Book Description
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.
Author : Sue Stauffacher
Publisher : G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Page : 40 pages
File Size : 42,19 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN :
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.
Author : Angela Y. Davis
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 43,82 MB
Release : 2011-10-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 030757444X
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.
Author : Michelle R. Scott
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 16,19 MB
Release : 2008-08-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0252033388
The cultural and industrial reconstruction of the South, explored through a major figure in early black music
Author : David Crittendon
Publisher : Blurb
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 14,59 MB
Release : 2021-10-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781006351785
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.
Author : Edward Albee
Publisher : New Amer Library
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 24,42 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780452260832
Two modern plays explore the spiritual and tragic aspects of the human struggle with death
Author : Alexandria Manera
Publisher : NA-r
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 18,2 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780739868751
Recounts the life of the famous blues singer who flourished during the 1920s.
Author : Will Friedwald
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 540 pages
File Size : 12,23 MB
Release : 1996-08-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780306807121
Author : Jennifer Warner
Publisher : BookCaps Study Guides
Page : 66 pages
File Size : 29,24 MB
Release : 2014-09-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1629173886
Nicknamed the Queen of the Blues, Bessie Smith rose up from poverty in the American South to become one of the most famous and respected recording artists of her generation. Smith was at the forefront of transitioning blues music from a rural novelty to a legitimate art form that critics and audiences took seriously. Behind the scenes of her success, though, Bessie navigated a story family and personal life. She had adult sisters who depended on her for a living and yet disrespected her when she wasn’t around. Likewise, she settled with a husband, Jack Gee, who mistreated her in every possible way. This book looks at the incredible and influential life of Bessie Smith.
Author : Elaine Feinstein
Publisher : Viking Adult
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 11,45 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Author : Melanie E. Bratcher
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 22,16 MB
Release : 2007-11-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1135861447
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.