Download or read book Sissieretta Jones written by Maureen D. Lee and published by . This book was released on 2013-02-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sissieretta Jones: The Greatest Singer of Her Race,1868-1933 provides a comprehensive, moving portrait of Jones and a vivid overview of the exciting world in which she performed.
Download or read book Sing Her Name written by Rosalyn Story and published by Agate Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sing Her Name follows two musically gifted women whose lives overlap across the boundaries of time. This third novel by Rosalyn Story, whose critically acclaimed books treat the central role of Black people in American music, is her best and most rewarding yet. Beautiful and brilliantly talented Celia DeMille is a nineteenth-century concert artist who has garnered fame, sung all over the world, and amassed a fortune. But prejudice bars her from achieving her place in history as one of the world’s greatest singers, and she dies in poverty and obscurity. In 21st-century New Orleans, Eden Malveaux, a thirty-something waitress with a beautiful but untutored voice, is the sole guardian of her 17-year-old brother. Motherless for most of their lives, she has struggled for years to make ends meet as she fights to keep the promise she made to their dying father: to protect her wayward brother and raise him as if he were her own child. After a hurricane displaces them to New York City, Eden seeks safe refuge—not only from the ensuing flood, but also to hide her brother from the law, while she works to divert him from a path of crime, prison, or worse. Months into their New York stay, Eden’s estranged Great Aunt Julia summons her back to New Orleans for a brief visit, and the older woman gives Eden something that alters the course of her life: a box she found in the midst of flooded rubble containing a hundred-year-old scrapbook and a mysterious and valuable gold pendant necklace belonging to one of the greatest singers in history—Celia DeMille. Eden returns to New York, but as she explores the artifacts of Celia DeMille’s extraordinary life, curiosity grows into obsession, then into an inspiration that propels Eden into a world she never dreamed. With the help of new friends, and buoyed by the diva’s story, Eden’s new life in New York takes a dramatic turn toward unimagined success. But just as she is poised to make her mark on the world stage, her brother’s dangerous choices catch up with them, and Eden must confront buried secrets from her complicated childhood. To face the promise of her future, Eden must first reconcile years of regrets and leave behind the guilt of the past—and perhaps even the brother she loves.
Download or read book Olio O written by Tyehimba Jess and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Jess presents the sweat and story behind America's blues, worksongs and church hymns.
Download or read book Sissieretta Jones written by Maureen D. Lee and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, whose nickname the "Black Patti" likened her to the well-known Spanish-born opera star Adelina Patti, was a distinguished African American soprano during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Performing in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden, Jones also sang before four U.S. presidents. In this compelling book-length biography of Jones, Maureen Donnelly Lee chronicles the successes and challenges of this musical pioneer. Lee details how Jones was able to overcome substantial obstacles of racial bias to build a twenty-eight-year career performing in hundreds of opera houses and theaters throughout North America and Europe. Serving as a role model for other African American women who came after her, Jones became a successful performer despite the many challenges she faced. She confronted head on the social difficulties African American performers endured during the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Throughout her career Jones was a concert singer performing ballads and operatic pieces, and she eventually went on to star in her own musical comedy company, the Black Patti Troubadours. Critics praised Jones as America's leading African American prima donna, with some even dubbing her voice one in a million. Lee's research, utilizing many Black newspapers, such as the New York Age and the Indianapolis Freeman, concert reviews, and court documents brings overdue recognition to an important historical songstress. Sissieretta Jones: "The Greatest Singer of Her Race," 1868-1933 provides a comprehensive, moving portrait of Jones and a vivid overview of the exciting world in which she performed.
Download or read book Black Celebrity written by Emily Ruth Rutter and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.
Download or read book Women of Distinction written by Lawson Andrew Scruggs and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written with a conscious sense of racial pride, a black physician presents biographical sketches of accomplished black women.
Download or read book Pathfinders written by Tonya Bolden and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the lives of 16 extraordinary Black Americans in this engaging collection from Coretta Scott King Honor Award winner Tonya Bolden Untold numbers of Black men and women in America have achieved great things against the odds. In this insightful book, award-winning author Tonya Bolden commemorates the lives of sixteen Black individuals who dared to dream, take risks, and chart courses to success. They were Pathfinders. In these pages you will meet Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who was instrumental in putting U.S. astronauts on the moon; Venture Smith, an African man who was enslaved in America but later bought his own freedom; Richard Potter, a magician whose methods paved the way for entertainers like Harry Houdini; Sissieretta Jones, an opera singer who captivated audiences all over the world with her enchanting voice; James Forten, a powder boy then prisoner of war during the Revolution who grew up to be one of Philadelphia’s leading abolitionists and wealthiest citizens; James McCune Smith, the first Black university-trained physician in the United States; Mary Bowser, a spy during the Civil War; Allen Allensworth, town founder; Clara Brown, one of the first Black women to settle in what would become Colorado; Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to run a bank; Charlie Wiggins, a race car driver; Eugene Bullard, a combat pilot in World War I; Oscar Micheaux, filmmaker; Jackie Ormes, cartoonist; Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, an economist and attorney who fought for civil rights; and Paul R. Williams, architect of luxury homes and many iconic buildings in Los Angeles.
