0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course will use the tools of the historical archive, autobiography, memoir, biography, narrative, poetry, film and music to etch a social history of Billie Holiday (1915-1959) in Baltimore, between roughly 1900 and 1960. Holiday’s remarkable and unique art has earned her the title of the premier jazz singer of all-time. Her voice and experience was strongly connected to Baltimore City, its pattern of black migration, its musical culture, urban density, as well as its narcotics and violent crime. Although she was born in Philadelphia, she deliberately falsely claimed in her candid memoir, “I was finally able to prove I’d been born in Baltimore.” As revealing as her willed connection to a particular geography of nativity was her determined claiming of vernacular knowledge outside of the arts. Holiday also insisted, in 1956, “ask them if they think they know something about dope that Lady Day don’t know.” The Baltimore conjunction between her experience of prostitution, crime and violence and her stirring sound also begs the question of the city’s infamous participation as a major site of the global heroin trade. What was the artist’s relationship to her urban geography? How did it change over space and time? What dimension of shared fate did she have with the community of black domestic workers, laborers, artisans, and small business people from the first half of the twentieth century? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? How was her consciousness as a vocal opponent to segregation shaped by her grooming in the city?