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Nina Simone is a civil rights leader
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Over and over again critics write about Nina Simone’s power and charisma throughout the Civil Rights Movement. She sang the words of an entire movement, “All I want is equality/ for my sister, my brother, my people, and me./ Yes, you lied to me all these years”(Simone Mississippi). She sang out for her entire race, and with a “smoky- toned” voice, when four young girls were killed in a church bombing (Lewis). She sang “Will my country fall, stand or fall?/ Is it too late for us all?/ And did Martin Luther King just die in vain? (Simone Why?) after the death of MLK. Nina Simone… a singer with many different voices, a singer who denies categorization, a woman who is genre-less to prove a point.
"'It's always been my aim to stay outside any category'. 'That's my freedom,'" she insisted to one reporter. But it was a "freedom" that, according to biographer David Nathan, "drove industry pundits and the music press crazy as they tried to categorize her" (Brooks). Critics have tried to catalog her in genres ranging from the most obvious, jazz, to “wing to bebop to free jazz within which...
Rachel M. Harper’s The Myth of Music intentionally weaves together 1960s era jazz music and a poor African American family via metaphor and allusion to show a deep familiar bond between father and daughter.
“We Shall Overcome” was a popular song of comfort and strength during the civil rights movement; it was a rallying cry for many black people who had experienced the racial injustices of the south. The song instilled hope that one day they would “overcome” the overt and institutional racism preventing them from possessing the same rights as white citizens. Anne Moody describes several instances when this song helped uplift her through the low points of her life as a black woman growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s and early 1960s. By the end of her autobiography “Coming Of Age In Mississippi” (1968), she saw a stream of excessive and unending violence perpetrated by white people and the crippling effects of poverty on the black people of
Joan Baez, a famous folk singer, sang her most famous song “Oh Freedom” during the civil rights movement. She expressed her want and need for equality and freedom f...
Through music, they were able to make powerful political statements without drawing the fury of white America. Nina Simone was one of the artists who used the music stage to make political statements. She sang a combination of jazz, blues and folk music. She was a civil rights activist and wrote songs promoting the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, she became identified as one of the voices of the civil rights movement and wrote passionate songs about the movement. She wrote the song "Mississippi Goddam" in response to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young African-American girls. Nina Simone’s legacy continues to live and she is quoted in many circles for her defiant music to the
Her family ties to the south, her unique talent, her ability to travel and make money are similar to the Blues women movement that preceded her. It can be said that Nina Simone goes a step further the by directly attacking inequities pertaining to race and gender in her music. However, what distinguishes her is her unique musicianship and that is what ultimately garners her massive exposure and experiences than those of her past contemporaries. Like the Blues women Simone expands ideas pertaining to self-expression, identity and beauty as they relate to black women. She does this by embracing what is definitively African American and connecting that to a historical context. By doing so she is the embodiment of a political statement. Her journey which began like many entertaine...
To summarize Nina Simone and how important she was, many people would describe her as a musical genius, a Black Power icon, and even some
This scene from The Jazz Singer (1927) starts with Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) talking to the audience in the nightclub he is preforming in that night. To get them excited, he tells them “you ain’t heard nothin’!”and he then begins to animatedly sing and dance around the stage. The camera cuts back and forth between the audience and Jackie as he preforms. The audience claps along as he sings and at the end of the song it cuts to a long shot of the crowd. They clap as Jackie stands on the stage looking down appreciatively at them. This scene is important to note because it contains the elements of a musical and, importantly, it is where the musical genre began.
Whitney Houston is considered one of the greatest singers of our generation. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, she holds the record of being the most rewarded female artist of all time. I chose her as my topic, because she represents resiliency and tenacity, despite her troubled experiences with drugs and her personal life. Whitney Houston comes from a family with an amazing, musical pedigree; her mother, Cissy Houston, was a successful back-up singer for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. Dionne Warwick is her first cousin, and Aretha Franklin is her godmother.
According to Albert Murray, the African-American musical tradition is “fundamentally stoical yet affirmative in spirit” (Star 3). Through the medium of the blues, African-Americans expressed a resilience of spirit which refused to be crippled by either poverty or racism. It is through music that the energies and dexterities of black American life are sounded and expressed (39). For the black culture in this country, the music of Basie or Ellington expressed a “wideawake, forward-tending” rhythm that one can not only dance to but live by (Star 39).
In brief, this paper was based on Whitney Houston's life, what she did, and why was she so influential to American culture. Whitney was a great pop star that had a great talent and throughout her career she won many awards. She is an example to many stars, and she proved
Josephine Baker Josephine Baker was an African American woman who had to overcome discrimination and abuse in achieving her dream of becoming a singer and dancer. She did this during the 1920s, when African Americans faced great discrimination. She had a hard childhood. Her personal life was not easy to handle. Furthermore, she overcame poverty and racism to achieve her career dream.
...nspired to make a change that she knew that nothing could stop her, not even her family. In a way, she seemed to want to prove that she could rise above the rest. She refused to let fear eat at her and inflict in her the weakness that poisoned her family. As a child she was a witness to too much violence and pain and much too often she could feel the hopelessness that many African Americans felt. She was set in her beliefs to make choices freely and help others like herself do so as well.
“With the writing of Jazz, Morrison takes on new tasks and new risks. Jazz, for example, doesn’t fit the classic novel format in terms of design, sentence structure, or narration. Just like the music this novel is named after, the work is improvisational.” -www.enotes.com/jazz/ “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize- winning Beloved.
Maya Angelou was a highly skilled poet who used her writer’s voice to strengthen and guide civil rights. Angelou was born in St. Louis on the 4th of April, 1928 and is still currently writing (bio.com). A victim of sexual assault, Angelou spent years after as a virtual mute (poetryfoundation.org). Facing racial prejudice and discrimination through all her youth, a lot of her works were centred around prejudice and civil rights (poetryfoundation.org). Angelou is a strong civil rights activist and her writings such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings certainly reflect that. Angelou was an influential and passionate person with strong motives . Angelou was the first African-American woman to have a non-fiction bestseller, impacting the literature world (bio.com). Angelou was a coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to bolster civil rights (poetryfoundation.com). Overall, Angelou’s works have affected not only poetry but fr...
Whitney Houston was an American recording artist, actress and fashion model born in a rough neighbourhood in the projects of Newark, New Jersey in 1963. Se is the third and youngest child of John and gospel singer Cissy Houston. Whitney was married to husband Bobby Brown and they had a daughter called Bobbi Kristina Brown. I chose Whitney because she was amazing; her voice was amazing and so was her acting. Her voice had so much emotion and she could give a song a feeling that anyone could relate to. Whitney Houston was famous for her electrifying live performances throughout her career, which gave her the chance to show the spectacular range of her unique voice. She started out her career by singing alongside her mother Cissy Houston at night clubs in New York City where she was discovered by Arista Records. At age 22 Whitney released her debut album which became the best-selling debut album by a female artist. Her second album called ‘Whitney’ became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one billboard 200 albums chart. Whitney appeared in her first starring role in ...