Come home Charley Patton - Hardcover

Lemon, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819573191 ISBN 13: 9780819573193

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2013

Synopsis

A moving and imaginative memoir documenting the Civil Rights Era, contemporary southern culture, and Lemon's private and public art practice

Come home Charley Patton is a moving and an imaginative memoir documenting the Civil Rights Era and contemporary southern culture. Intricately layered and deeply arresting, Ralph Lemon's research on the African American experience intertwines personal anecdotes and family remembrances with diaristic accounts of the making of a dance, as Lemon journeys the mythic roads of migration―visiting the sites of lynchings, following the paths of Civil Rights marches, and meeting the descendants of early blues musicians. Come home Charley Patton is a rich, transcendent text, and a historically-charged meditation on memory in America. It is a formidable finale for the Geography trilogy (including Geography and Tree), three books connected thematically by racial identity and the related dance projects choreographed by Lemon. Generously illustrated with family photos, original art, and photos of the performance, the book will take its place in the canon of great African American writing.

About this title

About the Author

RALPH LEMON is a distinguished dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

An African American dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist, Lemon undertakes quests, then transforms documentation of his journeys into performance pieces and striking travelogues that combine word and image. This is the final volume in a trilogy, following Geography (2000), which covers his sojourn in West Africa, and Tree (2004), an account of his explorations in Asia. Come Home Charley Patton is an American story. Lemon braids together family history and autobiography with eerie, funny, and heart-wrenching on-the-road encounters as he and his daughter reenact the 1961 Freedom Bus Ride. Lemon transcribes conversations with people they meet and describes with fine-tuned insights the poignant and tragic civil rights sites they visit. He is also seeking traces of obscure blues musicians, especially the elusive Charley Patton, and not only does he intently look and listen, he also dances spontaneously in living rooms and open spaces. Motion is intrinsic to Lemon’s understanding of the world, and this graceful, meditative, and unveiling odyssey, told in dancing language and kinetic drawings and photographs, reframes and recharges still hidden, still painful stories of the perplexities of race and freedom. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819573191
• ISBN 13: 9780819573193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240