San Antonio College Library

A celebrated talent shares what she has learned from her experience. From struggling to get a career under way to dealing with her own personal doubts, Fleming is candid and articulate about her art, the roles played by a solid education, supportive mentors, and mental and physical discipline. Here is a look at the real life of an artist today, confronted by the loneliness of touring, the challenges of stress, coping with business issues, and, most...

Popular music owes greatly to the spirit of rebellion. In all of its diversified, experimental, modern-day micro-genres, music's roots were first watered by good old-fashioned social dissension- its incendiary heights pushed heavenward by radicals and rogue revolutionaries. And perhaps none are more influential and non-conformist than women. Always first in line to give convention a sound thrashing, women in music have penned sonic masterpieces, championed...

A complete account of the triumphs and difficulties of the brilliant and high-tempered Nina Simone, whose distinctive voice and music occupy a singular place in the canon of American song. One of eight children in a proud North Carolina black family, the prodigiously talented child was trained in classical piano through the charity of a local white woman, then devastatingly rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music--a dream deferred that would forever...

The noted singer's notes from abroad, written during a nonstop 1980 concert tour through Europe and Australia, present the Divine Miss M's bawdy, raunchy, innocent, and perceptive views of the world at large.

"Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest-paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties. This book--a revised and expanded edition of the classic biography of this extraordinary artist--debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937"--Dustjacket.

An autobiography of the Soviet opera singer who was stripped of her citizenship while traveling for "artistic purposes."

Complete with never-before-revealed details about the sex, violence, and drugs in her life, this biography reveals the incredibly turbulent life of Motown artist Mary Wells. Based in part on four hours of previously unreleased and unpublicized deathbed interviews with Wells, this account delves deeply into her rapid rise and long fall as a recording artist, her spectacular romantic and family life, the violent incidents in which she was a participant,...

"Inspired by the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, an intimate and vivid look at the legendary life of Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist who evolved into a chart-topping chanteuse and committed civil rights activist. From music journalist and former Spin and Vibe editor-in-chief Alan Light comes a biography of incandescent soul singer and Black Power icon Nina Simone, one of the most influential, provocative,...

Nina Simone--the "high priestess of soul"--Sets the story of her tumultuous, passionate life straight in "I Put a Spell on You."