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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

With Billie

by Julia Blackburn - £10.99  Vintage (2006)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780099483656 | ISBN 10: 0099483653

Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting new book is a life of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz.
 
Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim of her own vices. These intimate stories gives us a much deeper picture of her personality - we witness scenes from her chaotic childhood; we see her when she first arrives in Harlem; and we follow her through her rise to fame and into the notoriety what came so close on its heels.
 
Billie's friends and lovers and fellow musicians talk about her troubles and her addictions, but they also have a lot to say about her warmth and her courage, and the ones who were really close to her understood all that really mattered was the singing.

"Julia Blackburn's book gives a far more complete idea of Holiday as an artist than anything else I have read... A genuine portrait."
(Guardian)

(Price & availability last checked: May 2018)

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In booklists: Black, Asian and Middle Eastern Biography and Autobiography, Women in Music, Women in North America, Black American Women, Black American Music, Jazz and Blues, Music Memoirs and Biographies,
In categories: History & Biography, Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, Feminism & Women, Music & Performing Arts,

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