Billie Holiday

[Harrold Wilson Gray]

On Apr 6, 2005, at 12:58 PM, George Thompson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Billie Holiday
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> WKCR, a local radio station, has begun a broadcast that will play every
> recording Billie Holiday ever made, some of them many times.  The
> broadcast has lasted 5 days so far -- it won't end until April 15 --
> and I have heard "Billie's Blues" 8 or 10 times, in different versions
> made across her career.  This song, which she wrote, contains the
> line "I have been your slave ever since I have been your babe" -- the
> line is repeated twice in the stanza and the stnaza is usually sung
> twice in the performance, at the beginning and at the end.
>
> In nearly all repetitions of this verse I clearly hear her singing "I
> have been your slave |every| since I have been your babe"  Is this
> found from other speakers?

Uh, you've never heard any other black person speak or sing? If Black
English had a standard, this use of "every" would be part of that
standard.

-Wilson Gray

> WKCR broadcasts on the internet at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/
> The jazz hounds among us who are out of range of the broadcast stations
> should check it out.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>>
>