Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108720X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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.
Religion Around Billie Holiday
Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108720X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108720X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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.
Religion Around Billie Holiday
Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271080956
Category : Jazz
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Explores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday's life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music.
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271080956
Category : Jazz
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Explores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday's life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music.
Religion Around Virginia Woolf
Author: Stephanie Paulsell
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271086262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. From her agnostic parents to her evangelical grandparents, an aunt who was a Quaker theologian, and her friendship with T. S. Eliot, Woolf’s personal circle was filled with atheists, agnostics, religious scholars, and Christian converts. In this book, Stephanie Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways. Beginning with the religious forms and ideas that Woolf encountered in her family, friendships, travels, and reading, Paulsell explores the religious contexts of Woolf’s life. She shows that Woolf engaged with religion in many ways, by studying, reading, talking and debating, following controversies, and thinking about the relationship between religion and her own work. Paulsell examines the ideas about God that hover around Woolf’s writings and in the minds of her characters. She also considers how Woolf, drawing from religious language and themes in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing, created a literature that did, and continues to do, a particular kind of religious work. A thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Woolf and religion, this book highlights Woolf’s relevance to our post-secular age. In addition to fans of Woolf, scholars and general readers interested in religious and literary studies will especially enjoy Paulsell’s well-researched narrative.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271086262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. From her agnostic parents to her evangelical grandparents, an aunt who was a Quaker theologian, and her friendship with T. S. Eliot, Woolf’s personal circle was filled with atheists, agnostics, religious scholars, and Christian converts. In this book, Stephanie Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways. Beginning with the religious forms and ideas that Woolf encountered in her family, friendships, travels, and reading, Paulsell explores the religious contexts of Woolf’s life. She shows that Woolf engaged with religion in many ways, by studying, reading, talking and debating, following controversies, and thinking about the relationship between religion and her own work. Paulsell examines the ideas about God that hover around Woolf’s writings and in the minds of her characters. She also considers how Woolf, drawing from religious language and themes in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing, created a literature that did, and continues to do, a particular kind of religious work. A thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Woolf and religion, this book highlights Woolf’s relevance to our post-secular age. In addition to fans of Woolf, scholars and general readers interested in religious and literary studies will especially enjoy Paulsell’s well-researched narrative.
Cultural Icons and Cultural Leadership
Author: Peter Iver Kaufman
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1786438062
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Contributions to this book probe the contexts–both social and spiritual–from which select iconic figures emerge and discover how to present themselves as innovators and cultural leaders as well as draw material into forms that subsequent generations consider innovative or emblematic. The overall import of the book is to locate producers of culture such as authors, poets, singers, and artists as leaders both in their respective genres and of culture and society more broadly through the influence exerted by their works.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1786438062
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Contributions to this book probe the contexts–both social and spiritual–from which select iconic figures emerge and discover how to present themselves as innovators and cultural leaders as well as draw material into forms that subsequent generations consider innovative or emblematic. The overall import of the book is to locate producers of culture such as authors, poets, singers, and artists as leaders both in their respective genres and of culture and society more broadly through the influence exerted by their works.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030757444X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030757444X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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.
Religion Around Bono
Author: Chad E. Seales
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271084893
Category : Evangelicalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Examines how the popular musician and public figure Bono represents the power of evangelicalism and promotes a religion of neoliberal capitalism.
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271084893
Category : Evangelicalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Examines how the popular musician and public figure Bono represents the power of evangelicalism and promotes a religion of neoliberal capitalism.
Religion Around John Donne
Author: Joshua Eckhardt
Publisher: Religion Around
ISBN: 9780271083377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Explores the ways in which the religious controversies and beliefs that surrounded John Donne were circulated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England.
Publisher: Religion Around
ISBN: 9780271083377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Explores the ways in which the religious controversies and beliefs that surrounded John Donne were circulated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England.
PTL
Author: John H. Wigger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199379718
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
PTL traces the lives of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace after revelations of a sex scandal and massive financial mismanagement.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199379718
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
PTL traces the lives of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace after revelations of a sex scandal and massive financial mismanagement.
Religion Around Mary Shelley
Author: Jennifer L. Airey
Publisher: Religion Around
ISBN: 9780271082073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Explores Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period. Analyzes her creative engagement with contemporary religious controversies and uncovers a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.
Publisher: Religion Around
ISBN: 9780271082073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Explores Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period. Analyzes her creative engagement with contemporary religious controversies and uncovers a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.
Religion Around Emily Dickinson
Author: W. Clark Gilpin
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027106613X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027106613X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.