Billie Holiday

on his lunch breaks. He has a book titled “Lunch Poems” consisting of his entire lunchtime poem collection. Amongst this collaboration lies a special poem named “The Day Lady Died”. Unlike all of his other poems, this one is about the death of Billie Holiday. This was unusual amidst his collection because the majority of the poems were about the occurrences over his lunchtime, rather than the death of a famous person. O’Hara is eminent for playing a huge part in the New York School period. The…

A tone that Billie Holiday conveyed so freely. Of course, everyone loved jazz singers like Louis Armstrong, but every now and then, people wanted something a bit more soothing, rather than the rash tone of some of the male jazz singers’ voices. “‘Lady Day’ was perhaps the most exceptional popular music singer of the 20th century. She wrote few songs; but when she sang, she took on a deep, personal and intimate approach” (Listverse). Billie was energetic, young, and new. Everyone…

During the early 1900s many African Americans fled the south and moved north. The reason being, the north had some better economic opportunities, which was called the Great Migration. One of the cities they migrated to was Harlem city in New York. Harlem city was considered to be a cultural center drawing in African American writers, artists, musicians etc. coming from the south to freely express their talents. The explosion it caused to these groups was considered to be the Harlem Renaissance.…

saxophonist. Going on in the rest of the world “the U.S. Army crossed the German border” (“Dyas”). By 1946 New York hosted Billie Holiday at Town Hall. Then in 1947 Carnegie Hall hosts Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Sadly later on in 1947 “Billie Holiday was convicted for possession of heroin”…

from the album Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1929). Another artist who sang against discriminatory ways was Billie Holiday and her famous track “Strange Fruit,” from the album The Billie Holiday Story (1939). These artists expressed themselves through these songs to communicate the injustice and racial discrimination being done not only to black musicians, but to African Americans nationwide. Armstrong and Holiday took a massive risk by releasing these songs to the public by discussing lynching,…

III When it came to the Surrealist movement in art, the leader of that movement was more easily identifiable. It was Andre Breton, who also found fame later as a French poet. Yet when one mentioned Surrealism in art, the first name that came to the minds of most art critics and students of art history was that of Salvador Dali, not Andre Breton. This was an ironical state of affairs because Andre Breton and the Surrealists had formally expelled Salvador Dali from their art movement in 1939.…

Jazz music is a staple of the Civil Rights movement, signifying the long struggle and the long-awaited freedom of African-American people in the United States. Jazz musicians, such as Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, worked tirelessly to get their messages across in order to further the Civil Rights movement. While all art forms seem to come with a sense of irony, it appears that jazz is the most prone, due to the ever-lingering racism of the United States, the self-proclaimed superiority of…

Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919 in Patterson, NY. Having been raised in a musical family, Seeger picked up a love for music throughout his childhood years. He later became one of the most well known American folk singers. Seeger spent the first years of his career collaborating with singer-songwriter, Woody Guthrie. Both artists, Seeger and Guthrie, shared similar point of views, in that they were both social activists. In 1948, Seeger continued his music with an American folk quartet called…

written and he mixes some brilliant jazz elements and blacks’ styles. According to Floyd, the song was sung in by Clara in the first act as a lullaby (218). George’s summertime song has been recorded many times with remarkable renditions by Billie Holiday who twisted the lullaby into a sultry torch song; Janis Joplin redid the song into a psychedelic blues rock classic in 1968; Sam Cooke’s rendition…

such as painting, writing, music, and more. The harlem Renaissance was was the soul of the migrated African American’s heart. One of the branches apart if it was the Jazz Age. Artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday were major musicians in the Jazz Age and in the Renaissance. Many of their work had been influential into modern day. The Jazz Age was a time for innovation in the 1920s that had led into modern day, some pieces were impactful, masterful, and…