Terry Blade

Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes (eBook, ePUB)

Lyrics, Album Notes and Critical Essays
Redaktion: Blade, Terry

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes is a hybrid work of music writing and cultural criticism by Terry Blade that brings together lyrics, album notes, and essays grounded in Black American blues as lived practice.

Written in conversation with three interconnected albums, American Descendant of Slavery, Ethos: Son of a Sharecropper, and Chicago Kinfolk: The Juke Joint Blues, the book treats music as evidence. Songs are not presented as nostalgia or abstraction, but as inheritance shaped by history, labor, and survival. Blade writes from inside the tradition, examining how lineage settles into voice, rhythm, silence, and family memory, and how those forces continue to operate in the present.

The essays move between personal lineage and cultural analysis, addressing the ethics of listening, the limits of tidy historical narratives, and the responsibilities that come with carrying a tradition forward. Album notes document the artistic decisions behind the recordings, including the use of acoustic instrumentation, room sound, and archival voices, and explain how those choices function as acts of care rather than ornament.

Throughout the book, Blade rejects museum framing and heritage packaging. The blues here is not preserved at a distance. It is active, unfinished, and accountable. These pages insist that history does not stay behind us, and that art made from inherited conditions must reckon honestly with what it carries.

For readers of music criticism, creative nonfiction, and African American literature, Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes offers a clear-eyed, uncompromising work where sound, story, and responsibility remain inseparable.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Blade Arthouse Media
• Seitenzahl: 190
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Januar 2026
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798218885441
• Artikelnr.: 76256098

Autorenporträt

Terry Blade is a cross-disciplinary, multi-genre artist, an award-winning vocalist, songwriter, and cultural documentarian whose work treats music as living record. Rooted in Southern family history and shaped by Chicago's creative fire, Blade builds albums that function as testimony, narrative, and archive: projects where craft serves truth. Blade's songs are driven by intersectional identity: Black, queer, and shaped by generational ties to enslavement, sharecropping, migration, and working-class survival. Rather than flattening those realities into slogans, he writes from the inside where history becomes daily life, where desire and dignity share the same breath, and where inheritance is both burden and blueprint. Across his catalog, Blade shifts sound and form to match what each story demands, while keeping a consistent purpose: to document what gets ignored, to honor what endures, and to make space for Black queer interior life with clarity and insistence. His lyrics move like oral history set to music: intimate, unsentimental, and fiercely human. This book gathers new album notes and lyrics as a companion to the recordings, part listening guide, part archive, part witness statement. Blade lives and works in Chicago, continuing a practice built on community, precision, and the conviction that songs can carry what history tries to bury.