Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/24/2014
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location
Subterranean Books

Dean Alger Discussion and Signing for “THE ORIGINAL GUITAR HERO AND THE POWER OF MUSIC – The Legendary Lonnie Johnson, Music and Civil Rights” Thursday, April 24, 6-7pm at Subterranean

To pre-order or for more information look here http://store.subbooks.com/event/dean-alger-signing-original-guitar-hero-and-power-music-april-24.

Copies of THE ORIGINAL GUITAR HERO AND THE POWER OF MUSIC will be available for purchase and signing at the event. If you would like a signed copy but cannot attend the event just let us know!

THE ORIGINAL GUITAR HERO is about much more than an old musician biography: It discusses the nature of the guitar, how artistry on the guitar developed, and how it became the dominant instrument in popular music and a cultural icon. And it reviews the inspiring, vital story of how Blues and Jazz, and other music spawned by them, plus the great musicians involved, played a major role in progress on Civil Rights. The book is about The Power of Music, on multiple levels.

“Lonnie Johnson was the most influential guitarist of the 20th century.” –B.B. King

Lonnie Johnson was a guitar legend before we knew what they were. You can trace his playing style in a direct line through T-Bone Walker and B.B. King to Eric Clapton.–Bill Wyman

In THE ORIGINAL GUITAR HERO & THE POWER OF MUSIC Dean Alger offers the long overdue biography of one of the true geniuses of 20th century music. Alger has collected material from extensive research and woven it into a narrative that rightly presents the real Lonnie Johnson in the appropriate light of an unjustly underrated and neglected superstar. This superstar’s recorded output from the 1920s to the 1960s outclassed much of the work of more heralded figures, black and white.

Fascinatingly readable, the book goes even further in that it places Johnson in the broadest context of American culture of the 20th century, seeing him rightly not only as a trailblazer and pervasive influence on a variety of musical genres– jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, country, rock, and folk–‹but as an important symbol of race relations, racial understanding, and racial progress in the American (perhaps the Afro-American) century. If this volume doesn¹t bring Johnson his rightful place in American musical and historical discussions, and a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, then grits ain¹t groceries and Mona Lisa was a man.–‹Steven C. Tracy, Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, author of over a dozen books on music and Afro-American culture, and a fine musician

Dean Alger has written on Lonnie Johnson for the new Grove Dictionary of American Music and lectured on Mr. Johnson at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and has written 5 books. The fourth, MEGAMEDIA, received high praise from a long list of nationally notable people, including Bill Moyers. More info: http://www.deanalger.com/