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Nilka
Posted April 17, 2009
Billie Holiday-Singer-
This was such a good book.
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I would recomend it for anyone. Billie Holiday is such an inspriing person. It is a quick read though. -
Anonymous
Posted January 10, 2008
The Life of Billie Holiday
Lady Sings The Blues is based on the life of blues singer, Billie Holiday. She tells us her story in first person about her childhood and how she was beaten by her cousin Ida, and raped by a man in neighborhood. Born as Eleanora Fagan, she takes us threw her childhood when she was working as a steps maid earning at the most $5 a day, and running errands in the local whorehouse just to be able to listen for records. Also struggling to become recognized as a singer, Eleanora also must fight racism in her daily life. Even when Eleanora joins a band, she continues to struggle even to get food and money to survive. Then Eleanora slowly declines in health due to her heroine addiction that causes her untimely death at the age of forty-five. The book would be most enjoyed by high school students since this contains strong language and details that may be offensive to some. The book is approximately 150-200 pages in length and is easily readable regardless of the reading level. Rating 'out of five': ****
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Anonymous
Posted August 15, 2006
great book couldnt put it down
if you love billie holiday this book opens your eyes to the realities that were her life as well as many others in that era and you love her even more plus the cd is great
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Anonymous
Posted June 1, 2004
Jazz vs. Heartache
Jazz vs. Heartache I read the book Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday and William Dufty. The book itself was amazing. The way she writes about her life, her sorrows and her pains, and also about her joys and her happiness is the way Billie wants people to feel. She wants people to feel the way she felt, when she brutally describes in her book about the time she got raped when she was nine years old by this man named Mr. Dick. I mean the details and the type of language she uses was fantastic. I loved every minute of reading and every time I turned the page I couldn¿t wait to read more. ¿Mom and pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen and she was sixteen and I was three.¿(Billie p.5) This quote got my full and undivided attention as it starts the book. Back in those days if a young man got a sixteen- year- old girl pregnant then they should get married, and most times they did. But in these days if an eighteen-year-old boy gets a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant they call it statutory rape, and that¿s bad. Billie¿s relationship with her mother was not on a consistent basis. For a while she had to live with her grandma and her cousin Ida, who she very much hated and who beat her all the time for no apparent reason. When her mother came back from cleaning white people¿s houses up north she came and got Billie and bought a house for them for nine hundred dollars (from the money she saved up), but soon she had to go back and live with her grandma and cousin Ida. You would think she would want to go live with her father, but her father got stuck in the draft and they never heard from him again, until he sent divorce papers to her grandma¿s house for her mother. He wanted to get a divorce so he could marry a Vietnamese girl he met in a club, where he and his band were playing at one night. Her father was a very talented guy; some say that¿s where Billie gets all her talent. But the fact that he left his family and didn¿t care about Billie or her mother didn¿t make him the ideal father to live with. Billie Holiday soon put all her frustrations into her music and she became a world renounced jazz singer, where she recorded solitude and God Bless The Child. Even when her cousin Ida told her that, what she was doing was of the devil and God wouldn¿t accept her into the place they called paradise. Do you think that stopped Billie? No, she soon recorded the chart toping songs: t¿ain¿t nobody¿s bizness if I do and Good Morning Heartache. She was able to give thanks to her mother for being a mother and a father to her as she grew up. Because Billie was black she went through lots of pains and struggles to get her music recorded. Once she finally got it done she recorded music that is still on people¿s minds and hearts today.
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