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Book Cover
E-book
Author Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne), 1944-

Title Blues legacies and Black feminism : Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Published New York : Random House US, 2011

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Description 1 online resource (397 pages)
Summary "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 consciousness-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."--Google Books viewed Mar. 26, 2021
Notes Print version record
Subject Rainey, Ma, 1886-1939.
Smith, Bessie, 1894-1937.
Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959.
SUBJECT Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959 fast
Rainey, Ma, 1886-1939 fast
Smith, Bessie, 1894-1937 fast
Subject Blues (Music) -- History and criticism
Blues (Music) -- Texts
Feminism and music -- United States
Women blues musicians -- United States
African American women singers -- United States
African American women singers
Blues (Music)
Feminism and music
Women blues musicians
United States
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Texts
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780679771265
0679771263