Billie Holiday Celebration with Lawrence Jackson and Candice Hoyes

Description

Dr. Lawrence Jackson, a professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, will deliver a public lecture on the "Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts" in conjunction with several events celebrating the life and music of jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Jackson's presentation is a story map exploring Billie Holiday's early life in Baltimore City, conveyed on the ArcGIS [Geospatial Information Service] database. It uses the tools of the historical archive – maps, photographs, newspapers, city directories, memoir, biography, film and music – to etch a social history of Billie Holiday (1915-1959) in Baltimore, between roughly 1900 and 1960.

Holiday's remarkable and unique art has earned her the title of the premier jazz singer of all-time. Her voice and experience was strongly connected to Baltimore City, its pattern of black migration, its musical culture, urban density, as well as its narcotics and violent crime. Although she was born in Philadelphia, she deliberately falsely claimed in her candid memoir, "I was finally able to prove I'd been born in Baltimore."

As revealing as her willed connection to a particular geography of nativity was her determined artistry, invented out of black vernacular sound. The presentation enables us to understand the artist's relationship to her urban geography broadly, and to historic Pennsylvania Avenue specifically. How did it change over space and time? What dimension of shared fate did she have with the community of black domestic workers, laborers, artisans, and small business people from the first half of the twentieth century? In what manner did Baltimore's racial segregation and racism define her life and art? How was her consciousness as a vocal opponent to segregation shaped by her grooming in the city?

The Billie Holiday Project for the Liberation Arts is conceived of as part of a commitment to harness the tools of the humanities and digital technologies to reshape the modern university and democratize public access to archival resources and rewrite history from the ground up.

The lecture is immediately followed by a Billie Holiday musical tribute by Candice Hoyes.