ABSTRACT
The goal of this study is to analyze the selected song performances of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone through the prism of aesthetics, to show how African aesthetic features of sound quality and style of sound impart various African cultural values and motion sensibilities. I have shown some thematic commonalities and some Black female survivalist values in Smith, Holiday, and Simone’s lyrics in Chapter Four. However, I have an intense interest in determining how aural performance adds another, decidedly African dimension of value to their lyrics.1 Therefore, I am using Welsh Asante’s statement to support my premise that there are values embedded in Smith, Holiday, and Simone’s song performances that demonstrate numerous, decidedly African and African-derived aesthetics. In this chapter, I describe, examine, and evaluate the selected song performances of Smith, Holiday, and Simone in accordance with Welsh Asante’s (1994) conceptualization of a Pan-African aesthetic, Nzuri.
