Lady Day Research Articles

Lady Day on Screen

Jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915 – 1959) is a hugely influential figure. The impact of her vocal craft – particularly her distinctive timbre, adroit use of rubato, and compellingly emotional interpretations – can be traced across subsequent generations of singers (Szwed 2015). However, details of her turbulent personal life often overshadow explorations of her musical legacy. The most recent depiction of Lady Day’s life on screen, Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday, is arguably the latest retrospective to fall into this trap. However, this article argues that its mixed reception might be indicative of a small but significant shift in how Holiday’s life and work are understood. Drawing on critical reactions to the film, it explores the ways in which a narrative shift in storytelling around Holiday can be identified, and how this can contribute to our understanding of the malleability of the posthumous careers of iconic musicians.

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

The Workhouse Population of the Nottingham Union, 1881-1882

The purpose of this article is to examine and analyse the resident population of the Nottingham Union Workhouse during a 12-month period beginning on Lady Day 1881. Using data drawn from the workhouse admission and discharge registers this study analyses the seasonal pattern of admissions and discharges as revealed by the registers, and also considers how this pattern might be related to the local economy. The Nottingham region had been a beacon of good practice in the treatment of the poor in the years leading up to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, but soon became a centre of resistance to the New Poor Law. Local politics and the textile trade cycle not only prevented the legislation from being fully implemented after 1834, but also dictated the economic and social conditions which prevailed in Nottingham in the later nineteenth century. The population analysis is based not only on the relevant admission and discharge register data, but also includes a study of the workhouse census information for 1881. The incidence of birth in the workhouse is also assessed together with the use made of the workhouse by women for giving birth and 'lying-in'.

Vision as OfferingInterview of Kamau Daaood Monday April 9, 2012, by Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl, edited by Sophie Rachmuhl and Kamau Daaood

The Journey into a Poem Interviewers: Could you tell us how you work? There are several kinds of poems it seems, like the one about your father or the one about Lady Day, which are a bit more narrative than some others. And the one that you start your concerts with, “Liberator of the Spirit,” (hear it on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4btOXkGpwA8) maybe that’s less narrative. Kamau Daaood: You know the writing process with me is different. There’s no one set way that I write. I’...

Assessing an Early Modern Fenland Population: Whittlesey (Cambridgeshire)

Improvement writers argued that drainage would bring prosperity and population growth to fenland communities; locals counter-argued that their communities were already thriving. The detailed surviving records from early modern Whittlesey, in the Isle of Ely, are analysed here to test the accuracy of these opposing claims. Using the returns of the 1523 Lay Subsidy, the 1563 ecclesiastical census, the Lady Day 1674 Hearth Tax records and the 1676 Compton Census, together with bishops' transcripts and probate inventories, this article finds that although the population did indeed increase after drainage, the pre-drainage population was also increasing. The Michaelmas 1664 Hearth Tax records are analysed to uncover something of the character of the inhabitants and the 1674 Lady Day returns are then used to test the relative wealth of the community compared with that of sub-regions throughout England identified by Tom Arkell. Finally, there is a discussion of Whittlesey's housing stock.

