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

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.Stacy Holman Jones is assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Kaleidoscope Notes: Writing Women's Music and Organizational Culture and several essays on music, feminism, performance, autoethnography, and performative writing.

This is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical intervention. It provides ground zero-the starting place for the next generation of performance scholars who study desire, intimacy, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, torch singers, love's wounds, healing and hearing new musical sounds, lyrics for torching, new ways of writing and breathing our selves into being. Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Torch Singing is as lyrical and inviting as the songs that Stacy Holman Jones takes as her subject. The text itself is like a torch song, calling out for a response from the reader/listener. Moving among autobiography, critical ethnography, musicaland performance analysis, and music history (especially of the blues and Tin Pan Alley), this book is self-conscious and self-reflexive politically, intellectually, and methodologicall