Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan) also known as Lady Day was an American jazz singer and phenomenon in the 1950’s who not only greatly influenced jazz and pop singing, but through her vocal style, she pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Holiday had a very tumultuous childhood, which also manifested continuously in her adult years. Some believe because of it, Holiday was able to exploit her sorrowful and melancholy disposition and create expressive genius music and a one of a kind vocal technique. “As a young teenager, Holiday served the beginning part of her so-called ‘apprenticeship’ by singing along with records by Bessie Smith or Louis Armstrong in after-hours jazz clubs. When Holiday's mother, Sadie Fagan, moved to New York in search of a better job, Billie eventually went with her.
Félix,2017). Even before Bobby and Whitney got married in 1992, her life was already troubled with drugs. In an interview with Robin Roberts bobby said that just before the two were married in 1992 he walked in to see his bride and found her hunched over a bureau snorting a line of cocaine. “That was the first time I had actually saw her do drugs,” Bobby told Roberts. Bobby said that this scene of his wife doing cocaine made want to love her and protect her even more.
Kristina Georgia Snow and her alter ego, Bree, start at the beginning and lead you through the chilling story of her downfall due to her addiction to crank, better known as crystal meth. The story starts when Kristina, the perfect daughter, goes to visit her father who is an alcoholic and drug addict living on the rough side of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is where Kristina’s inner rebellious vixen, Bree, comes out to play. It is in Albuquerque that she meets her first love as well as the monster, crank. She stays there for three weeks before moving back to Reno, Nevada where her mother, step-father, and two siblings live.
Radio exposure brought him to the attention of bandleader Harry James, with whom Sinatra made his first recordings, including "All or Nothing at All." In 1940, Sinatra joined Tommy Dorsey’s band. After two years of chart-topping success with Dorsey, Sinatra decided to strike out on his own (Frank Sinatra: the Boudoir Singer, 2011). In the 1940s Sinatra embarked on a solo career and became the idol of “bobby-soxers,” teenage girls who swooned over his crooning, soft-voiced singing. He appeared in such film musicals as Anchors Aweigh (1945), Till the Clouds Roll By (1947), and On the Town (1949).
Her father was considered to be a schizophrenic. He was in and out of prison and hanged himself in prison in 1969. Her mother abandoned Aileen and her older brother with her grandparents. Aileen did not have much of a childhood, living isolation, with hardly any friends. At an early age she was sexually active trading sex for cigarettes at age nine.
He was kicked out for psychological reasons. He tried crystal methamphetamine after he was discharged from the navy. This was his start to his drug addiction. In his early twenty’s he was traveling regularly to Manhattan to buy heroin. He was sniffing two to three baggies a day.
Louis Armstrong often stated that he was born on July of 1900, but (after his death), it was determined via his baptismal records that he was born on August 4, 1901. He was born in New Orleans, and lived in “one of the poorest sections of town”. Armstrong grew up with a very challenging childhood – his father abandoned the family soon after his birth, and his mother (Who was then unable to pay the bills) often turned to prostitution, frequently leaving him in the hands of his grandmother. At the age of 11, after firing a gun in the air during a New Year's Eve celebration, Armstrong was deemed a juvenile delinquent and sent to the ‘New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs’. (PBS.org) There, he took a music class which made him fall in love with music.
Ke$ha’s mother was also a singer/songwriter, which influenced Ke$ha at a young age and got her familiar with writing and recording songs (Kesha). Pebe is known for writing songs, such as, Dolly Parton’s song “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You”. Ke$ha’s mom also helped her write several of her songs, which included “We R Who We R” and “Your Love is My Drug”(Kesha). When she was 17, she dropped out of high school to move to Los Angeles to follow her dream of making it big. She also changed her name from Kesha to Ke$ha with a money sign.
Joan Chandos Baez ( /ˈbaɪ.ɛz/) (born January 9, 1941 as Joan Chandos Báez) is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician, and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace, and environmental justice. Baez has a distinctive vocal style, with a strong vibrato. [1] Her recordings include many topical songs and material dealing with social issues. Baez began her career performing in coffeehouses in Boston and Cambridge, and rose to fame as an unbilled performer at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She began her recording career in 1960, and achieved immediate success.
In 1890 she published her first novel: At Fault. Her early work was influenced by her favorite writers: Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Molière. She wrote several more novels and short stories, with her most famous (and also most controversial) being: The Awakening. After publishing The Awakening “Chopin’s career was ruined by the critical and public reaction, she had difficulties finding publishers for later works and was ousted from local library groups.”i (Poupard, 1985) On August 20th 1904 Kate Chopin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while she was at a fair. On August 21st she went unconscious and died the next day.