Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen - Softcover

Many people have seen [Billie] Holiday as a sacrificial brown beauty, a haunting victim-symbol, but some who knew her thought that the addictions that populated her life with pushers and police were inevitable, that she was too sensitive not to have been destroyed. Certainly her story raises some hard questions, chief among them: Could the America of her era have allowed a black woman of such sensuality and sensitivity to achieve success and wholeness? Lena Horne, another singer from the thirties who became a symbol of idealized black womanhood, poses this question as a kind of running theme throughout her autobiography. Horne says in effect that while it is indeed possible for a black woman to win through, she must also tote up the personal psychic and emotional costs in a society where racism and sexism exact enormous energies from the black woman artists. Carmen McRae, upon whom Billie Holiday made such a deep impression as a woman and singer, once analyzed her this way: "Singing is the only place she can express herself the way she'd like to be all the time. The only way she's happy is through a song. I don't think she expressed herself as she would want to when you meet her in person. The only time she's at ease and at rest with herself is when she sings."

The jazz scene in New Orleans, the Age of Swing, the Big Band Era of the 1940s and the ever present dark, smoky blues clubs have been the domain of men-but not entirely. Stormy Weather is a tribute to the women who made the scene, profiling the jazz and blues women from the turn of the century until now. Finishing off this work are interviews with ten women who have been part of the jazz industry and an extensive discography. Highly descriptive and enlightening, this engrossing reading brings alive a subculture that is as much a part of jazz as the music itself. Within these pages is the history and lives of women who often walked in its shadows. -- From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by Ilene Rosoff