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Feeling the Style

2005; Society for Music Theory; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.30535/mto.11.3.2

1067-3040

Lori Burns,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

As Billie Holiday described her unique brand of vocal expression, she claimed that she wanted the “style” of Louis Armstrong and the “feeling” of Bessie Smith. These aesthetic and expressive goals can be interrogated for their analytic and interpretive potential. What elements of her musical presentation capture the jazz stylings of Armstrong and the Classic-blues subjectivity of Smith? Can affective gestures be teased apart from the structural features of the musical performance? Might these apparently distinct elements be in fact integrally bound, the stylistic elements (conventions, manners) serving feeling, and concomitantly the affective elements (emotion, subjectivity, affect) serving structure? By recognizing these distinctive aspects and qualities of a singer’s vocal expression, do we take a step closer to his or her distinctive musical artistry? This article explores the analytic potential of Billie Holiday’s self-proclaimed performance goals by interpreting vocal gesture in her versions of two songs also recorded by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. The songs chosen for consideration are “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (words and music by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins), written in 1922 and “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” (music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler), written in 1932. Billie Holiday’s recordings of these songs are credited as tributes to her idols Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. The analysis illustrates how Holiday gave tribute to Smith and Armstrong through specific strategies of vocal content and gesture while still forging an innovative style and feeling in her own musical expression.