Suits Me

Amazon.com Price: $18.76 (as of 10/11/2019 08:40 PST- Details)

ISBN13: 9780395957899
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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Description

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was once born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost no person knew the truth until the day he died, in Spokane in 1989. Over a fifty-year performing career, Billy Tipton fooled nearly everyone, including Duke Ellington and Norma Teagarden, five successive “wives” with whom Billy lived as a man, and three children who he “fathered.” As Billy Tipton herself said, “Some people might think I’m a freak or a hermaphrodite. I am not. I’m a normal person. This has been my choice.” This jazz-era biography evokes the rich popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story.
Billy Tipton was once a jazz performer who played in clubs during the Midwest for just about 50 years. Tipton never made the big time as a musician and ended up working as a booking agent in Spokane, Washington. Only with Tipton’s death in 1989 was once it revealed that the five-times-married father to three boys was once biologically female. Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography describes the transformation of Dorothy Tipton, a white Oklahoman who was once not allowed to play jazz because she was once a girl, into Billy Tipton, a male pianist and bandleader. The creator traces the life of this itinerant jazz musician over several decades and through changing constructions of gender.

Middlebrook, whose biography of Anne Sexton was once noted for its controversial use of tape recordings and notes made right through the poet’s psychiatric remedy, was once approached by Kitty Tipton Oakes, one of Billy’s former wives, to write this biography; she interviewed his/her friends, spouses, members of the family, and colleagues and found them to have different, yet universally sympathetic, readings of Tipton’s gender. Along with examining what gender is, Suits Me also asks to whom it belongs: the individual or the people who interact with the individual. –Rebecca Brown
ISBN13: 9780395957899
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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