Billie Holiday
eBook - PDF

Billie Holiday

A Biography

  1. 144 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Billie Holiday

A Biography

About this book

Billie Holiday (1915-1959), the legendary jazz singer whose vocal stylings were deeply affecting, continues to enthrall. This biography conveys her hard-luck youth, career triumphs, and then decline and early death. At age 14, despite growing up with an absentee musician father, little schooling, a rape at 10, and jail time for prostitution, this extraordinary girl moved to New York City to find work as a dancer or singer. She soon became the toast of Harlem and went on to tour and record with the biggest names in jazz. Holiday's career took off in the 1930s, during the Depression, and the biography evokes the era and atmosphere of the jazz club scene. The state of race relations in the country is discussed as Holiday tours with white bandleaders such as Artie Shaw and even as she sings about lynching in the controversial Strange Fruit. The narrative further chronicles Holiday's relationships, descent into drug addiction, the subsequent diminishment of her talent, and tragic early death. Readers today will then want to seek out Holiday's recordings to more fully appreciate her interpretations of the songs of that classic era.

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Yes, you can access Billie Holiday by Meg Greene in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas & Música jazz. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. CONTENTS
  2. Series Foreword
  3. Introduction
  4. Timeline: Events in the Life of Billie Holiday
  5. Chapter 1. Eleanora
  6. Chapter 2. Billie
  7. Chapter 3. Ladies and Gentlemen … Billie Holiday
  8. Chapter 4. A Rising Star
  9. Chapter 5. On the Road
  10. Chapter 6. “Strange Fruit”
  11. Chapter 7. Life as Billie Holiday
  12. Chapter 8. A Slow Descent into Hell
  13. Chapter 9. Jazz’s Falling Star
  14. Chapter 10. The Spotlight Dims
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. Photo essay follows page 54