Published in 2005
336 pages
Buzzy Jackson is an award-winning author, historian, and book critic for the Boston Globe and other publications. Buzzy grew up in the American West, moving between Truckee, California and Montana. She eventually headed for sea level, living in Perth, Australia, Los Angeles, Barcelona, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned a Ph.D. in History at UC Berkeley. Her work experience includes stints as a radio DJ, tennis hostess, NATO Headquarters tour guide, NBC Sports gopher, and college professor. She lives with her family and a freethinking dog named Ralph in Colorado.
What is this book about?
An exciting lineage of women singers—originating with Ma Rainey and her protégée Bessie Smith—shaped the blues, launching it as a powerful, expressive vehicle of emotional liberation. Along with their successors Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Janis Joplin, they injected a dose of reality into the often trivial world of popular song, bringing their message of higher expectations and broader horizons to their audiences. These women passed their image, their rhythms, and their toughness on to the next generation of blues women, which has its contemporary incarnation in singers like Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams (with whom the author has done an in-depth interview). Buzzy Jackson combines biography, an appreciation of music, and a sweeping view of American history to illuminate the pivotal role of blues women in a powerful musical tradition. Musician Thomas Dorsey said, “The blues is a good woman feeling bad.” But these women show by their style that he had it backward: The blues is a bad woman feeling good.
