Billie Holiday

Author : Carole Boston Weatherford
Publisher : Boyds Mills Press
ISBN 13 : 1629791733
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Billie Holiday written by Carole Boston Weatherford and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award The stunning voice and hard life of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is revealed through evocative, accessible poetry. In 1915, Sadie Fagan gave birth to a daughter she named Eleanora. The world, however, would know her as Billie Holiday, possibly the greatest jazz singer of all time. Eleanora's journey to become a legend took her through pain, poverty, and run-ins with the law. By the time she was fifteen, she knew she possessed something that could possibly change her life--a voice. Eleanora could sing. Her remarkable voice led her to a place in the spotlight with some of the era's hottest big bands. Through a sequence of raw and poignant poems, New York Times best-selling and award-winning poet Carole Boston Weatherford chronicles the singer's young life, her fight for survival, and the dream she pursued with passion.

Author : John Szwed
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101614706
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday written by John Szwed and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Kirkus Best Books of 2015 selection for Biography • Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talent When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

Author : Billie Holiday
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0767923863
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lady Sings the Blues written by Billie Holiday and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

Author : Jerry Dantzic
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0500544654
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill written by Jerry Dantzic and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid, intimate, and largely unseen photographic chronicle of one week in the life of jazz icon Billie Holiday In 1957, New York photojournalist Jerry Dantzic spent time with the iconic singer Billie Holiday during a week-long run of performances at the Newark, New Jersey, nightclub Sugar Hill. The resulting images offer a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of Billie with her family, friends, and her pet chihuahua, Pepi; playing with her godchild (son of her autobiography’s coauthor, William Dufty); washing dishes at the Duftys’ home; walking the streets of Newark; in her hotel room; waiting backstage or having a drink in front of the stage; and performing. The years and the struggles seem to vanish when she sings; her face lights up. Later that same year, Dantzic photographed her in color at the second New York Jazz Festival at Randall’s Island. Only a handful of the photographs in the book have ever been published. In her text, Zadie Smith evokes Lady Day herself and shows us what she sees as she inhabits these images and reveals what she is thinking.

Author : Donald Clarke
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0786730870
Total Pages : 510 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Donald Clarke and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. "Now, finally, we have a definitive biography," said Booklist of Donald Clarke's Billie Holiday, "by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength." Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s—interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction and, in the words of the Seattle Times, "finally sets us straight. . .evoking her world in all its anguish, triumph, force and irony." Newsday called this "a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu." The New York Times raved that it "may be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday," and Helen Oakley Dance in JazzTimes said, "We should probably have to wait a long time for another life of Billie Holiday to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement."

Author : John Szwed
Publisher : Penguin Books
ISBN 13 : 0143107968
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday written by John Szwed and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Author : Bud Kliment
Publisher : Holloway House Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780870675614
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Bud Kliment and published by Holloway House Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of one of the most widely admired jazz singers of all time.

Author : John White
Publisher : Omnibus Press
ISBN 13 : 0857128248
Total Pages : 142 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday: Her Life and Times written by John White and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and times of Billie Holiday.

Author : Carole Boston Weatherford
Publisher : Boyds Mills Press
ISBN 13 : 9781590785072
Total Pages : 126 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Billie Holiday written by Carole Boston Weatherford and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award The stunning voice and hard life of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is revealed through evocative, accessible poetry. In 1915, Sadie Fagan gave birth to a daughter she named Eleanora. The world, however, would know her as Billie Holiday, possibly the greatest jazz singer of all time. Eleanora's journey to become a legend took her through pain, poverty, and run-ins with the law. By the time she was fifteen, she knew she possessed something that could possibly change her life--a voice. Eleanora could sing. Her remarkable voice led her to a place in the spotlight with some of the era's hottest big bands. Through a sequence of raw and poignant poems, New York Times best-selling and award-winning poet Carole Boston Weatherford chronicles the singer's young life, her fight for survival, and the dream she pursued with passion.

Author : Earle Rice
Publisher : Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1612283438
Total Pages : 52 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Earle Rice and published by Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleanora Fagan rocketed to fame like a shooting star during the two decades spanning 1937 and 1957. She soared to stardom on the wings of a unique voice and songs sung sad. As Billie Holiday, she overcame personal crises and racial bigotry to become what many consider to be America’s premier jazz vocalist of the twentieth century. Then, like a flamed–out meteor, she crashed and burned in the throes of alcohol and drug addiction. Lady Day, as Billie was known to her friends and admirers, joined a handful of jazz musicians who can truly be called legendary. Her voice was one of a kind; her lyrical interpretations, intimate—and often sensually expressive or disturbingly bitter. She profoundly influenced her fellow musicians, not only in jazz, but in every other musical genre. Billie’s life and legacy are emblematic of both triumph and tragedy: She overcame more than her share of adversities, but she could not conquer her urge to self-destruct.