Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), professionally known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz artist and artist musician with a vocation traversing almost thirty years. Nicknamed "Woman Day" by her companion and music accomplice Lester Young, Holiday affected jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, firmly propelled by jazz instrumentalists, spearheaded another method for controlling stating and rhythm. She was known for her vocal conveyance and improvisational aptitudes, which compensated for her restricted range and absence of formal music instruction. There were other jazz vocalists with equivalent ability, however Holiday had a voice that caught the consideration of her crowd. After a turbulent adolescence, Holiday started singing in dance club in Harlem, where she was heard by the maker John Hammond, who praised her voice. She marked a recording contract with Brunswick Records in 1935. Coordinated efforts with Teddy Wilson yielded the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which turned into a jazz standard. All through the 1940s, Holiday had standard accomplishment on names, for example, Columbia Records and Decca Records. By the late 1940s, in any case, she was plagued with legitimate inconveniences and medication manhandle. After a short jail sentence, she played out a sold-out show at …show more content…
Carnegie Hall, however her notoriety disintegrated as a result of her medication and liquor issues. Despite the fact that she was an effective show entertainer all through the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, Holiday's awful wellbeing, combined with a string of injurious connections and progressing medication and liquor manhandle, brought on her voice to wilt. Her last recordings were met with blended response to her harmed voice however were mellow business victories. Her last collection, Lady in Satin, was discharged in 1958. Occasion kicked the bucket of cirrhosis of the liver in 1959. An after death collection, Last Recording, was discharged after her passing. Quite a bit of Holiday's material has been rereleased since her demise.
She is viewed as an amazing entertainer with a continuous impact on American music. She is the beneficiary of four Grammy grants, every one of them after death grants for Best Historical Album. Occasion herself was accepted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1973. Woman Sings the Blues, a film about her life, featuring Diana Ross, was discharged in 1972. She is the essential character in the play and later film Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill; the part was started by Reenie Upchurch in 1986, and played by Audra McDonald on Broadway (she got a Tony Award for her execution) and in the
film Billie Holiday kicked the bucket in Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been captured for unlawful ownership of opiates somewhat more than a month prior, as she lay mortally sick; in the room from which a police monitor had been expelled – by court arrange – just a couple of hours before her passing, which, similar to her life, was messy and miserable. She had been strikingly excellent, yet she was squandered physically to a little, twisted exaggeration of herself. The worms of each sort of abundance – medications were just a single – had eaten her. The probability exists that among the last contemplations of this critical, wistful, foul, liberal and significantly gifted lady of 44 was the conviction that she was to be charged the next morning. She would have been, in the long run, albeit potentially not that rapidly. Regardless, she expelled herself at long last from the purview of any court here underneath
Ella was born in Newport News, Virginia on April 25, 1917. When alled “The First Lady of Song” by some fans. She was known for having beautiful tone, extended range, and great intonation, and famous for her improvisational scat singing. Ella sang during the her most famous song was “A-tiscket A-tasket”. Fitzgerald sang in the period of swing, ballads, and bebop; she made some great albums with other great jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. She influenced countless American popular singers of the post-swing period and also international performers such as the singer Miriam Makeba. She didn’t really write any of her own songs. Instead she sang songs by other people in a new and great way. The main exception
Bessie Smith was a rough, crude, violent woman. She was also the greatest of the classic Blues singers of the 1920s. Bessie started out as a street musician in Chattanooga. In 1912 Bessie joined a traveling show as a dancer and singer. The show featured Pa and Ma Rainey, and Smith developed a friendship with Ma. Ma Rainey was Bessie's mentor and she stayed with her show until 1915. Bessie then joined the T.O.B.A. vaudeville circuit and gradually built up her own following in the south and along the eastern seaboard. By the early 1920s she was one of the most popular Blues singers in vaudeville. In 1923 she made her recording debut on Columbia, accompanied by pianist Clarence Williams. They recorded "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues." The record sold more than 750,000 copies that same year, rivaling the success of Blues singer Mamie Smith (no relation). Throughout the 1920s Smith recorded with many of the great Jazz musicians of that era, including Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman and Louis Armstrong. Her rendition of "St. Louis Blues" with Armstrong is considered by most critics to be one of finest recordings of the 1920s. Bessie Smith was one of the biggest African-American stars of the 1920s and was popular with both Whites and African-Americans, but by 1931 the Classic Blues style of Bessie Smith was out of style and the Depression, radio, and sound movies had all damaged the record companies' ability to sell records so Columbia dropped Smith from its roster. In 1933 she recorded for the last time under the direction of John Hammond for Okeh. The session was released under the name of Bessie Smith accompanied by Buck and his Band. Despite having no record company Smith was still very po...
She is also known to the world as the “Queen of Soul”. She went on tour with her father’s traveling revival and later released her very first recording under the album, Spirituals, when she was 14 years old. Similar to Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin was signed by Columbia Records. There she released several classics such as, I’ll Keep on Smiling and I Still Can’t Forget. Years later (1966) she signed to Atlantic Records where she recorded I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) and Respect which both sold millions. From the start of her career in 1961 she has had forty three top single and maybe more to come. Having won over eighteen Grammy awards in her career. In 1987, Ms. Franklin was the very first female artist to be inducted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Grammys awarded her the Legend Award in 1991. In 1994 she was awarded the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award and also received the Kennedy Center Honors. She has been nominated for nine American Music Award winning four out of her nine nominations. Aretha has performed at both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidential inaugurations. She has also been awarded different honorary degrees in music. There is no one who could manipulate the same sound that Aretha Franklin had into this new day
In 1933 Billie audition as a dancer when she was 18, but the judges said she was not good enough so they asked her if she could sing-she could. In 1939 Billy sang at a café called Café Society and the song was “Strange Fruit”. Holiday wanted the song to be recorded but it was forbidden because it was “too inflammatory” Strange Fruit is a song about racism. She did not want to sing it on many radio stations because they banned all the intense words in the song. She could have been killed by the Koo Klucks Klan if she sang that song. Promoters objected Billie Holiday because of her race. The style of her voice-often tries to sound like a horn instrument because she likes the sliding sound. She refused to sing like other singers. Billie slyly said on a radio interview,”I always wanted to sound like an instrument.” She changed her name to Billie Holiday because her favorite film star, Billie Dove. In 1944 Billie Holiday received the Esquire Magazine Gold Award for Best Leading Female Vocalist. She would then receive some more awards in the following years to come. She got the nickname “Lady Day”. She was discovered by John Hammond, a young producer at Monette’s, a Harlem night club. When he heard Billie’s voice he was
Barbara Shreisand and Celine Dion, which are two of the most popular singers of all time, decided to join forces back in 1997 to sing one of the most beautiful duets of all time. They sang a song called "Tell Him." They showed the world how talented they were by singing that song.
