 | |
| Author | Carole Boston Weatherford |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Floyd Cooper |
| Country | United States |
| Genre | Children's poetry |
| Publisher | Wordsong |
Publication date | 2008 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 117 |
| Awards | Coretta Scott King Award |
| ISBN | 978-1-59078-507-2 |
| OCLC | 51995 |
Becoming Billie Holiday is a 2008 book of poetry for young readers by American poet and author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper, originally published by Wordsong. It won an honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2009.
Through a series of poems, Weatherford outlines the evolution from Eleanora Fagan to renowned singer Billie Holiday. Told from Billie's own perspective, she muses on the first 25 years of her life. Most poems are titled after actual Billie Holiday songs. The book starts with poems about her young life. Detailing events like her father's abandonment, her tomboyish attitude, and her time spent in an orphanage with nuns. It continues into her adolescence with poems about her first gig singing jazz, deciding to change her name, and her many relationships with men. Weatherford's book ends with Holiday's rising fame and the tension of racism in the United States. The last poem illustrates Holiday's memorable performance at the Café Society, singing the song "Strange Fruit." At the end of the book, there are pages giving information for further reading and biographies of others mentioned in the poems.
In the book's afterword, Weatherford talks about her childhood listening to jazz music with her father. As a teenager, she started listening to more popular music at the time until she watched the film Lady Sings the Blues in 1972. From then on, she was listening to and collecting Holiday's music all the time. Weatherford related to much of Holiday's life: a shared hometown of Baltimore, a difficult love life, and navigating the realities of racism. Before writing the poems, the author would listen to early Billie Holiday songs for weeks. For the factual parts of the story, Weatherford referenced oral histories and Holiday's autobiography. [1] She hoped the book would inspire readers to learn more about the singer, as well as cross over to an adult audience. Weatherford has written several other books about jazz musicians. [2]
Floyd Cooper created the illustrations in the book using an eraser to make subtractive shapes in paint. He also used other mediums on top that were oil based, all put on with a drybrush technique. [1]
Critics reviewed Becoming Billie Holiday very favorably. In a starred Kirkus review, they praise both Weatherford's "remarkable tribute" as well as illustrator Floyd Cooper's beautiful images. [2] Another Kirkus reviewer was impressed with the rich writing of the poems, and felt it was a perfect tribute to such a celebrated singer. [3] Booklist noted that Weatherford's book was "proud, and clear-toned." [4] A starred review in the School Library Journal points out the perfect background soundtrack in the novel, praising Weatherford's choice to use song titles as poem titles. The reviewer comments on the author's way of capturing Holiday's "jazzy, candid voice so adroitly that at times the poems seem like they could have been lifted...from Holiday's autobiography..." She continues to marvel at Cooper's images that invoke real emotions paired with the words. [5]
The book was awarded the honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2009. [6]
Eleanora Fagan, known professionally as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century, and the great majority of victims were black. The song has been called "a declaration" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement".
Carole Boston Weatherford is an African-American author and critic, now living in North Carolina, United States. She writes children's literature and some historical books, as well as poetry and commentaries. Weatherford is best known for her books Juneteenth Jamboree, Freedom in Congo Square, and You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen. Notably, Weatherford has written literary criticisms of racist representations in children's entertainment. Today, she often writes with her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, who is an illustrator and poet.
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Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former poet laureate of Connecticut, She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994 she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of over twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
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