Billie Holiday The Last Interview

Download or read book Billie Holiday: The Last Interview written by Billie Holiday and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever collection of interviews with the tortured but groundbreaking singer Billie Holiday, part of Melville House’s beloved Last Interview series Legendary singer Billie Holiday comes alive in this first-ever collection of interviews from throughout her career. Included is her last interview, given from her deathbed in a New York City hospital, where police were standing by ready to arrest her for a parole violation should she recover. Also included: The transcript of an interrogation by a US Customs official questioning about whether she'd violated her parole by using drugs on a foreign tour. But the book is more than a look at just the famously tragic side of her life. In other conversations, drawn from music magazines, late-night radio programs, and newspapers across the US and Canada, she discusses her childhood, musicians who influenced her, her friendship -- and falling out -- with the influential sax player Lester Young, why she chose the gardenia as her symbol, why she quit Count Basie's band, her substance abuse problems, writing songs and whether she wrote her own memoir, and more. In frank and open conversations, Billie Holiday proves herself far more articulate, aware, intelligent, and even heroic than the way she's often portrayed. This collection is an essential volume for all who have been moved by her music.

Download or read book Religion Around Billie Holiday written by Tracy Fessenden and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soulful jazz singer Billie Holiday is remembered today for her unique sound, troubled personal history, and a catalogue that includes such resonant songs as “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” Holiday and her music were also strongly shaped by religion, often in surprising ways. Religion Around Billie Holiday examines the spiritual and religious forces that left their mark on the performer during her short but influential life. Mixing elements of biography with the history of race and American music, Tracy Fessenden explores the multiple religious influences on Holiday’s life and sound, including her time spent as a child in a Baltimore convent, the echoes of black Southern churches in the blues she encountered in brothels, the secular riffs on ancestral faith in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Jewish songwriting culture of Tin Pan Alley. Fessenden looks at the vernacular devotions scholars call lived religion—the Catholicism of the streets, the Jewishness of the stage, the Pentecostalism of the roadhouse or the concert arena—alongside more formal religious articulations in institutions, doctrine, and ritual performance. Insightful and compelling, Fessenden’s study brings unexpected materials and archival voices to bear on the shaping of Billie Holiday’s exquisite craft and indelible persona. Religion Around Billie Holiday illuminates the power and durability of religion in the making of an American musical icon.

Download or read book Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview written by MELVILLE HOUSE and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller The brilliant intellect and candor of Anthony Bourdain is on full display in this collection of interviews from throughout his remarkable career, with an introduction from The New Yorker's Helen Rosner. Anthony Bourdain always downplayed his skills as a chef (many disagreed). But despite his modesty, one thing even he agreed with was that he was a born raconteur—as he makes clear in this collection of sparkling conversations. His wit, passion, and deep intelligence shine through all manner of discussion here, from heart-to-hearts with bloggers, to on-stage talks before massive crowds, to intense interviews with major television programs. Without fail, Bourdain is always blisteringly honest—such as when he talks about his battles with addiction, or when detailing his thoughts on restaurant critics. He regularly dispenses arresting insight about how what’s on your plate reveals much of history and politics. And perhaps best of all, the heartfelt empathy he developed travelling the world for his TV shows is always in the fore, as these talks make the “Hemingway of gastronomy,” as chef Marco Pierre White called him, live again.

Download or read book If You Can't be Free, be a Mystery written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The threads of Billie Holiday's mystique are unraveled in this study of a woman who needed to create art at any cost. Griffin liberates Holiday from stereotypes of black women and pries her away from the male tradition of jazz criticism while presenting Holiday's independent spirit. of photos.

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.

Download or read book With Billie written by Julia Blackburn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it. Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure. In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people–piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.

Download or read book Chasing the Scream written by Johann Hari and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix. One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his family. Confused, not knowing what to do, he set out and traveled over 30,000 miles over three years to discover what really causes addiction--and what really solves it. He uncovered a range of remarkable human stories--of how the war on drugs began with Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, being stalked and killed by a racist policeman; of the scientist who discovered the surprising key to addiction; and of the countries that ended their own war on drugs--with extraordinary results. Chasing the Scream is the story of a life-changing journey that transformed the addiction debate internationally--and showed the world that the opposite of addiction is connection.