Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf

by Stacy Holman Jones

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake―as willing deception and passive fate―Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope.

228 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Kat Ponte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slightly repetitive and obviously used for college courses (whose books written by professors always seem to repeat themselves to make the point they’re trying to teach their class) - but a great book nonetheless. The tone and verbiage of the book convey the soft romanticism of jazzy nightclubs with the mystique of the violent and sorrowful torch songs to which the books dedicates its pages.