By Will Friedwald
Will Friedwald’s illuminating, opinionated essays—provocative, humorous, and personal—on the lives and careers of greater than 300 singers anatomize the paintings of an important jazz and renowned performers of the 20 th century. From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they've got created a physique of labor that keeps to delight and encourage. here's the main wide biographical and demanding survey of those singers ever written, in addition to an important consultant to the good American Songbook and those that formed how it has been sung.
The tune crosses from jazz to pop and again back, from the songs of Irving Berlin and W. C. convenient via Stephen Sondheim and past, bringing jointly elementary jazz and pa singers (Billie vacation, Perry Como); hybrid artists who moved between genres and mixed them (Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé); the top women and men of Broadway and Hollywood (Ethel Merman, Al Jolson); yesterday’s vaudeville and radio stars (Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor); and today’s cabaret artists and hit-makers (Diana Krall, Michael Bublé). Friedwald has additionally written prolonged items at the such a lot consultant artists of 5 major genres that lie outdoors the songbook: Bessie Smith (blues), Mahalia Jackson (gospel), Hank Williams (country and western), Elvis Presley (rock ’n’ roll), and Bob Dylan (folk-rock).
Friedwald reconsiders the non-public tales successes and screw ups of some of these artists, their songs, and their performances, appraising either the singers and their song through balancing his reviews with these of fellow musicians, listeners, and critics.
This magisterial reference book—ten years within the making—will pride and tell a person with a fondness for the long-lasting tune of the United States, which keeps to resonate all through our pop culture.
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Additional resources for A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers
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When I was little, I embarrassed my mother by trying to pick babies out of prams on the streets and at markets. The one thing I dreamed of in my life was to have children of my own. ” As for 1 4 < Donald Spoto “receiving love,” even the semblance of it under the guise of basic domestic security: that was forever shattered when, at the end of May 1935—with no prior threats or warnings—Joseph Ruston packed his clothes and, apparently without a word to anyone, walked out the door into rue Keyenveld, never to return.
I was] terrified. What was going to happen to me? ” The abandonment of 1935, she added, “has stayed with me through my own relation- ENCHANTMENT = 15 ships. ” That day made Audrey withdraw from the few friends her mother allowed—a withdrawal that must have been partly from shame; partly from a mixture of sorrow and confusion for which she had no words; and partly from the cloud of guilt that darkens the soul of every child when a parent walks out. Did she do something to cause it? Was she in some way unlovable?
But as E. N. van Kleffens, then the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, wrote in 1940, “The Dutch have a gift of shrewd perspicacity which no propaganda can obliterate, [and] outward resignation should not be taken for inward submission” to the Nazis. 2 4 < Donald Spoto Precisely this spirit was evident in the remarkable story of the spirited and heroic members of the Dutch resistance to the German invasion. The resistance was first concerned with maintaining calm until the end of the war. Later, when it was clear that the restoration of peace was not a proximate reality, the Council of Resistance in the Kingdom of the Netherlands was founded, and its members were armed.
