Free With Billie Ebooks To Download
From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it.Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure.In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people–piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (April 19, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375406107
ISBN-13: 978-0375406102
Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.3 x 9.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,547,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #373 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Musical Genres > Soul #425 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Biographies > Rhythm & Blues #10108 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National
That deserves a good review. A couple reviews posted on here focus on Billie Holliday and her lifestyle, it puzzles me why they would even read the book, if you hated the woman so much -- nevertheless, they insisted on sharing their opinion of the person, not the book --so a lot of negative comments that aren't deserved get heaped onto the book --First off, I don't know if you can fully appreciate this book unless you've listened to Billie Holliday extensively and have a cursory knowledge of what happened to her...Just picking up this book and plodding through it -- I think will leave you frustrated -- if you don't know which years, were her best recording years and when life started to go horribly wrong for her then you lose many details that are given away in the book -- if you haven't listened to several different recordings of the same song, you won't understand what makes this woman so talented, because by all accounts most people would find her voice unique -- but not classified under the definition of a spectacular voice -- so the fact that she never sung the same song the same way, twice and that her phrasing and timing is one of a jazz instrumentalist, not a singer... you'll end up wondering why Blackburn wasted her time on an alcoholic drug addicted and abused woman.In the end, the book will paint a faded picture of a woman -- her fears -- unrealized dreams -- and her music will fill in the rest. If you've ever listened to out takes of Holliday talking between takes -- you would suspect she was a pretty rough woman -- I found this book shed some light on her compassionate side... the fact that if you were her friend, she would give you the shirt off her back.
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