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightclub entertaining, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for more than 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s. In conjunction with her club work, she also maintained a recording career that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unremarked in the script. Horne herself was a pivotal figure in the changing attitudes about race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her day, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that frequently she was encouraged to try to "pass" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social struggle enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out in favor of racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.
The movie Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday paints an interesting, and thought provoking portrait of one of jazz and blues most charismatic, and influential artists. The incomparable talent of Billie Holiday, both truth and legend are immortalized in this one-hour documentary film. The film follows Holiday, also referred to as “Lady Day” or “Lady”, through the many triumphs and trials of her career, and does it’s very best to separate the facts from fiction. Her autobiography Lady Sings The Blues is used as a rough guide of how she desired her life story to be viewed by her public. Those who knew her, worked with her, and loved her paint a different picture than this popular, and mostly fictional autobiography.
Born Gertrude Pridgett in Georgia in 1886 to parents who had both performed in the minstrel shows, she was exposed to music at a very early age. At the age of fourteen, she performed in a local talent show called “The Bunch of Blackberries,” and by 1900 she was regularly singing in public.2 Over the next couple of decades, she worked in a variety of traveling minstrel shows, including Tolliver's Circus and Musical Extravaganza, and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels; she was one of the first women to incorporate the blues into minstrelsy. It was while working with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels that she met William Rainey, whom she married in 1904; together, they toured as “Ma and Pa Rainey: Assassinators of the Blues.” By the early 1920s, she was a star of the Theater Owners' Booking Agency (TOBA), which were white-...
Bessie Smith impacted Billie Holiday because Holiday learned a lot through Smith’s records by thinking that Smith was kind of a teacher. Even though Billie Holiday did not have a voice as powerful as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday’s musical interpretations and phrasing were similar to Bessie Smith. Frank Sinatra was impacted by Bessie Smith because he believed that she was an early blues genius. Sinatra’s voice was more polished than Smith’s voice, but he did find inspiration in the emotions she sang with in the records. Bessie Smith was a highly influential artist that had the power to help people with their music even after her death proving that she truly is “The Empress of Blues” ("Bessie Smith"
Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were both prominent jazz singer-songwriters during the same time and masters in their own right, but their worlds could not have been further apart. In 1939, while they were both in the midst of experiencing mainstream success, Ella was touring with Ella and her Famous Orchestra and showcasing her perfect pitch and tone to the world while singing songs that would soon become standards to fellow singers and musicians. Billie was singing solo, comfortable with her limited range, and gaining the adoration of audiences nationwide who loved her soulful voice. Both of these historic singers made contributions to the art of jazz, with vocalists and instrumentalists still using elements of their style today. Ella
a major film studio. She was also an accomplished jazz singer. Recording songs such as: “The Lady and Her Music” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” Lena was a strong advocate of equal rights. he was a member of the NAACP, the National Council of Negro women and the Urban League. I think that she is a great pioneer of equal rights because she did it on her own terms and was not as forceful as some of the other advocates. She achieved equal rights and respect because of her grace, elegance and talent.
Known as the “Empress Of Blues”, Bessie Smith was said to have revolutionized the vocal end of Blues Music. She showed a lot of pride as an independent African-American woman. Her style in performance and lyrics often reflected her lifestyle. Bessie Smith was one of the first female jazz artists, and she paved the way for many musicians who followed.
Faith Evans was born on June 10, 1973, and grew up in Newark, NJ, where she began singing in church at the mere age of two. A high school honor student, she sang in her school's musical productions before winning a full scholarship to Fordham University. After just one year, though, she left college to put her jazz and classical training to use in the field of contemporary RB. It didn't take her long to find work and over the next few years, she sang backup and wrote songs for artists like Hi-Five, Mary J. Blige, Pebbles, Al B. Sure, Usher, Tony Thompson, and Christopher Williams. Thanks to her work on Blige's 1994 sophomore effort, My Life, Evans met producer/impresario Sean "Puffy" Combs, who signed her to his Bad Boy label. In 1995, Evans released her debut album, Faith, which went platinum on the strength of the hit RB singles "You Used to Love Me" and "Soon as I Get Home." The same year, she met fellow Bad Boy artist the Notorious B.I.G. (some accounts say at a photo shoot, others a phone conversation) and married him after a courtship of just nine days; shortly thereafter, she guested on a remix of his smash single "One More Chance."
The music is vocal instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony and expression of emotion. The most famous music during the Renaissance is Jazz and some Rock and Roll instruments are very important during that time too it’s still important till this day. The three people I decide to tell you about are Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and the last person I really enjoyed learning about was Louis Armstrong.
Columbia Pictures then picked her up to play Peggy Martin in Ladies of the Chorus (1948), where she sang two numbers.