to visually hold it all together. The breezy text is very generalised and really no more than naming performers, their hits and odd bits of showbiz gossip. I found it rather annoying that black music styles were mixed together, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Hadda Brooks are some of the record covers on pages ninety-four and five, the only common element is that they are all black, their music though, is completely different in style. Jazz is probably the only black music, in the past, to develop eye catching covers and the book ignores anything from record companies like Blue Note, Riverside, Atlantic or Verve.

The last chapter, 'Soul for sale', includes several movie posters of black musicians appearing in pop music movies but it also deals with the marketing of black musicians as role models in advertising, mostly for cigarettes, alcohol and hair products and though it rather strays from the book's main focus it is a subject that would make an interesting visual book about this area of black life.

Most of the four hundred illustrations in the book are covers and as expected none are of any design merit but put them all together in a book and they superficially become interesting. A similar thing occurs in 'A Separate Cinema' (ISBN 0374523606) probably the only book to concentrate on black cast movie posters. None of them will win any design awards yet they all have an exuberant colorful style when so many are presented together.

'Heart & Soul' is worth getting if you are interested in black visual culture and to bring it right up to date have a look at 'The Book of Hip Hop Cover Art' (ISBN 1840009195) by Andrew Emery. In this book some of the covers really are a treat to look at.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Heart & Soul, February 27, 2011
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Good information, should have included more information from that era. So many artist of note not mention, but there is information there that has not been mentioned elsewhere. Good starter.
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