The History of the Blues by Uschan Michael V.;

Author:Uschan, Michael V.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The History of The Blues
ISBN: 5538675
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Published: 2018-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Billie Holiday’s harsh childhood helped her fill her performance with real emotion. “God Bless the Child,” which she co-wrote, is one of her most famous songs.

On April 7, 1915, Holiday was born Eleanora Harris in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a single mother. Her childhood was horrible: she lived in poverty, was raped at age eleven, and three years later she and her alcoholic mother worked as prostitutes in New York. She sang for tips in the brothel, but in 1929, when she was only fourteen, she began singing professionally as Billie Holiday. She took her stage name from actress Billie Dove and Clarence Holiday, a musician she believed was her father.

In just a few years Holiday became a star, singing with bands led by African Americans such as William “Count” Basie. In the late 1930s, Holiday became the first black singer with a white band, which was led by Artie Shaw. During tours in the South, Holiday was subjected to racism. She was not allowed to eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels where white band members stayed, and whites in the audience often taunted her with racial epithets.

Throughout her career, Holiday had many memorable songs including “God Bless the Child,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Easy Living,” and “Strange Fruit,” which protested the lynching of blacks in southern states. Holiday was a perfectionist who hated listening to her records because she always found fault with herself. She told one interviewer, “It’s always something that you should have done. Or you should have waited here, or you should have phrased [it differently]—well, you know how it is.”89 And in performances Holiday never sang songs the same way twice because she was always trying to make them better. Her artistry inspired great black singers from many musical genres, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin.

Although blues songs were only part of Holiday’s repertoire, Angela Y. Davis writes that Holiday’s creativity was significant in transforming the blues:

[Holiday’s] music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained.90

Holiday lived a tormented life even after becoming successful. She suffered drug and alcohol problems and relationships with men who abused her and treated her badly. Holiday died on July 17, 1959, of heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver caused by heavy drinking. Another blues singer who introduced a very different style of music is Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her life was the opposite of the harsh one Holiday led.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was an evangelist who traveled the South. By age four Rosetta was performing in her mother’s show as “the singing and guitar playing miracle.”91 Tharpe is best known for gospel singing, but she performed that genre of black music like no one ever had before to create a style known as gospel blues.

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