The Girl Singer

The Girl Singer
Author: Marianne Worthington
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1950564207

Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music: three threads beautifully woven into one in Marianne Worthington's poetry collection The Girl Singer. The poet grew up in urban Appalachia, listening to country and folk music and letting it live within her. The speakers in The Girl Singer offer lyrical celebrations of the women who performed that music and recite their stories anew. The girl singer is also the poet—one who traces loss through turning seasons, monitors the patterns of neighborhood wildlife, and creates a sisterhood for singing old songs in new ways. The Girl Singer is part family history, part music, and part nature walk. Worthington's attentive eye and heart are reflected in the starkly striking and painful images she paints in the poems. Every poem, whether describing a connection with Appalachian wildlife, retelling the lyrics of a classic country tune, reflecting on the speaker's bloodline, or giving voice to famous musical figures of the past, strikes a powerful chord.

Girl Singer

Girl Singer
Author: Rosemary Clooney
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2002-04-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0767910834

At the top of her form and topping the charts, Rosemary Clooney looks back at a life of triumph and tragedy more dramatic than any work of fiction. Rosemary Clooney made her first public appearance at the age of three, on the stage of the Russell Theater in her hometown of Maysville, Kentucky, singing, "When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver," an odd but perhaps prophetic choice for one so young. She has been singing ever since: on local radio; with Tony Pastor's orchestra; in big-box-office Hollywood films; at the Hollywood Bowl, the London Palladium, and Carnegie Hall ; on her own television series; and at venues large and small across the country and around the world. The list of Clooney's friends and intimates reads like a who's who of show business royalty: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Tony Bennett, Janet Leigh, Humphrey Bogart, and Billie Holiday, to name just a few. She's known enormous professional triumphs and deep personal tragedies. At the age of twenty-five, Clooney married the erudite and respected actor Jose Ferrer, sixteen years her senior and light-years more sophisticated. Trouble started almost immediately when, on her honeymoon, she discovered that he had already been unfaithful. Finally, after having five children while she almost single-handedly supported the entire family and endured Ferrer's numerous, unrepentant infidelities, she filed for divorce. From there her life spiraled downward into depression, addiction to various prescription drugs, and then, in 1968, a breakdown and hospitalization. After years spent fighting her way back to the top, Clooney is married to one of her first and long-lost loves- a true fairy tale with a happy ending. She's been nominated for four Grammys in six years and has two albums at the top of the Billboard charts. In the words of one of Stephen Sondheim's Follies showgirls, she could well be singing, triumphantly, "I'm still here!"

The Great Woman Singer

The Great Woman Singer
Author: Licia Fiol-Matta
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822373467

Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers—Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benítez—to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer. Fiol-Matta shows how these musicians, despite seemingly intractable demands to represent gender norms, exercised their artistic and political agency by challenging expectations of how they should look, sound, and act. Fiol-Matta also breaks with conceptualizations of the female pop voice as spontaneous and intuitive, interrogating the notion of "the great woman singer" to deploy her concept of the "thinking voice"—an event of music, voice, and listening that rewrites dominant narratives. Anchored in the work of Lacan, Foucault, and others, Fiol-Matta's theorization of voice and gender in The Great Woman Singer makes accessible the singing voice's conceptual dimensions while revealing a dynamic archive of Puerto Rican and Latin American popular music.

The Girl Singer

The Girl Singer
Author: Marianne Worthington
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1950564215

Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music: three threads beautifully woven into one in Marianne Worthington's poetry collection The Girl Singer. The poet grew up in urban Appalachia, listening to country and folk music and letting it live within her. The speakers in The Girl Singer offer lyrical celebrations of the women who performed that music and recite their stories anew. The girl singer is also the poet—one who traces loss through turning seasons, monitors the patterns of neighborhood wildlife, and creates a sisterhood for singing old songs in new ways. The Girl Singer is part family history, part music, and part nature walk. Worthington's attentive eye and heart are reflected in the starkly striking and painful images she paints in the poems. Every poem, whether describing a connection with Appalachian wildlife, retelling the lyrics of a classic country tune, reflecting on the speaker's bloodline, or giving voice to famous musical figures of the past, strikes a powerful chord.

Girl Singer

Girl Singer
Author: Mick Carlon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781935248736

Young Avery replaces Billie Holiday in Count Basie's band. But a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany changes her life forever.

No Walls and the Recurring Dream

No Walls and the Recurring Dream
Author: Ani DiFranco
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0735225184

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A memoir as fierce, freewheeling, and passionate as her music." --O, the Oprah magazine A memoir by the celebrated singer-songwriter and social activist Ani DiFranco In her new memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, Ani DiFranco recounts her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and much more into an inspiring whole. In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman's eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty. Ani's coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence--from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records. In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to question established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has inspired and challenged more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and to follow your dreams.

