Billie Holiday Research Paper

1468 Words3 Pages

Phillip Moore
Carrie Granitz
Acc. English
3/9/2015
Billie Holiday
Many people lay claim to affecting modern music as we know it today. One such person is the popular jazz singer Billie Holiday who was know for her upbeat and happy tunes and her powerful emotional voice that captured the ears and attention of anyone listening. Billie Holiday was an African-American jazz with a fiery personality and emotional voice that helped shaped not only music itself, but also brought attention to the racism and injustices toward the African-American people even while living a fragile life.
No one can deny that Billie Holiday had (even if it was a minor part) an influence on music and many generations of singers after her, not only in jazz but popular music. …show more content…

Phrasing being the grouping of the notes of a musical line into distinct phrases and tempo being the speed at which a musical piece is played or sung. But it was more than her technique, she had a way of making you feel the music according to Humphrey Noyes, a graduate student at Columbia after World War II. "And I felt something akin to the twisting of my heart in real agony as she o inimitably ended with her drawn-out soul cry of 'a strange and bitter crop.' these for me, were the most memorable words I ever heard in all my years of listening to jazz and blues. Utterly haunting." (Margolick). Unlike other singers, who focused their attention on carrying the tune or keeping things swinging, Holiday emphasized the emotions beneath the melody and rhythm. Hearing her, it's easy to understand how her man could be "Easy to Love," or why "(There Is) No Greater Love" than the one she had (J. D. Considine). Even …show more content…

This song was a direct slap in the face for many audiences and according to jazz writer Leonard Feather called it "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism". However the song did not always receive critical acclaim even among the man who discovered her and produced her records, John Hammond, didn’t much like the song, and Columbia-apparently fearful of antagonizing Southern costumers-wanted no part of it (Margolick). However even though it was a moving song and people praised it for its truth it was not popular because it was a somber song, Warren Morse notes that "They had never heard anything remotely like this, they'd never heard anyone speak about lynching. I remember one girl just broke down sobbing... it made an impact on people. for the first time in their lives it made them think about the lynching victims as actual people." (Margolick). Even with this though the song and the singer where widely publicized, The New Masses called the a song "a superb outcry against lynching, remarkable because the lyrics are not to pretentious for the simple blues language." (Margolick). Even in Time magazine under an article titled "Strange Record," Time described it as "a prime piece of musical propaganda for NAACP" it even goes on to describe Holiday as "a roly poly young colored women with a hump in her voice, she does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.". Many singers over the

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