Download or read book Bessie Smith and the Night Riders written by Sue Stauffacher and published by G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga written by Michelle R. Scott and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural and industrial reconstruction of the South, explored through a major figure in early black music
Download or read book Then See If I Care written by David Crittendon and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Sandbox And The Death of Bessie Smith With Fam and Yam written by Edward Albee and published by New Amer Library. This book was released on 1988 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two modern plays explore the spiritual and tragic aspects of the human struggle with death
Download or read book Bessie Smith written by Elaine Feinstein and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 1985 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jazz Singing written by Will Friedwald and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1996-08-22 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Words and Songs of Bessie Smith Billie Holiday and Nina Simone written by Melanie E. Bratcher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic. Its purpose is three-fold: to show commonalities between Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone's lives and original compositions; to codify, examine and evaluate their selected song performances in accordance with the Pan African aesthetic "Nzuri theory/model;" and to illuminate the vast sources of transformational values that aesthetic analysis of African American song performance can foster. Following concordant procedures and principles of Afrocentricity, the study focuses on Smith, Holiday and Simone's performances as part of a whole African artistic and cultural value system. The goal of the Afrocentric methodological structure is to locate relevant African dynamics in songs and to promote knowledge for cultural transformation and continuity. Its use in this study provides meta-criteria for analyzing African American music, which the author has used to uniquely argue connections between African cultural memory and African-derived cultural expression.
Download or read book Arthur Rimbaud written by Benjamin Ivry and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fictional Blues written by Kimberly Mack and published by African American Intellectual. This book was released on 2020 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wild Women of Song written by Rebeca Mauleón and published by . This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black Resonance written by Emily J. Lordi and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.
Download or read book The Bessie Smith Companion written by Edward Brooks and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1982 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Really the Blues written by Mezz Mezzrow and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.
Download or read book Bessie Smith written by Jackie Kay and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Treat It Gentle written by Sidney Bechet and published by . This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most valuable and moving of all jazz biographies. -Nat Hentoff
