ABSTRACT
I have shown that Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone share certain common social and cultural experiences or survivalist traditions. They express those experiences as common themes in their music. Kariamu Welsh Asante’s Pan-African aesthetic theory, Nzuri, sustains numerous Africancentered aesthetics and is therefore meta-criteria for my analysis of the song performances of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone.
