Bessie by Chris Albertson is a biography of Bessie Smith, the blues singer known as the Empress of the Blues, who was the highest-paid African-American performer of the 1920s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Smith’s relatives, friends, and associates — including Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with her for over a … Read more
A raw punk rock memoir chronicling Syrian-American Rayya Elias’s journey from her childhood in Aleppo through Detroit to 1980s Lower East Side New York, where she pursued music and hairstyling while exploring her sexuality with lovers of both sexes, battling heroin addiction, experiencing homelessness and incarceration, and ultimately finding redemption and sobriety.
A raw punk rock memoir chronicling Syrian-American Rayya Elias’s journey from her childhood in Aleppo through Detroit to 1980s Lower East Side New York, where she pursued music and hairstyling while exploring her sexuality with lovers of both sexes, battling heroin addiction, experiencing homelessness and incarceration, and ultimately finding redemption and sobriety.
Queer Noises | John Gill | British music critic John Gill has penned a tell-all tome, although he’s careful not to out anyone who hasn’t already left clues waiting to be pieced
Carlile Brandi | Broken Horses | ‘Brandi Carlile was born into a musically gifted, impoverished family on the outskirts of Seattle and grew up in a constant state of change, moving fr
Angela Y. Davis | Blues Legacies And Black Feminism | From one of this country’s most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial b
Jamie Anderson | An Army of Lovers | In California, a month before the Stonewall Riots in 1969, Maxine Feldman penned a song, “Angry Atthis,” about the shame surrounding lesbians. She did
Carolyn Gage | Babe: An Olympian Musical | Big, brassy, full-cast mainstage musical about the greatest woman athlete in history, Babe Didrikson! Babe’s struggle for acceptance. Numbers include
Philip Brett; Elizabeth Wood; Gary C. Thomas | Queering the Pitch | The first collection of gay and lesbian work in musicology. Contributors cover a wide range of subjects from analysis of the work of gay composers to
Alix Dobkin | Adventures in Women’s Music | Written by a major pioneering figure in the women’s music movement. Dobkin performed with Kay Gardner and other women in the early 1970s before she re