Like
Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday also expressed this bitterness, especially when she mounted the stage to perform "Strange Fruit." This bitter denunciation of lynching in the Deep South perfectly expresses the affinity between jazz musician and leftist in the 1930s and '40s.
Consider The Georgia Crackers, Miller's backing band from his 1928 sessions for New York's Okeh label, There is Eddie Lang, "the first great jazz guitarist," who performed with luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and
Bessie Smith. Drummers Gene Krupa and Stan King both played in Benny Goodman's celebrated orchestra.
Read about
Bessie Smith, Judy Garland, Joan Baez, Bette Midler and Madonna.
He included his amusing play-on-words duet Pas de Duke for Judith Jamison and Mikhail Baryshnikov, as well as The Mooche, a touching suite of dances based on Ellington's tone portraits of female performers Florence Mills, Mahalia Jackson, Marie Bryant and
Bessie Smith.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday.
At which of Time Warner's labels today could an executive enjoy the kind of autonomy granted the late Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who was permitted to sign unknown and unpeggable artists, from
Bessie Smith to Bob Dylan?
The Death of
Bessie Smith was a highly political play.
Unfulfilled love, unromantic sex, and jazz greats from
Bessie Smith to Cortez's ex-husband Ornette Coleman are subjects of her first collection of poems, Pissstained Stairs and The Monkey Man's Wares (1969).
Bessie Smith, Ricki's childhood icon, is on her tape player, singing, "I woke up this morning with an awful aching head." Bessie speaks for Ricki, who is not listening.
But if I were forced to make a list, I would include, among other things, music by
Bessie Smith, Morton Feldman, Public Enemy, Tibetan Buddhist monks, The Roches, J.
In scenes that allude to events of Albee's life, The Zoo Story and the five plays that followed it in the next two years--The Death of
Bessie Smith (1960), The Sandbox (1960), Fam and Yam (1960), The American Dream (1961), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962)--Albee dramatizes his characters' conflicting loyalties to their stereotypical family identities of the past and the mysteries of their present existence.