It’s All About the Blues,
and Rhythm
B; M;;; R;;;;;;
The spring, music bios cross cultural lines; R & B stands
out.
Legendary blues singer Billie Holiday would have been 100 years old this
April, and to mark the occasion, Viking is publishing Billie Holiday:
The Musician and the Myth, by jazz writer and Columbia professor
John Szwed, who draws on new material.
In 1973, 17-year-old Janis Hunter met the Motown singer-songwriter
Marvin Gaye; the two married in 1977 (he died in 1983). Now Janis
Gaye, she recounts their story in After the Dance: My Life with
Marvin Gaye. Meanwhile, veteran music biographer Mark Ribowsky
chronicles the life of Otis Redding against the backdrop of the cultural
history of his era in Dreams to Remember: The Legacy of Otis
Redding. In L.A. Confidential, music producer L.E. Reid relates bringing R & B to the present, as he tells of making careers of such R&B and
pop stars as Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Kanye West, Rihanna, TLC,
Outkast, Pink, Justin Bieber, and Usher.
In a turn to the South—and country and folk music—Willie Nelson,
writing with David Ritz, recounts what promises to be an “unvarnished,
complete story of his 80-year life, in It’s a Long Story: My Life. Eddie
Huffman narrates the career of an influential singer-songwriter in John
Prine: In Spite of Himself.
In Girl in a Band: A Memoir, Kim Gordon, a founding member of
Sonic Youth, writes about inspiration and the infidelity of her longtime
husband and band member Thurston Moore. PW wrote, “The strength of
Gordon’s prose lies in her evocation of places.” Guns n’ Roses bassist Duff
McKagan follows up It’s So Easy: And Other Lies with How to Be a Man,
in which he draws on his life experience to give advice on fatherhood and
money management.
Two writers set their stories against the backdrop of the 1960s:
Richard Goldstein, among the first rock critics to write for the Village
Voice, tackles 1960s counterculture in Another Little Piece of My
Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s. For Andrew
Grant Jackson, one year alone defined an era: in his book 1965: The
Most Revolutionary Year, he combines personal stories with a panoramic historical narrative of epic social change and the music of Bob
Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, James Brown, and John
Coltrane, among others.
MUSIC
SPRING 2015 ADULT
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