Author: Jackie Kay
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593314271
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
A beautiful genre-bending tribute to the larger-than-life blues singer Bessie Smith. Scotland’s National Poet blends poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction to create an entirely unique biography of the Empress of the Blues. There has never been anyone else like Bessie Smith. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1894 and orphaned by the age of nine, Bessie Smith sang on street corners before becoming a big name in traveling shows. In 1923, she made her first recording for the newly founded Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and catapulted her to fame. Known for her unmatched vocal talent, her timeless and personal blues narratives, her tough persona, and her ability to enrapture audiences with her raw voice, the Empress of the Blues remains a force and an enigma. In this remarkable book, Kay combines history and personal narrative, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life, and to capture the soul of the woman she first identified with as a young Black girl growing up in Glasgow. Powerful and moving, Bessie Smith is at once a vivid biography of a central figure in American music history and a personal story about one woman’s search for recognition. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.
Author: Sue Stauffacher
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Black blues singer Bessie Smith single-handedly scares off Ku Klux Klan members who are trying to disrupt her show one hot July night in Concord, North Carolina. Includes historical note.
Author: Michelle R. Scott
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252033388
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
The cultural and industrial reconstruction of the South, explored through a major figure in early black music
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030757444X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Author: Edward Albee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: David Crittendon
Publisher: Blurb
ISBN: 9781006351785
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
David Crittendon's historic blues novella, THEN SEE IF I CARE: A Story About Bessie Smith, makes you feel her yearning down to your bones. This is no low-down, foot-dragging dirge. With prose that rings true to African American idiom yet resounds with Crittendon's singular poetic voice, THEN SEE IF I CARE is by turns defiant, bawdy, mocking, starkly bitter, and jubilant, initiating us into an encounter with the woman behind the legend.
Author: Elaine Feinstein
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
Author: Will Friedwald
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306807121
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 540
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Book Description
Author: Kimberly Mack
Publisher: African American Intellectual
ISBN: 9781625345509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression. Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.
Author: Mezz Mezzrow
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590179455
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
Hailed as an “American counter-culture classic,” this “funny” and candid musical memoir offers a delicious glimpse into the 1930s jazz scene (The Wall Street Journal) Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues—the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe—is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”