Mingus Mood by William Memlouk

their own way, liberated from the morass of self-doubt, conformism, and low self-esteem that have held them back until they put on Mitterrand’s seemingly magical hat. Daniel Mercier, who finds the hat in the brasserie after sitting at the table next to that of the presidential party, overcomes his timidity at work, becomes more outspoken at meetings of his company, and soon gets a major promotion . He is also the first of the hat’s beneficiaries to lose it when he no longer really needs it, but he spends the rest of the novel tracking it down. In the end, he generously, and patriotically, returns it to its rightful owner, whom he gets to meet again in person. The second individual to find the hat is Fanny Marquand, who serendipitously shares the same initials as the President of France, which are embossed in gold on the headband. This portentous coincidence gives Fanny the courage to break off her longtime liaison with a married man who keeps finding excuses not to leave his wife. She makes her literary aspirations her new focus and becomes a successful short story writer when she publishes a story based on her love life. With the money she earns from her publications, she buys a book store in Cabourg (shades of Proust), where she also finds a partner more worthy of her. While en route to his weekly visit to his psychiatrist, Pierre Aslan picks up the hat on a bench in the Parc Monceau where Fanny has left it. Pierre is a master nose, a creator of perfumes who, now in his fifties, has become a kind of hasbeen . The smell of Mitterrand’s hat left on a radiator after getting wet in the rain, combined with the colognes of the different people who have worn it, inspires him to create a new scent that re-launches his career and earns him a fortune. The hat’s final passing owner is Bernard Lavallière, a wealthy businessman who has always been a political conservative. Wearing Mitterrand’s fedora turns him into an enthusiastic partisan of the socialist president and a collector of contemporary art, much to the dismay of his wife and friends. The form of this novel is as entertaining as the plot. It is written for the most part in the third person, but it becomes an epistolary novel in the middle when the first three people through whose hands the hat passes exchange letters concerning its whereabouts. As a result of this correspondence, Daniel and his wife become admirers of Fanny’s short stories. In the epilogue, we discover that the president’s security agents have been monitoring the hat’s movements from day one. Mitterrand had rejected a direct intervention, preferring to enjoy the spectacle of the ways it has impacted the lives it has crossed. This almost godlike posture is reinforced in the final words of the novel where a line is quoted from Mitterrand’s final speech to the people of France: “‘Je crois aux forces de l’esprit et je ne vous quitterai pas.’” One is reminded of Jesus assuring the Apostles just before His Ascension that He will be with them all days. University of Denver James P. Gilroy MEMLOUK, WILLIAM. Mingus Mood. Paris: Julliard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-260-01955-8. Pp. 244. 18 a. Ce premier roman de Memlouk qui, né en 1977, est journaliste spécialisé en littérature et musique, s’apparente aux biographies fictionnelles de figures du jazz, genre encore marginal voici une décennie mais qui tend à devenir de plus en plus répandu. Nous en voulons pour preuve les nombreux “romans” d’Alain 794 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 Gerber (Louie (2002), Chet (2003), Charlie (2005), Lady Day (2005), Miles (2007), Frankie, le sultan des pâmoisons (2008)—tous parus chez Fayard), et aussi des ouvrages de plus jeunes auteurs, comme le beau Pannonica de Pauline Guéna (2007). Comme il est fréquent pour une telle entreprise, le récit s’inspire des épisodes connus de la vie de Charles Mingus, le grand contrebassiste de jazz. Mingus a écrit son autobiographie, Beneath the Underdog (1971), et les...

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address Robert Farris Thompson (bio) Delivered Saturday, October 15, 2011, at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX “What is translation? Why don’t we start with bad translation? Bad translation is when John Wayne says, “Give me a shot of red eye,” and it comes out, “Dubonnet s’il vous plait.” Another bad translation: when John Wayne says, “Drinks all on the house. I’m feelin’ loose as a goose.” Subtitle in Zurich: “Cognac fur alle.” What an elegant cowboy! Imagine the late and great Humphrey Bogart kissing the forever great Lauren Bacall. He pushes her against the wall and they kiss, languorously. Lauren says, “I’ve never been kissed like that in my life.” Spanish subtitle: “Muchísimas gracias.” So, how do we avoid such catastrophes? The German theorist Walter Benjamin has an answer for you. He says, “You cannot translate anything—French into German, Japanese into Mandarin—unless you love the other language as much as your own.” And I’m here to tell you that I love Yoruba, maybe even more than English, who knows? Imagine yourself coming in from the Eighth Galaxy and your mission is: “Check the planet. Send us back a message. Is there life?” You send a zap to Paris and it picks up by luck John Coltrane on recording. Then you hit Rio [samba drumming sounds]. Then you hit the South Bronx: Mambo! And so forth. So you send back to Eighth Galaxy: “Your Highness, I have probed the planet. There is definitely life and to judge from the sounds I am getting: they baaaad!” The point being the extra-terrestrial listened to so many forms of black music that he’s even beginning to talk black. The big triumph is that the airwaves of our planet belong to black people. No matter where you are you’ll pick up black music. Or maybe you are in Manila and you pick up: boom-chi-boom-chick. That is, of course, Habanera sped up to become Reggaeton. Wherever you are, what’s the secret of the black conquest of the airwaves? They have something that no other musical tradition has and that’s multiple meter: 4/4, plus 2/4, plus 6/8, plus 12 and a half, plus whatever you got. Multiple meter—you can see it happening centuries ago in the fifteen hundreds in Benin [pointing at an image] . . . you can see there is one being struck with the hands in the middle drum, you can see a person is striking a counter beat with a stick on the side of the drum, and then you got another drummer. At least three different beats. Cut to Brazil today in 2011, and you’ll see the same combination of drums, each [End Page 999] one with a different texture or different metrical pattern. Multiple meter. That’s one of the powerhouses behind the black conquest. And that conquest leads to the great invention of the classical music of our nation: Jazz. What do you do under drum fire? How can you function when you are bombarded by multiple meter? And that leads us to something else here that we have to translate: cool. That is to say, a collectiveness of mind. You are under drum fire, in which you keep your mental gyroscope and what you do is internalize the beat. You’re no longer afraid of dancing because you are a beat of your own. If there’s anything that black people have taught me is that people are art. Even to me Payton, the great running back who invented the stutter-step, or brought the stutter-step into NFL football, he’s a work of art, just as much as Malcolm X or John Coltrane. Just as much as “Lady Day,” AKA Billie Holiday. Diaspora to me is a magical word. It means the impossible. It means that you recreate Africa right in the middle of the USA. [End Page 1000] Robert Farris Thompson Robert Farris Thompson is The Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of African & African American Art at...

