By David Hajdu
comedian books, and our downloading tradition. the guts of Heroes and Villains is a rare new piece of cultural rediscovery, unique to this publication. It tells the untold tale of 1 of the main important—and, finally, some of the most tragic—figures in American renowned song, Billy Eckstine. via exhaustive new study, Hajdu indicates how this nice, forgotten singer, once again well known than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, reworked American song via combining intercourse attraction, sophistication, and black machismo—in the period of segregation. the price, for Eckstine, used to be his career—and approximately his life.
Other essays during this expansive e-book care for topical and fantastic topics like Beyoncé, Bobby Darin, Kanye West, Marjane Satrapi, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.
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Additional resources for Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
Sample text
With men such as Sinatra now singing greater numbers of theater songs originally written for women, and with women such as Fitzgerald singing more tunes composed for men, both the songs and their singers seemed to deepen and to expand in emotional range. A common repertoire of durable, adaptable songs written throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the songs we have since come to know as standards, began to coalesce. Fitzgerald, working closely with Norman Granz at Verve Records, helped give form to this repertoire through her duly revered series of LPs devoted to the canonical songwriters Kern, Berlin, Porter, and the rest—with Ellington included, in his case as both composer and band leader— each titled as the composer’s Songbook.
Chris Connor and June Christy, both of whom followed O’Day in and out of the Stan Kenton Orchestra, emulated O’Day, as have countless lessers who have wanted to imitate that cool-jazz vibe. O’Day, for all the good work she left the world, is also to blame for Sade. Reared as a singer in Gene Krupa’s hard-driving dance band, O’Day had impeccable time. Whatever the tempo, she swung. Her scat singing had dazzling rhythmic vigor and complexity. ”) Her first husband was a drummer, as was her longtime best friend John Poole, who served as the only constant in her bands for decades and who, at O’Day’s insistence, first turned her on to heroin.
In his lucid and thorough biography of Lorenz Hart, Frederick Nolan recounts an anecdote that the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner used to tell. He and his partner Frederick Loewe were stuck in the dark with Hart during a wartime air-raid drill a short while after Rodgers had teamed up with Hammerstein. Hart clicked through the channels on a radio, and Lerner could see his cigar glowing redder and redder as every station played a different song from Oklahoma!. “They knew what they had witnessed was the sight of a man made all too painfully aware of his own obsolescence,” Nolan writes.