Bessie Smith

Author : Jackie Kay
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780593314272

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Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay Pdf

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.

Author : Sue Stauffacher
Publisher : G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Page : 40 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : African Americans
ISBN : PSU:000061151659

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Bessie Smith and the Night Riders by Sue Stauffacher Pdf

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 : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2011-10-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780307574442

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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis Pdf

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 : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2008-08-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780252033384

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Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga by Michelle R. Scott Pdf

The cultural and industrial reconstruction of the South, explored through a major figure in early black music

Author : Kathleen Tracy
Publisher : Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.
Page : 48 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-30
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9781612283470

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Bessie Smith by Kathleen Tracy Pdf

Known as the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Singing came naturally to Bessie and as a young girl she helped support her family as a street singer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When she was seventeen Bessie joined a traveling show and worked her way up to the black vaudeville circuit. Her popularity led to a recording contract that eventually established her as the most successful black performing artist of her time, earning as many fans in the North as she had in the South. But for as gifted as she was a singer, Bessie was also troubled and difficult off stage. Alcohol abuse led to violent outbursts that alienated many friends and associates. After a brief career slump Bessie was on tour making a comeback when tragedy struck and she was killed in a car accident. Although her life was cut short, her impact on music lives on to this day.

Author : Edward Albee
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:65893268

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The Sandbox ; And, the Death of Bessie Smith ; With, Fam and Yam by Edward Albee Pdf

Author : Edward Albee
Publisher : Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0822200309

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The American Dream ; The Death of Bessie Smith ; Fam and Yam by Edward Albee Pdf

Author : Melanie E. Bratcher
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2007-11-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781135861445

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Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone by Melanie E. Bratcher Pdf

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.

Author : Jennifer Warner
Publisher : BookCaps Study Guides
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-09-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781629173887

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Queen of the Blues by Jennifer Warner Pdf

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 : David Crittendon
Publisher : Blurb
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1006351787

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Then See If I Care by David Crittendon Pdf

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 : Elaine Feinstein
Publisher : Viking Adult
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015009699391

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Bessie Smith by Elaine Feinstein Pdf

Author : Benjamin Ivry
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Homosexuality and literature
ISBN : 1899791558

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Arthur Rimbaud by Benjamin Ivry Pdf

Author : Will Friedwald
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 540 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1996-08-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 0306807122

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Jazz Singing by Will Friedwald Pdf

Author : Chris Albertson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2004-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300107562

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Bessie by Chris Albertson Pdf

Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties. This book--a revised and expanded edition of the classic biography of this extraordinary artist--debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937. Chris Albertson writes with insight and candor about the singer's personal life and her career, supplementing his historical research with dozens of interviews with her relatives, friends, and associates, in particular Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with Bessie for over a decade. For this new edition he includes more details of Bessie's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication in 1971.

Author : Kimberly Mack
Publisher : African American Intellectual
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 162534550X

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Fictional Blues by Kimberly Mack Pdf

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.