41 Songs and 10 lyrics by Jazz and Blues singer, composer, performer and author Joan Cartwright.

Three essays and interviews with photographs by author and musician Joan Cartwright about the creation of blues in America by Africans captured for servitude on Euro-American plantations over a span of 400 years. This book should be read by music students and enthusiasts, alike.

In a 30-year span, jazz vocalist and composer Joan Cartwright has become a Diva in her own right. She's toured in 15 countries and has written over 60 songs. She produced both of her recordings, Feelin' Good and In Pursuit Of A Melody. With her daughter, Mimi Johnson of Caustic Dames, Joan is bridging the gap between the generations with Jazz Meets Hip-hop. Among her accomplishments as an entrepreneur, Joan has been a newspaper columnist, radio DJ, festival producer of Women in Jazz, a website designer for herself, Caustic Dames and an array of musicians, fine artists and entrepreneurs. Her claim to fame is that she is the only composer in the Freddie Hubbard Song Book, which includes her composition, Sweet Return. Joan has rubbed shoulders with the greatest jazz artists in the world, including Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Hubbard, Betty Carter and McCoy Tyner. She and her daughter own a recording studio in Atlanta, Georgia, where they produce jazz, blues, hiphop, spoken word and cable television specials. Semi-retired, Joan performs at Ellington's Jazz Bar and Restaurant on Sanibel Island, Florida, one weekend a month. Her book is a memoir of tours in Europe and the music she's written over the years.

First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model. With acuity and candor, longtime feminist activist Hayes elucidates why this music scene matters. Veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer, and cultural historian Linda Tillery provides a foreword.

This is the hard cover edition of Joan Cartwright's first book of memoirs, poetry, songs, and lectures.

Advances in technology allow us to see the invisible: fetal heartbeats, seismic activity, cell mutations, virtual space. Yet in an age when experience is so intensely mediated by visual records, the centuries-old realization that knowledge gained through sight is inherently fallible takes on troubling new dimensions. This book considers the ways in which seeing, over time, has become the foundation for knowing (or at least for what we think we know). A. Joan Saab examines the scientific and socially constructed aspects of seeing in order to delineate a genealogy of visuality from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating that what we see and how we see it are often historically situated and culturally constructed. Through a series of linked case studies that highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing—hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, to name just a few—she interrogates the relationship between “visions” and visuality. This focus on the strange and the wonderful in understanding changing notions of visions and visual culture is a compelling entry point into the increasingly urgent topic of technologically enhanced representations of reality. Accessibly written and thoroughly enlightening, Objects of Vision is a concise history of the connections between seeing and knowing that will appeal to students and teachers of visual studies and sensory, social, and cultural history.