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outcolder's review against another edition
4.0
Challenging. She'll write stuff that has me thinking, "well, I don't know about that..." but then maybe why I don't know is because I am white and male. In any case, it gave me lots of good reasons to listen to those songs again and to listen for something that I hadn't been listening for before.
There are plenty of less challenging bits in here, where she is mainly pointing out how the white male writers have missed or better said misdirected the way these women are represented in the larger culture. The chapters on Billie Holiday are like that. You have Billie Holiday's autobiography, and the genius of her music, and then you have this crap, dopey image of her everywhere from the Diana Ross pic to most of the writing about her. It doesn't add up, but Davis's chapters about her do.
Also, it is nice to put all this music in the context of the social struggles Davis is more known for. It's like, kinda, white (for lack of a better word) to always want to consider art as something timeless and, uh, art-for-art's sake... the artist against the world. Eric Crapton is always talking about the blues like that: "a man and a guitar against the world." Davis doesn't make that mistake. She quotes some Marcuse, a Marxist academic she studied with in another era, and tries to identify both the timelessness and the timeliness in this music.
The second half of the book is her transcriptions of the lyrics. Reading blues lyrics is as challenging as reading about them. It always feels like they were never meant to be written down, and for me, that the voice in my head isn't doing the words justice.
There are plenty of less challenging bits in here, where she is mainly pointing out how the white male writers have missed or better said misdirected the way these women are represented in the larger culture. The chapters on Billie Holiday are like that. You have Billie Holiday's autobiography, and the genius of her music, and then you have this crap, dopey image of her everywhere from the Diana Ross pic to most of the writing about her. It doesn't add up, but Davis's chapters about her do.
Also, it is nice to put all this music in the context of the social struggles Davis is more known for. It's like, kinda, white (for lack of a better word) to always want to consider art as something timeless and, uh, art-for-art's sake... the artist against the world. Eric Crapton is always talking about the blues like that: "a man and a guitar against the world." Davis doesn't make that mistake. She quotes some Marcuse, a Marxist academic she studied with in another era, and tries to identify both the timelessness and the timeliness in this music.
The second half of the book is her transcriptions of the lyrics. Reading blues lyrics is as challenging as reading about them. It always feels like they were never meant to be written down, and for me, that the voice in my head isn't doing the words justice.
bubblegumcreams's review against another edition
5.0
m1thrandir's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
moseslh's review against another edition
4.0
A fascinating, if sometimes dense, exploration of three female Blues/Blues-influenced musicians and the social impact and relevance of their work. During the research process for this book, Dr. Davis discovered that the lyrics to most of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith's songs had never been transcribed. Davis transcribed the lyrics to all of their recorded works herself and includes the comprehensive collection of their lyrics in the back of the book for reference, so the book is really only half as long as it looks. I enjoyed learning about the significance of Rainey and Smith and their use of music to speak out about the realities of working class Black female lives and to empower Black women. Davis's final two chapters are on Billie Holiday, who does not fit neatly into a category with Rainey and Smith, as she was not (strictly speaking) a Blues artist. The first chapter on Holiday was the book's weakest. Because Holiday's repertoire consisted mostly of politically neutral Tin Pan Alley material, Davis relies on more subjective measures like how she sings her songs, and the resulting chapter is less convincing. The reader needs to either listen to each song mentioned in order to follow Davis's arguments or blindly trust Davis's inherently subjective basis of analysis; I think an audio book format with embedded recordings would have been a much better way for Davis to convey her message. The second chapter on Holiday, unlike the first, focuses on a specific song, namely "Strange Fruit," which does carry an overtly political message. This chapter was one of the finest in the book and more than makes up for its predecessor's weakness. The book was slow at times and felt decidedly less accessible than Davis's [b:Are Prisons Obsolete?|108428|Are Prisons Obsolete?|Angela Y. Davis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320521835s/108428.jpg|104488], but was a worthwhile read nonetheless.
lindy_b's review against another edition
3.0
It's one of those books that gets cited everywhere and is considered foundational to scholarship around blues women (and I understand why) but was underwhelming to me once I actually read it. In particular, I'm not impressed by how Davis would often assert that she could tell, through careful study of inflection, that a singer meant something ironically (e.g.), but would not go on to describe that inflection. These days, it's easy to search for the song on your streaming service of choice and judge for yourself, but when the book was written, some of the music discussed was not yet available on compact disc. It's just not persuasive.
gannent's review against another edition
fast-paced
4.0
The first 3/4ths of the book was really great. The lyrics analysis is super interesting and I learned a lot. Those sections focus pretty much exclusively on Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. Only the last two chapters really discuss Billie Holiday, and those really felt like they should have been a separate article or book. They didn’t really seem to connect. Rainey and Smith were analyzed together and Holiday was analyzed separately, so that section didn’t feel as strong. But overall a really interesting book and I learned a lot.
glendajb4's review against another edition
I read the first few chapters and had to return it to the library. Wanted to absorb those few chapters more than I wanted to rush through the book. I want to buy this to read the next few chapters and to keep the lyrics for future reference.
sagelikesscats's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime and Racism