* A version of this paper was presented at the conference Music and Gesture, held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., August 28-30, 2003. I wish also to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Standard Research Grant (2002-05), during which period I conducted the research and writing of this paper.

1. Leslie Gourse, The Billie Holiday Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 76.

2. The four tribute songs on the Decca session are "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-ness If I Do," "Keeps on a Rainin,'" "Do Your Duty," and "Gimme a Pigfoot."

3. Stuart Nicholson comments on the similarities between the Armstrong version and the Holiday tribute (Nicholson, Billie Holiday (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 115). Holiday's first Commodore session in April 1939 featured Holiday backed by Frankie Newton and his Caf� Society Orchestra, recording "Strange Fruit," "Yesterdays," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," and "Fine and Mellow." See Nicholson, 263-64.

4. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.

5. Ibid., 20.

6. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 229.

7. Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992/1990), 6.

8. Floyd, 125.

9. Mackey, 76. Mackey's use of the terms verb and noun here owe their origins to Amiri Baraka's "Swing--From Verb to Noun" (first published in LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 1963).

10. Floyd, 96-97.

11. For my analysis, I will refer to performance transcriptions, however I do not offer such examples as a comprehensive representation of the performance details. The notated versions are useful for their function of capturing pitch and rhythm.

12. Gates, 123.

13. Arnold Rose, The Singer and the Voice; Vocal Physiology and Technique for Singers, Foreword by Harold Rosenthal (New York, St. Martin's Press; London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 49.

14. Ibid., 50.

15. Ibid., 50.

16. Ernst Levy and Sigmund Levarie, Musical Morphology: A Discourse and Dictionary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 301-02.

17. Holiday, quoted in Arnold Shaw, Black Popular Music in America: From the Spirituals, Minstrels, and Ragtime to Soul, Disco, and Hip-Hop (New York: Schirmer Books; London: Collier Macmillan, 1986), 135.

18. Gioia, 18.

19. Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 44-45.

20. The song "Tain't Nobody's Biz-ness if I Do," words and music by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins, was first published in 1922. Copyright MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA INC.

21. Schuller, 91.

22. Gourse, 135.

23. The song "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, was first published in 1932. Copyright 1932, 1933 by Warner Brothers, Inc.

24. I am borrowing the concept of "adopting and exceeding a structure" from Julia Kristeva, whose understanding of pheno-text (structural features of language, the rules) and geno-text (expressive features of language, the individual manipulation of the rules) resonates with my discussion of style and feeling. See Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 86.