Wild Women and the Blues

Wild Women and the Blues
Author: Denny S. Bryce
Publisher: Kensington Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496730097

"Perfect for fans of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo...a dazzling depiction of passion, prohibition, and murder.“ —Shelf Awareness “Ambitious and stunning.” —Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author "Vibrant…A highly entertaining read!” —Ellen Marie Wiseman New York Times Bestselling author of THE ORPHAN COLLECTOR “The music practically pours out of the pages of Denny S. Bryce's historical novel, set among the artists and dreamers of the 1920s.”—OprahMag.com Goodreads Debut Novel to Discover & Biggest Upcoming Historical Fiction Books Oprah Magazine, Parade, Ms. Magazine, SheReads, Bustle, BookBub, Frolic, & BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Books Marie Claire & Black Business Guide’s Books By Black Writers to Read TODAY & Buzzfeed Books for Bridgerton Fans SheReads Most Anticipated BIPOC Winter Releases 2021 Palm Beach Post Books for Your 2021 Reading List In a stirring and impeccably researched novel of Jazz-age Chicago in all its vibrant life, two stories intertwine nearly a hundred years apart, as a chorus girl and a film student deal with loss, forgiveness, and love…in all its joy, sadness, and imperfections. “Why would I talk to you about my life? I don't know you, and even if I did, I don't tell my story to just any boy with long hair, who probably smokes weed.You wanna hear about me. You gotta tell me something about you. To make this worth my while.” 1925: Chicago is the jazz capital of the world, and the Dreamland Café is the ritziest black-and-tan club in town. Honoree Dalcour is a sharecropper’s daughter, willing to work hard and dance every night on her way to the top. Dreamland offers a path to the good life, socializing with celebrities like Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But Chicago is also awash in bootleg whiskey, gambling, and gangsters. And a young woman driven by ambition might risk more than she can stand to lose. 2015: Film student Sawyer Hayes arrives at the bedside of 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, still reeling from a devastating loss that has taken him right to the brink. Sawyer has rested all his hope on this frail but formidable woman, the only living link to the legendary Oscar Micheaux. If he’s right—if she can fill in the blanks in his research, perhaps he can complete his thesis and begin a new chapter in his life. But the links Honoree makes are not ones he’s expecting . . . Piece by piece, Honoree reveals her past and her secrets, while Sawyer fights tooth and nail to keep his. It’s a story of courage and ambition, hot jazz and illicit passions. And as past meets present, for Honoree, it’s a final chance to be truly heard and seen before it’s too late. No matter the cost . . . “Immersive, mysterious and evocative; factual in its history and nuanced in its creativity.” —Ms. Magazine “Perfect…Denny S. Bryce is a superstar!” —Julia Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of the Bridgerton series “Evocative and entertaining!” —Laura Kamoie, New York Times bestselling author “Wild Women and the Bluesdeftly delivers what historical fiction has been missing.” —Farrah Rochon USA Today bestselling author

Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues

Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues
Author: Marita Golden
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

14 African American women explore the Black female psyche in uncompromising terms.

In the Face of the Sun

In the Face of the Sun
Author: Denny S. Bryce
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496730100

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement amidst an America convulsed by the 1960s, a pregnant young woman and her brash, profane aunt embark upon an audacious road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles to confront a decades-old mystery from 1920's Black Hollywood in this haunting novel of historical fiction from the author of Wild Women and the Blues. A lime-gold Ford Mustang is parked outside my building. Unmistakable. My Aunt Daisy, the driver, is an audacious woman that no one in our family actually speaks to. They only speak about her--and not glowingly. Still, she is part of my escape plan... "Bryce excels at placing readers in a glamorous time and place...riveting and vibrant." - Booklist 1928, Los Angeles: The newly-built Hotel Somerville is the hotspot for the city's glittering African-American elite. It embodies prosperity and dreams of equality for all--especially Daisy Washington. An up-and-coming journalist, Daisy anonymously chronicles fierce activism and behind-the-scenes Hollywood scandals in order to save her family from poverty. But power in the City of Angels is also fueled by racism, greed, and betrayal. And even the most determined young woman can play too many secrets too far... 1968, Chicago For Frankie Saunders, fleeing across America is her only escape from an abusive husband. But her rescuer is her reckless, profane Aunt Daisy, still reeling from her own shattered past. Frankie doesn't want to know what her aunt is up to so long as Daisy can get her to LA--and safety. But Frankie finds there's no hiding from long-held secrets--or her own surprising strength. Daisy will do whatever it takes to settle old scores and resolve the past--no matter the damage. And Frankie will come up against hard choices in the face of unexpected passion. Both must come to grips with what they need, what they've left behind--and all that lies ahead ... RAVES FOR Wild Women and the Blues "The best kind of historical novel: immersive, mysterious and evocative." --Ms. Magazine "Vibrant. . . . A highly entertaining read!" --New York Times Bestselling author Ellen Marie Wiseman "The music practically pours out of the pages." --Oprah Daily

The Drum Is a Wild Woman

The Drum Is a Wild Woman
Author: Patricia G. Lespinasse
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496836049

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

When Your Body Gets the Blues

When Your Body Gets the Blues
Author: Marie-Annette Brown
Publisher: Rodale
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2002-02-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 157954486X

A guide to sub-clinical depression presents an eight-week program which uses light therapy, moderate exercise, and vitamins to combat depression, overcome fatigue, and provide a greater sense of control, balance, and well-being.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Author: Tom Robbins
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2003-06-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553897896

“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.

Wild Women of Song

Wild Women of Song
Author: Rebeca Mauleón
Publisher:
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Women jazz musicians
ISBN: 9780615548555

The Language of the Blues

The Language of the Blues
Author: Debra Devi
Publisher: True Nature Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781624071850

A comprehensive dictionary of blues lyrics invites listeners to interpret what they hear in blues songs and blues culture, including excerpts from original interviews with Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy, and many others.

Yellow Wife

Yellow Wife
Author: Sadeqa Johnson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982149124

From the New York Times bestselling author of House of Eve—a 2023 Reese’s Book Club Pick! *A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Christian Science Monitor* Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this “fully immersive” (Lisa Wingate, #1 bestselling author of Before We Were Yours) story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.