APPENDIX III: THE ACCOUNTS OF THE GARRISON OF BEVERLEY, 1643

After the King's failed siege of Hull in July 1642 he left a small garrison in Beverley, but this was soon ejected by forces under Colonel Francis Boynton. Thereafter Beverley remained in parliamentarian hands until August 1643. It became an important fundraising centre for the East Riding parliamentarians and a large garrison was established there in March 1643. The garrison accounts begin on 20 March and this date is corroborated by records from the Committee of Indemnity that demonstrate the garrison's inception as between Lady Day and Easter. This committee's records also show that Sir Edward Rodes of Great Houghton was appointed the garrison's commander-in-chief. According to Sir John Hotham, the corporation of Beverley had agreed to quarter the garrison provided the town was reimbursed by an assessment collected across the East Riding. The accounts cease a week before the arrest of Sir Edward Rodes and the unsuccessful attack on Beverley by royalist forces sent by Sir Hugh Cholmley on 29 June 1643.

Warwickshire hearth tax returns: Michaelmas 1670, with Coventry Lady Day - Edited by Tom Arkell, with Nat Alcock

Warwickshire hearth tax returns: Michaelmas 1670, with Coventry Lady Day - Edited by Tom Arkell, with Nat Alcock

Billie Holiday: The Life and Artistry of Lady Day (review)

Billie Holiday: The Life and Artistry of Lady Day (review)

Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton by Theresa M. DiPasquale

MLR, 105.4, 2010 1141 stamp of scholarly heft. Cohering the work around close analyses of individual words employed by Milton, the author's stated aim, consonant with the recent academic trend (as exemplified in Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns's John Milton: Life,Work, and Thought from the same publisher (2008), reviewed above), is threefold: to rehabilitate her subject's neglected prose works; to encourage, confident in its canonical status, a less deferential attitude towards theMilton corpus in general; and relatedly, to emphasize its contingency, the 'series of changes of direction, impulsive gestures, apologies, revisions, and thoughts worked out in the very process ofwriting them down' (p. 14). An engaging chapter on the divorce pamphlets argues plausibly thatMilton presents a logical case for reform of the divorce law, superimposed on a subtext of emotional chaos' (p. 48), the latter evidenced by the copious deployment of metaphor and euphemism in the Doctrine and Discipline ofDivorce (1643) which underscores his apparent physical and intellectual difficulties with sexual intercourse at this time. The most diverting?and important?chapter, however, concerns the still under-studied Paradise Regained (1671). In it,Patterson argues for, among other things, the significant influence on Milton's epic of JohnBale's Temptacyon of Christ (1538), evidenced in both writers' vividly transforming the biblical account of Christ's trial in the wilderness into dramatic literature. Inwhat for Patterson is tantamount to an audacious mission to rework, and even rewrite, Scripture itself, Milton exhibits recognizably Socinian sympathies through rendering God's redemption ofmankind a corollary of Christ's passing, through constant reference toOld Testament writings, a word-based test of intellectuality. Birkbeck, University of London Philip Major Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of JohnDonne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. By Theresa M. DiPasquale. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 2008. xiii+392 pp. ?49.99. ISBN 978-0-8207-0405-0. This tripartite study of the importance of the 'sacred feminine' for the poetics of JohnDonne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton is asworthy an act of scholarship as Theresa DiPasquale's previous book from the same publisher, her award-winning Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular inJohnDonne (1999)- As in her previous research, DiPasquale's historical and philological understanding and her considerable sensitivity to the implications of patristic,medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation theology enrich her formalist readings of early modern poetry. The focus of her enquiry concerns these seventeenth-century poets' portrayal of 'the feminine as a reflection of the divine, and woman herself, at her best, as an agent of redemption or conduit of grace' (p. 2), and the journey on which she takes her reader surveys individual poetic treatments of, variously, the biblical figure of divine, created, and practical Wisdom, the bride of the Song of Songs, the Pauline and apocalyptic Ecclesia, and theVirgin Mary. DiPasquale selects these three particular poets over the likes ofVaughan or Herbert because, 1142 Reviews she maintains, they are all [. . .] exceptionally provocative in their approaches to sex and gender as aspects of the sacred' (p. 2). As a leading Donne scholar, DiPasquale is in her element in the study's first chapter. She provides a fresh Trinitarian interpretation of Donne's little-read 'The Annuntiation and Passion', inwhich she uncovers a feminine triad of 'the cogitating Christian soul, the woman upon whom her mind's eye gazes (the Blessed Virgin), and her guide (the church)' (p. 24), and finds in the occasion celebrated, the coincidence of Lady Day and Good Friday, as much a celebration of 'the flesh of a woman (worn by her son) that redeems humanity' (p. 33) as a memorialization of the redeemer himself. Her analysis of one ofDonne's most intricate sonnets, the sonnet upon the death of his wife entitled 'Since She whome I lovd', is also worthwhile for its tactful handling of Donne's conflicted sense of Anne Donne as a human sacrament, his remembrance of her present absence as a celestial bride drawing his spirit heavenward even as his desire forher absent presence attracts his flesh to earth. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of Donne's Anniversaries that resumes DiPasquale's enduring interest in sacramental poetics. In the First and Second Anniversaries...