Download or read book All Joking Aside written by Rebecca Krefting and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.
Download or read book Singing Like Germans written by Kira Thurman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.
Download or read book Negro Musicians and their Music written by Maud Cuney-Hare and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In offering this study of Negro music, I do so with the admission that there is no consistent development as found in national schools of music. The Negro, a musical force, through his own distinct racial characteristics has made an artistic contribution which is racial but not yet national. Rather has the influence of musical stylistic traits termed Negro, spread over many nations wherever the colonies of the New World have become homes of Negro people. These expressions in melody and rhythm have been a compelling force in American music Ð tragic and joyful in emotion, pathetic and ludicrous in melody, primitive and barbaric in rhythm. The welding of these expressions has brought about a harmonic effect which is now influencing thoughtful musicians throughout the world. At present there is evidenced a new movement far from academic, which plays an important technical part in the music of this and other lands. The question as to whether there exists a pure Negro art in America is warmly debated. Many Negroes as well as Anglo-Americans admit that the so-called American Negro is no longer an African Negro. Apart from the fusion of blood he has for centuries been moved by the same stimuli which have affected all citizens of the United States. They argue rightly that he is a product of a vital American civilization with all its daring, its progress, its ruthlessness, and unlovely speed. As an integral part of the nation, the Negro is influenced by like social environment and governed by the same political institutions; thus page vi we may expect the ultimate result of his musical endeavors to be an art-music which embodies national characteristics exercised upon by his soul's expression. In the field of composition, the early sporadic efforts by people of African descent, while not without historic importance, have been succeeded by contributions from a rising group of talented composers of color who are beginning to find a listening public. The tendency of this music is toward the development of an American symphonic, operatic and ballet school led for the moment by a few lone Negro musicians of vision and high ideals. The story of those working toward this end is herein treated. Facts for this volume have been obtained from educated African scholars with whom the author sought acquaintanceship and from printed sources found in the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library and the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The author has also had access to rare collections and private libraries which include her own. Folk material has been gathered in personal travel.
Download or read book Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading written by and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James T. Haley's purpose in conceiving this book was to instigate a "moral revolution" within the black community. By recounting the stories of numerous, successful blacks, Haley hoped to inspire African Americans to adopt the "the qualities of thrift, order, virtue, and manliness."
Download or read book And So I Sing written by Rosalyn M. Story and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 1990-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black women bring a host of influences and ideologies with them to opera -- as well as their spirituality, their strengths and passions. The exclusion of blacks from opera for so many generations impoverished both the artists and the artistic world from which they were barred. Imagine if Leontyne Price had been born 50 years earlier, during a time when she would not have been allowed on an American opera stage. This book not only supplies portraits of the greatest artists for future generations of students of black art and culture, but also rescues from history's shadows the lost legacies of geniuses born too soon. Photos.
Download or read book Leadbelly written by Tyehimba Jess and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Poetry Series winner makes compelling poetry from the tumultuous life of blues singer Leadbelly.
Download or read book Cultivating Music in America written by Ralph P. Locke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultivating Music in America corrects long-standing prejudices, omissions, and misunderstandings about the role of women in setting up the structures of America's musical life, and, even more far-reaching, it sheds light on the character of American musical life itself. To read this book is to be brought to a fresh understanding of what is at stake when we discuss notions such as 'elitism, ' 'democratic taste, ' and the political and economic implications of art."--Richard Crawford, author of The American Musical Landscape "We all know we are indebted to royal patronage for the music of Mozart. But who launched American talent? The answer is women, this book teaches us. Music lovers will be grateful for these ten essays, sound in scholarship, that make a strong case for the women philanthropists who ought to join Carnegie and Rockefeller as household words as sponsors of music."--Karen J. Blair, author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America
Download or read book African American Concert Singers Before 1950 written by Darryl Glenn Nettles and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2003-03-06 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian Roberts, Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson were among the most visible early African American concert singers, but they were not the only ones. Many others were involved in the arts as concert singers and, given the times in which they lived, achieved tremendous results in the face of great adversity and helped pave the way for the post-1950 African American vocal artist. Drawn from articles, reviews, programs, biographical sources, and interviews, this work is a survey of the unknown early African American concert singers. Much of the information from periodicals was taken from The New York Amsterdam News, The Chicago Defender, and The New York Age. The book covers the African Americans who came before Roberts, Hayes, and Robeson, and details the opportunities available in Europe for black concert singers.
Download or read book A Woman s Place Is at the Top written by Hannah Kimberley and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography of Annie Smith Peck, an early feminist and accomplished adventurer who changed the rules for women.
Download or read book Great African American Women written by Darryl Lyman and published by Jonathan David Pub. This book was released on 2005 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Collection of Biographies of African-American Women and their Accomplishments in all Areas of Life