Who Sang the First Song?

Who Sang the First Song?
Author: Ellie Holcomb
Publisher: B&H Kids
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1462794459

Have you ever wondered who hummed the first tune? Was it the flowers? The waves or the moon? Dove Award-winning recording artist Ellie Holcomb answers with a lovely lyrical tale, one that reveals that God our Maker sang the first song, and He created us all with a song to sing. Go to bhkids.com to find this book's Parent Connection, an easy tool to help moms and dads (or anyone else who loves kids) discuss the book's message with their child. We're all about connecting parents and kids to each other and to God's Word.

The Art of Leaving

The Art of Leaving
Author: Ayelet Tsabari
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1443447889

WINNER OF THE CANADIAN JEWISH LITERARY AWARD FOR MEMOIR FINALIST FOR THE HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION An unforgettable memoir about a young woman who tries to outrun loss, but eventually finds a way home. Ayelet Tsabari was 21 years old the first time she left Tel Aviv with no plans to return. Restless after two turbulent mandatory years in the Israel Defense Forces, Tsabari longed to get away. It was not the never-ending conflict that drove her, but the grief that had shaken the foundations of her home. The loss of Tsabari’s beloved father in years past had left her alienated and exiled within her own large Yemeni family and at odds with her Mizrahi identity. By leaving, she would be free to reinvent herself and to rewrite her own story. For nearly a decade, Tsabari travelled, through India, Europe, the US and Canada, as though her life might go stagnant without perpetual motion. She moved fast and often because—as in the Intifada—it was safer to keep going than to stand still. Soon the act of leaving—jobs, friends and relationships—came to feel most like home. But a series of dramatic events forced Tsabari to examine her choices and her feelings of longing and displacement. By periodically returning to Israel, Tsabari began to examine her Jewish-Yemeni background and the Mizrahi identity she had once rejected, as well as unearthing a family history that had been untold for years. What she found resonated deeply with her own immigrant experience and struggles with new motherhood. Beautifully written, frank and poignant, The Art of Leaving is a courageous coming-of-age story that reflects on identity and belonging and that explores themes of family and home—both inherited and chosen.

Girl from the North Country

Girl from the North Country
Author: Conor McPherson
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2017-11-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1559368829

“The idea is inspired and the treatment piercingly beautiful . . . Two formidable artists have shown respect for the integrity of each other’s work here and the result is magnificent.” —Independent “Bob Dylan’s back catalogue is used to glorious effect in Conor McPherson’s astonishing cross-section of hope and stoic suffering . . . It is the constant dialogue between the drama and the songs that makes this show exceptional.” —Guardian “Beguiling and soulful and quietly, exquisitely, heartbreaking. A very special piece of theatre.” —Evening Standard “A populous, otherworldly play that combines the hard grit of the Great Depression with something numinous and mysterious.” —Telegraph Duluth, Minnesota. 1934. A community living on a knife-edge. Lost and lonely people huddle together in the local guesthouse. The owner, Nick, owes more money than he can ever repay, his wife Elizabeth is losing her mind, and their daughter Marianne is carrying a child no one will account for. So when a preacher selling bibles and a boxer looking for a comeback turn up in the middle of the night, things spiral beyond the point of no return . . . In Girl from the North Country, Conor McPherson beautifully weaves the iconic songbook of Bob Dylan into a show full of hope, heartbreak and soul. It premiered at the Old Vic, London, in July 2017, in a production directed by the author. Conor McPherson is an award-winning Irish playwright. His best-known works include The Weir (Royal Court; winner of the 1999 Olivier Award for Best New Play), Dublin Carol (Atlantic Theater Company) and The Seafarer (National Theatre). Bob Dylan, born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, is one of the most important songwriters of our time. Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. He released his thirty-ninth studio album, Triplicate, in April 2017, and continues to tour worldwide.

She Come By It Natural

She Come By It Natural
Author: Sarah Smarsh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982157305

In this Time Top 100 Book of the Year, the National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland “analyzes how Dolly Parton’s songs—and success—have embodied feminism for working-class women” (People). Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities—and strengths—of women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, “country music was foremost a language among women. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren’t discussed.” And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton. In this “tribute to the woman who continues to demonstrate that feminism comes in coats of many colors,” Smarsh tells readers how Parton’s songs have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as “trailer trash.” Parton’s broader career—from singing on the front porch of her family’s cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from “girl singer” managed by powerful men to self-made mogul of business and philanthropy—offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture. Infused with Smarsh’s trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, this is “an ambitious book” (The New Republic) about the icon Dolly Parton and an “in-depth examination into gender and class and what it means to be a woman and a working-class hero that feels particularly important right now” (Refinery29).