Yorkshire West Riding hearth tax assessment, Lady Day 1672 - Edited by David Hey, Colum Giles, Margaret Spufford, and Andrew Wareham

Yorkshire West Riding hearth tax assessment, Lady Day 1672 - Edited by David Hey, Colum Giles, Margaret Spufford, and Andrew Wareham

County Durham hearth tax assessment Lady Day 1666 – Edited by Adrian Green, Elizabeth Parkinson and Margaret Spufford

County Durham hearth tax assessment Lady Day 1666 – Edited by Adrian Green, Elizabeth Parkinson and Margaret Spufford

Jazz A-B-Z: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits (review)

Reviewed by: Uncle Peter's Amazing Chinese Wedding; and: Jazz A•B••Z: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits Elizabeth Bush Look, Lenore Uncle Peter's Amazing Chinese Wedding; illus. by Yumi Heo. Schwartz/Atheneum, 2006 ISBN 0-689-84458-1$16.95 R* 5-9 yrs Marsalis, Wynton Jazz A•B••Z: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits; with biographical sketches by Phil Schaap; illus. by Paul Rogers. Candlewick, 200576p ISBN 0-7636-2135-8$24.99 R Gr. 8-12 This is no simple picture book but an ambitious and sophisticated project in which artist Rogers and jazz expert and practitioner-turned-wordsmith Marsalis attempt to capture the unique styles of jazz greats through different but complementary media. Rogers conceived the idea and, taking broad liberties with the traditional ABC format (here "U" is Eubie Blake and "X" is Bix Beiderbecke), contributes poster-style renderings rife with allusions to the musicians' work, venues, and era. Marsalis deploys various poetic forms to suit the performers, most of which are explained in concluding notes: "Lyric poems written today still give the feeling that they could be sung; they are intimate, personal, and can express the poet's own sense of mortality—just like a recording by Lady Day." Perhaps taking the alphabetical convention a little too much to heart, Marsalis sometimes overplays his hand in [End Page 239] his pursuit of alliteration ("Rollins's robust style radiates roundness./ On raucous rhythms or sweet romances/ Sonny resoundingly responds,/ Raging rhapsodic on regular songs/ Rendered swimmingly. And he rarely rests"). Nonetheless, Marsalis' energetic paeans and Rogers' silk-screen-styled acrylic and ink portraiture, coupled with biographical sketches and a discography of selected standards and capped off with clever bookmaking reminiscent of a 78-rpm record jacket, should lure jazz aficionados to browse, linger, and savor. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Kent Hearth Tax Assessment, Lady Day 1664

1St Just‐in‐Penwith Kent Hearth Tax Assessment, Lady Day 1664 DuncanHarringtonSaraPearsonSusanRose LondonBritish Record Soc. 2000cxiv + 687£40

Listening to Lady Day: An exploration of the creative (re)negotiation of identity revealed in the life narratives and music lyrics of Billie Holiday

Music lyrics as well as the narratives occurring in other non‐traditional discourses provide many opportunities to examine the social construction of identities for racial others and women. These forms of communication offer an opportunity to explore the ways in which marginalizing and otherwise oppressive dominant narratives may be deconstructed in an attempt at self definition or as a means of coping with living on the social periphery. In this study, these “texts”; provide fertile ground for the exploration of both the historically hegemonic identity construction of social others as well as current ones; and they do this while simultaneously revealing counter hegemonic responses to African American women's racialized, gendered and class‐based circumstances through an investigation of the autobiography, interviews and music lyrics of Billie Holiday.

NEWS

NEWS

Lady in satin: Billie holiday and the invention of identity

Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday by Donald Clarke. New York: Viking, 1994. 468 pp. (hardcover) $24.95. Lady Sings the Blues (rev. ed.) by Billie Holiday, with William Dufty. New York: Penguin, 1992. 102 pp. (paper) $10.00. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday by Robert O'Meally. New York: Arcade, 1991. 207 pp. (hardcover) $29.95.