Lady Sings the Blues

Lady Sings the Blues PDF Author: Billie Holiday
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767923863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

Lady Sings the Blues

Lady Sings the Blues PDF Author: Billie Holiday
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767923863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday PDF Author: John Szwed
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101614706
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
• Kirkus Best Books of 2015 selection for Biography • Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talent When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

Religion Around Billie Holiday

Religion Around Billie Holiday PDF Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108720X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Soulful jazz singer Billie Holiday is remembered today for her unique sound, troubled personal history, and a catalogue that includes such resonant songs as “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” Holiday and her music were also strongly shaped by religion, often in surprising ways. Religion Around Billie Holiday examines the spiritual and religious forces that left their mark on the performer during her short but influential life. Mixing elements of biography with the history of race and American music, Tracy Fessenden explores the multiple religious influences on Holiday’s life and sound, including her time spent as a child in a Baltimore convent, the echoes of black Southern churches in the blues she encountered in brothels, the secular riffs on ancestral faith in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Jewish songwriting culture of Tin Pan Alley. Fessenden looks at the vernacular devotions scholars call lived religion—the Catholicism of the streets, the Jewishness of the stage, the Pentecostalism of the roadhouse or the concert arena—alongside more formal religious articulations in institutions, doctrine, and ritual performance. Insightful and compelling, Fessenden’s study brings unexpected materials and archival voices to bear on the shaping of Billie Holiday’s exquisite craft and indelible persona. Religion Around Billie Holiday illuminates the power and durability of religion in the making of an American musical icon.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill PDF Author: Lanie Robertson
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573681844
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
"Deals with one of the last appearances of Billie Holiday." -- p.7 | May include musicians.

If You Can't be Free, be a Mystery

If You Can't be Free, be a Mystery PDF Author: Farah Jasmine Griffin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684868083
Category : Blues musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The threads of Billie Holiday's mystique are unraveled in this study of a woman who needed to create art at any cost. Griffin liberates Holiday from stereotypes of black women and pries her away from the male tradition of jazz criticism while presenting Holiday's independent spirit. of photos.

With Billie

With Billie PDF Author: Julia Blackburn
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307829219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it. Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure. In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people–piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.

Becoming Billie Holiday

Becoming Billie Holiday PDF Author: Carole Boston Weatherford
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 1635925576
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award The stunning voice and hard life of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is revealed through evocative, accessible poetry. In 1915, Sadie Fagan gave birth to a daughter she named Eleanora. The world, however, would know her as Billie Holiday, possibly the greatest jazz singer of all time. Eleanora's journey to become a legend took her through pain, poverty, and run-ins with the law. By the time she was fifteen, she knew she possessed something that could possibly change her life--a voice. Eleanora could sing. Her remarkable voice led her to a place in the spotlight with some of the era's hottest big bands. Through a sequence of raw and poignant poems, New York Times best-selling and award-winning poet Carole Boston Weatherford chronicles the singer's young life, her fight for survival, and the dream she pursued with passion.

Sugar Blues

Sugar Blues PDF Author: William, Of
Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
ISBN: 9780446361811
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
It's a prime ingredient in countless substances from cereal to soup, from cola to coffee. Consumed at the rate of one hundred pounds for every American every year, it's as addictive as nicotine -- and as poisonous. It's sugar. And "Sugar Blues," inspired by the crusade of Hollywood legend Gloria Swanson, is the classic, bestselling expose that unmasks our generation's greatest medical killer and shows how a revitalizing, sugar-free diet can not only change lives, but quite possibly save them.

Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill

Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill PDF Author: Jerry Dantzic
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0500544654
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A vivid, intimate, and largely unseen photographic chronicle of one week in the life of jazz icon Billie Holiday In 1957, New York photojournalist Jerry Dantzic spent time with the iconic singer Billie Holiday during a week-long run of performances at the Newark, New Jersey, nightclub Sugar Hill. The resulting images offer a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of Billie with her family, friends, and her pet chihuahua, Pepi; playing with her godchild (son of her autobiography’s coauthor, William Dufty); washing dishes at the Duftys’ home; walking the streets of Newark; in her hotel room; waiting backstage or having a drink in front of the stage; and performing. The years and the struggles seem to vanish when she sings; her face lights up. Later that same year, Dantzic photographed her in color at the second New York Jazz Festival at Randall’s Island. Only a handful of the photographs in the book have ever been published. In her text, Zadie Smith evokes Lady Day herself and shows us what she sees as she inhabits these images and reveals what she is thinking.

Not Till the Fat Lady Sings: Boston

Not Till the Fat Lady Sings: Boston PDF Author: The Boston Globe
Publisher: Triumph Books (IL)
ISBN: 9781572438927
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
In a single moment, an entire career reputation can be sealed and a franchise’s history cemented thanks to a last-second, game-winning finish, and this book chronicles 50 of the most memorable finishes in Boston sports. Vibrant four-color photos, statistics, quotes, and stories offer fresh details on some of the most famous events in Boston sports history, including Carlton Fisk’s Fenway Moment, “Havlicek Stole the Ball!,” Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary in Miami, and the Red Sox’s Greatest Comeback Ever. For those sports fans too young to have seen these famous moments or for those who wish to relive them over and over again, this encyclopedia of sporting greatness is a must-have for all passionate Boston fans.