The Blues Singers: Ten Who Rocked the World
by Julius Lester
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A collective biography of ten African-American blues singers, including Billie Holiday, B.B. King, Little Richard, and Aretha Franklin.Tags
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This book is awesome. It has several different artists in the book some you recognize and some you don't. It provides some great information on all of them. A lot of the information is info that is in every book.
This book is about a grandfather and his granddaughter. The little girl went to visit her grandfather and he shared different stories with her. This summer when she went to visit, he talked to her about blues singers that either is grandfather told him about, or the singers that he remember for himself. There were ten blues singers that he talked to her about particulary. He explained to her what the blues really meant. Overall, this book gives biographies of all ten blues singers that he chose to talk about.
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Youth: Music
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Author Information
56+ Works 11,042 Members
Julius Bernard Lester was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 27, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Fisk University in 1960. He moved to New York to become a folk singer. He performed on the coffeehouse circuit as a singer and guitarist. He released two albums entitled Julius Lester in 1965 and Departures in 1967. His first show more published book, The Folksinger's Guide to the 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly written with Pete Seeger, was published in 1965. In the 1960s, Lester was closely involved as a writer and photographer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He traveled to the South to document the civil rights movement and to North Vietnam to photograph the effects of American bombardment. He also hosted radio and television talk shows in New York City. He wrote more than four dozen nonfiction and fiction books for adults and children. His books for adults included Look Out, Whitey!: Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama, Revolutionary Notes, All Is Well, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, and The Autobiography of God. His children's books included To Be a Slave, Sam and the Tigers, and Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue, which won the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award in 2006. He also wrote reviews and essays for numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Dissent, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. After teaching for two years at the New School for Social Research in New York, Lester joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1971. He originally taught in the Afro-American studies department, but transferred to the Judaic and Near Eastern studies department when Lester criticized the novelist James Baldwin for what he felt were anti-Semitic remarks. He died from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 18, 2018 at the age of 78. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Languages
- English
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