Page date:1 November
2004
Michael Urban, with the assistance of Andrei Evdokimov. 2004. Russia Gets
the Blues: Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the
significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he
explains, have taken a music originating in the ãlowä culture of the American
South and transformed it into an object of ãhighä culture, fashioning a social
identity that distinguishes blues adherents from both the discredited Soviet
past and the vulgar consumerism associated with the countryâs Westernization.
While adapting the idiom to their own conditions, Russiaâs bliuzmeny (bluesmen)
have absorbed the blues ethos encoded in the music by their American forebears,
using it to invert their social world, thus deriving dignity and satisfaction
from those very things that give one the blues.
Based on more than forty interviews with blues musicians and fans, nightclub
managers, and others, Russia Gets the Blues reveals the fascinating history of
blues in Russia, from the initial mimicry of British blues-rock to the recent
emergence of a specifically ãRussian blues.ä The gradual mastering of the idiom
in Russia has been conditioned by the culture of the countryâs intelligentsia, a
fact explaining why, on one hand, bliuzmeny feel compelled to proselytize on
behalf of the music, to share with others this treasure of ãworld culture,ä
while, on the other, they perform blues almost exclusively in English÷which
almost no one understands÷and condemn any and all efforts to make the music
commercially successful.
Michael Urban is Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. His books include The Rebirth of Politics in Russia. Andrei Evdokimov
hosts All This Blues, a weekly radio show in Moscow.
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directly from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Why Blues?
2. First Encounters
3. Moscow Blues: Musicians and Their Music
4. Moscow Blues: Sites and Sounds
5. St. Petersburg and the Provinces
6. Identity and Community
7. Politics
Notes
Index
200 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 2 charts, 8 halftones
Paper: $17.95, ISBN: 0-8014-8900-8
Cloth: $45.00, ISBN: 0-8014-4229-X