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Zusatztext “This exquisite look at Lady Day is priceless.” – Essence “DAZZLING . . . THIS BOOK CONTAINS WRITING AS HAUNTING AND EVOCATIVE AS BILLIE HOLIDAY’S VOICE.” –ANN DOUGLAS Author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s “[AN] AMBITIOUS! FREE-RANGING MEDITATION ON THE SINGER’S LEGACY . . . Griffin’s prose is both sentimental and intellectual. . . . Her observations are sound and illuminating.” – The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor A Billie Holiday fan for as long as she can remember, Farah Jasmine Griffin is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. She is the author of “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative . Klappentext More than four decades after her death, Billie Holiday remains one of the most gifted artists of our time-and also one of the most elusive. Because of who she was and how she chose to live her life, Lady Day has been the subject of both intense adoration and wildly distorted legends. Now at last, Farah Jasmine Griffin, a writer of intellectual authority and superb literary gifts, liberates Billie Holiday from the mythology that has obscured both her life and her art. An intimate meditation on Holiday's place in American culture and history, If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery reveals Lady Day in all her complexity, humor and pain-a true jazz virtuoso whose passion and originality made every song she sang hers forever. Celebrated by poets, revered by recording artists from Frank Sinatra to Macy Gray, Billie Holiday is more popular and influential today than ever before. Now, thanks to this marvelous book, Holiday's many fans can finally understand the singer and the woman they love. Leseprobe Lady of the Day My students love Mary J. Blige. I purchase her CDs, dance to the songs from the first one. I like her sass, appreciate her beauty, am charmed by her ghetto girl shyness, but I do not share their adoration of her. Two former students, Nikki and Malik, are especially passionate about her. Nikki cherishes what she sees as the honesty of her lyrics. "She's our Billie Holiday," Malik states emphatically. "Oh, please!" I think but do not say. Another, Salamishah, explains: "She captures all those moments in your life, like when you break up with someone. You feel her pain. You think 'Thank God; my pain isn't as bad as hers.' Each album is closer to what she wants to be, closer to what you want for her, closer to where you want to be too." I love my students partly because they never stop believing in my capacity for growth. I have come to think when they speak about Mary J. Blige as their Billie Holiday, even more than the music, they mean the life; more than the voice, they refer to Holiday's life as they know it. And in this sense she may very well be their Billie Holiday. "She is one of ours, we want her to be happy, she sings for us, through us, to us." Does this comparison come out of any real sense of Holiday's life and the enormity of her talent or is it one that is constantly made for them in most media coverage of Blige's struggles? Hip-hop journalist dream hampton has written of both Mary J. Blige and another contemporary black female vocalist, Erykah Badu, as artists with the potential to be modern-day Billie Holidays. Of Badu she writes, "Once you feel the vibration from the timbre of Erykah Badu's voice, you will understand immediately [the comparison] is no marketing ploy. In fact, a comparison to Billie could bear weight that no new singer would want to inherit. The expectations soar. The tragic life that was Lady Day's haunts." Here, Billie Holiday is a revered ancestor; however, the weight of being named her heir is doubly heavy: first because of the expectations of artistic achievement, and second because of the fear of the dire circumstances of her life and death. In ...
