Actor #4
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Billie Holiday was a jazz singer but her personal blues created such powerful ‘story songs’ that she is often categorized as a blues singer.
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Actor #5
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She, like Bessie and Mahalia was a genius of improvisation. No song, no
line
of a song, no
WORD
of a song, ever sounded the same way twice.
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Actor #6
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We’re going to let Billie’s music, her face, and her own words from her autobiography
Lady Sings the Blues
, speak for themselves.
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(Actor #3 hits play on VCR and monitor. Male Actor # 3 offers Actor # 1 his stool C. He then retrieves gardenia from props table and puts it behind her ear. He returns to VCR.
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The following monologues are excerpted from Billie’s own autobiography with William Duffy: Lady Sings the Blues.) (3)
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Actor #1
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(on platform L)
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“Unless it was the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong I heard as a kid, I don’t know of anybody who actually influenced my singing, then or now. I always wanted Bessie’s big sound and Pop’s feeling. Young kids always ask me what my style is derived from and how it evolved and all that. What can I tell them? If you find a tune and it’s got something to do with you, you don’t have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too. With me, it’s got nothing to do with working or arranging or rehearsing. Give me a song I can feel, and it’s never work. There are a few songs I feel so much I can’t stand to sing them, but that’s something else again”.
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(During musical interlude, volume is lowered.)
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Actor #1
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“Everyone’s got to be different. You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing. I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close—order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”
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(Volume up as Billie resumes singing.)
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(Volume down.)
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Actor #1
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“I’ve been told that nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love.” Maybe I remember what those words are all about. Maybe I’m proud enough to
want
to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island, the Catholic institution and the Jefferson Market Court, the sheriff in front of our place in Harlem and the towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and scars, Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and San Francisco—every damn bit of it. All the Cadillacs and minks in the world—and I’ve had a few—can’t make it up or make me forget it. All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that.
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Look at my big dream! It’s always been to have a big place of my own out in the country someplace where I could take care of stray dogs and orphan kids, kids that didn’t ask to be born; kids that didn’t ask to be black, blue or green or something in between.”
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(Image of Billie on screen.)
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Actor #6
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Billie died on July 17, 1959. Her friend Lena Horne commented following her death that “Billie was just too sensitive to survive.” (4) But when we listen to Billie’s music we hear the struggle, and the sorrow, but also the triumph and transcendence . . . her own personal blues and the blues of her people.
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Actor #2
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Jazz became more complex and sophisticated but improvisation remained the cornerstone.
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Actor #3
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Let’s celebrate and appreciate vocal improvisation raised to an art form in the scatting of Ella Fitzgerald—the first Lady of Jazz.
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(Images of Ella—tapes of scatting “How High the Moon” or “Savoy”.)
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Actor #4
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The Africans brought the music in them when they were brought to America. Life and music were inseparable. They lived in music and the music expressed who they were.
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Actor #5
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(Images of each on screen as name is mentioned.)
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Mahalia, Bessie, Billie and Ella, through their ‘life songs’, told us who the African American was, and is—and will be . . . survivors, improvisors, lovers of life.
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(As actors leave, slides flash backward to beginning African slides. Drum playing is heard under this. When the drumming ends, Actor # 2 reappears C. A slide is left up on the screen—the first image.)
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Actor # 2
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hold yrself
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hold yrself in music.
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(Actor # 2exits.
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The piece has ended.)
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