Listening to Lady Day: An exploration of the creative (re)negotiation of identity revealed in the life narratives and music lyrics of Billie Holiday

Abstract

Music lyrics as well as the narratives occurring in other non‐traditional discourses provide many opportunities to examine the social construction of identities for racial others and women. These forms of communication offer an opportunity to explore the ways in which marginalizing and otherwise oppressive dominant narratives may be deconstructed in an attempt at self definition or as a means of coping with living on the social periphery. In this study, these “texts”; provide fertile ground for the exploration of both the historically hegemonic identity construction of social others as well as current ones; and they do this while simultaneously revealing counter hegemonic responses to African American women's racialized, gendered and class‐based circumstances through an investigation of the autobiography, interviews and music lyrics of Billie Holiday.

Key concepts:

• Billie Holiday
• black women's narratives
• narrative identity construction
• rhetorical criticism