Soulful jazz singer Billie Holiday is remembered today for her unique sound, troubled personal history, and a catalogue that includes such resonant songs as "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child." Holiday and her music were also strongly shaped by religion, often in surprising ways. Religion Around Billie Holiday examines the spiritual and religious forces that left their mark on the performer during her short but influential life.

Mixing elements of biography with the history of race and American music, Tracy Fessenden explores the multiple religious influences on Holiday's life and sound, including her time spent as a child in a Baltimore convent, the echoes of black Southern churches in the blues she encountered in brothels, the secular riffs on ancestral faith in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Jewish songwriting culture of Tin Pan Alley. Fessenden looks at the vernacular devotions scholars call lived religion-the Catholicism of the streets, the Jewishness of the stage, the Pentecostalism of the roadhouse or the concert arena-alongside more formal religious articulations in institutions, doctrine, and ritual performance.

Insightful and compelling, Fessenden's study brings unexpected materials and archival voices to bear on the shaping of Billie Holiday's exquisite craft and indelible persona. Religion Around Billie Holiday illuminates the power and durability of religion in the making of an American musical icon.

About the Author

Tracy Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University and the author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature.

Reviews

"A focused, enlightening examination of the gifted singer."

-Nick Ripatrazone The Millions

"This beautiful, brilliantly charted exploration of religion around Billie Holiday is overflowing with insights into the woman, the music, the milieu, and religious aspects of personal and collective struggle. Informed, critically discerning, and in gorgeous prose, this is exemplary humanities scholarship, a rare and exciting achievement."

-John Corrigan,author of Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America

"Fessenden's work has significant value, particularly for the scholar invested in lived religion or the history of religion, jazz, and American popular culture."

-Adam Sweatman Reading Religion

"It's refreshing to read a nonfiction text so freewheeling, and to encounter a scholar who so delights in making observations for the sheer wit of them. Fessenden is interested in Holiday's contemporaries and the coincidences of her career, and these aren't artificially forced into an argument."

-Katherine Lucky Commonweal

"From first to last, the prose is consistently compelling, the insights sharp and often surprising. One comes away from this book knowing more about lots of things and admiring the seamless interweaving. It will be impossible to hear Holiday's music the same way."

-David W. Stowe Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"With beautiful prose and nuanced analysis, Fessenden navigates the reader through the religious landscape that shaped Holiday's life and career and tunes our ear to listen for how the soundscape and spirituality of those religious sources shaped her artistry. What emerges is a rich and compelling portrait at the intersection of Holiday's personal history, American Catholicism, blues and jazz culture, and the currents of race and gender in American life."

-Judith Weisenfeld,author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

"Illuminating, graceful, insightful, and bold, Tracy Fessenden's marvelous interpretation of Billie Holiday is no mere biography. Religion Around Billie Holiday is an extension of, and improvisation on, the big questions shaping Fessenden's work. Holiday is not only, in Fessenden's imagination, an exemplary narrative subject. She also challenged the naturalization of American racial, gendered, and religious norms. Through her, Fessenden brilliantly shows us the fault lines in identity that were there all along, like more strange fruit."

-Jason C. Bivins,author of Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion

"A hungry, centrifugal curiosity animates Fessenden's writing. At times, her sense of 'religion around' seems capacious enough to include nothing less than America itself. . . . The reward is richness of scope: every page brings a new tumble down another rabbit hole of twentieth-century American cultural history."

-Brett Grainger American Catholic Studies

"Joining Matthew J. Cressler's important study of Vatican II and Black Power in mid-century Chicago with Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017) is Fessenden's towering close reading of an African American vocalist whose Catholic-informed life, and others' memory of it, reflect her discursive and performative treatment as the patron saint of jazz."

-Vaughn A. Booker Material Religion

"Religion Around Billie Holiday is Fessenden's own performance of what listening around a life allows one to hear of religion and of America more broadly. She does it in a beautiful way."

-Hannah C. Garvey American Religion

Book Information
ISBN 9780271080956
Author Tracy Fessenden
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press
Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 26mm