Please join us on July 6th from 6.30pm to celebrate the latest work by the culture and music writer Darryl W. Bullock. Best known for his work exploring the relationship between popular music and LGBTQ+ culture, Queer Blues, published by Omnibus Press, is the latest addition to a phenomenally well-researched and comprehensive collection.
Darryl will be hosted by Jacqueline Springer, the curator of Africa & Diaspora: Performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jacqueline is also a co-founder of fashion, culture and identity studies event curation duo Union Black, where the relationship between music, sartorial style, race and cultural identities are explored via bespoke commissions.
About the book:
From the very beginning, the blues has had a close connection with the LGBTQ community. There is a long and decorated history of so-called 'dirty blues' songs, stretching back beyond the earliest attempts to capture the blues on record. The 1920s and 30s saw the release of dozens of raunchy, bawdy blues recordings aimed at a knowing LGBTQ audience. Queer Blues tells the story of the pioneering LGBTQ composers and entertainers that wrote, performed, and recorded these wonderfully outlandish, life-affirming songs and chronicles, including: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker to Frankie 'Half-Pint' Jaxon and many more. This is the definitive account of the LGBTQ trailblazers of early blues and a fascinating consideration of the intersection between music and LGBTQ history, from the award-winning Darryl W. Bullock.
About Darryl:
Described as ‘a veritable Bard of the bent, broken and Baroque’ by Andy Partridge (XTC), Darryl W. Bullock is a writer, publisher and editor, specialising in music and the arts.
He has written for publications including The Guardian, Pitchfork, the Quietus, Songwriting Magazine, The Bath Chronicle, Venue, Folio, The Spark, B24-7, 3Sixty, The Bath Magazine, the Bristol Evening Post and The Western Daily Press, and he has been profiled in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and GT.
Darryl is the author of seven books including The World’s Worst Records (Volumes 1 and 2), Florence Foster Jenkins: the Life of the World’s Worst Opera Singer (Duckworth-Overlook, 2016), singled out as ‘delightfully cheering' by bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith in the New York Times, David Bowie Made Me Gay, the highly-regarded history of a century of LGBT pop music, The Infamous Cherry Sisters: The Worst Act in Vaudeville, and the internationally-acclaimed The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging Sixties, winner of the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2022 and Pride, Pop and Politics, which was published by Omnibus Press in 2022 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the UK's first Pride march. He posts weekly on his popular blog, The World’s Worst Records (www.worldsworstrecords.co.uk), and presents The World's Worst Records Radio Show on WFMU every Wednesday.
About Jacqueline:
Jacqueline Springer is Curator Africa & Diaspora: Performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She was employed by the BBC as a Senior Broadcast Journalist in radio and contributed to discussion on contemporary music, culture and representation. During her time at the corporation, Jacqueline was employed by Radio 1, 1xtra, the Caribbean Service, the World Service and 6Music and contributed to output on BBC Radio 4, 5live and television.
Jacqueline continues to contribute to BBC television radio arts and news programming and arts festivals. She also works independently exploring race, culture and musical expression under the banner of Contemporary Black Music Culture, and is the co-founder of fashion, culture and identity studies event curation duo Union Black (London College of Fashion, British Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum) where the relationship between music, sartorial style, race and cultural identities are explored via bespoke commissions.
Copies of Queer Blues, as well as Darryl's previous titles, will be available to purchase on the night. This event is free to attend. Please note that this event will take place in our downstairs event space, which unfortunately is not currently wheelchair accessible. If you have accessibility issues please email us at books@commonpress.co.uk, and we can discuss your specific needs.