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"Women singers"
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Black Resonance
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. InBlack 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 Resonancereveals 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 ofNative Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison'sInvisible 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 Resonanceoffers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.
eBook
Reckless daughter : a portrait of Joni Mitchell
A biography of Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
Book
Billie Holiday : the musician and the myth
\"Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, ... jazz writer John Szwed considers how [Holiday's] life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Blues on Stage
Blues on Stage presents a new history of the development
of the \"Classic Blues\" of the 1920s, offering a comprehensive
review of various Black singers who recorded and were influential
in this era, including Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Butterbeans and
Susie, and Ma Rainey. The business of music recording and
publishing, including songwriting and touring theater circuits, is
explored as part of the narrative of how and when these artists
became nationally popular. The most highly regarded singers of this
period were not folk or rural artists, but rather highly
experienced stage professionals whose careers often extended two
decades or more prior to their first recordings. These artists,
some of the most famous acts on the Black vaudeville and tent show
circuits, were preceded in the recording studio by many cabaret and
nightclub singers with a different entertainment perspective and
were followed by artists who came from a more rural, less
professional background. For anyone interested in the roots of jazz
and blues, Blues on Stage offers a new and comprehensive
introduction to the development of this American musical style.
eBook
Adele
Adele touches the hearts of millions of people who love her for her music and share the real and honest emotion she brings to each and every song. In a cynical age, she is a phenomenon. In Adele, bestselling biographer Sean Smith talks to those close to her as he follows her astonishing journey to fame that began on the gritty streets of Tottenham. Through compelling new research and interviews, he reveals that there is far more to Adele than the superstar we all think we know. He uncovers the story of her complex family relationships; the ill-starred love affair between her mother and father; her devastation at the untimely death of her grandfather; and her seemingly unpromising future in a gang-ravaged area of South London. She found salvation at the BRIT School before a series of unhappy love affairs provided the inspiration for her record-breaking albums. He describes how she conquered America and how it all could have been ended by a dramatic vocal injury. Instead, she has made an amazing comeback and found personal happiness in a new relationship and becoming a mum. Intimate and revealing, Adele is the uplifting story of the woman with the most glorious voice in the world.
Book
Woman Walk the Line
Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song.From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d.lang to Taylor Swift--these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives.
eBook
Supreme glamour
With the assistance of her close personal friend Mark Bego, founding Supremes member Mary Wilson tells the complete story of the group both on- and off-stage, from their beginnings as The Primettes in June 1959 to their 1964 breakthrough Motown hit--Where Did Our Love Go--and from the departure of Diana Ross to the group's comeback in the mid-1970s. Bego's narrative text is packed with personal ancedotes and reflections from Mary herself, and accompanied by rare archive photography and ephemera, much of which is taken from Mary's personal collection.
Book
Rebel girls. Episode 19, Nina Simone
This Rebel Girl was an icon of American music, a musician who used her talent to inspire others, writing songs of freedom and protest. We discover who Nina Simone was. Based on the best-selling books 'Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls'.
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