Irene Britton Smith

Irene was born December 22, 1907 in Chicago. At the American Conservatory she studied with Stella Roberts and Leo Sowerby, she also received her Bachelor of Music degree there in 1943. For more than 40 years she taught in Chicago's elementary schools, she specialized in Phonovisual approach to teaching reading. She got her Masters of Music degree at DePaul University under Leon Stein. Before she completed it though she worked in composition at The Juilliard School of Music with Vittorio Giannini. During the summer she worked with Irving fine at the Berkshire Music Center in 1950, Wayne Barlow at the Eastman School of Music, and with Nadi Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France in 1958. Some of the things that she has composed herself are Sinfonietta in three movements for orchestra in 1956, Fairest Lord Jesus in 1945, a long with many many more. She died on Feb. 15 1997, so you can see she lived to be 92 and has accomplished a lot of things in her lifetime that are still known today.

http://africlassical.blogspot.com/2007/12/irene-britton-smith-1907-1999-african.html

Bessie Smith "Nobody knows you when you're down and out" 1929. The song has an ABA form. There is an band in the background; sounds like a banjo and trumpet. There are 3 verses and a chorus and also an bridge when the trumpet is playing by himself. The song is about how a man has left her and how she feels now that he is gone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MzU8xM99Uo

Julia Amanda Perry

Julia Amanda Perry was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1924 but she was raised in Akron, Ohio and died there also. She was an African American woman that composed during the neoclassical style period.  She earned her bachelors and maters from Westminster choir college and also studied at the Julliard school. In 1959 she taught for a short time at Florida A&M and Atlanta University. She had a stroke in 1971 and was so determined to continue to compose that she taught hers how to write with her left hand. She is discussed in The Music of Black Americans: A History by Eileen Southern; it talks about her style of music, the texture she uses and the many different forms she wrote in.

http://africlassical.blogspot.com/2007/12/julia-amanda-perry-1924-1979-african.html

Julia Amanda Perry singing "Im a Poor lil Orphan (Negro Spiritual). There is an organ and just vocals. It has a very soulful sound to it and also sort of an opera feel to it. There is an ABA form to it, she starts off in a low voice and then when the chorus comes she gets to a really high soprano notes. I think she does this it really emphasize what she is trying to say or the story shes trying to tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6fQctPhHwQ

Dorothy Rudd Moore

Dorothy was born on June 4, 1940 in New Castle, Delaware. She was interested in music at a very young age thanks to her mother who was a singer and very supportive of her. The mathematical aspects of music were really appealing to her. She married a man named Kermit Moore who was a cellist. She attended school at Howard University. She also attended American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in 1963, had private study with Chou Wen Chung in 1965 and private voice lessons with Lola Hayes in 1972. She was a teacher at Harlem School of the Arts from 1965-66, New York University in 1969, Bronx Community College in 1971. She gave private piano, voice, sight-singing, and ear-training lessons in 1968. She has many different pieces of work; chamber pieces, song cycles, orchestral music, and an opera. "From the Dark Tower" is what she called her "black power statement" in reference to the pain and anger she felt at pervasive racism and class privilege. 

http://composers.com/dorothy-rudd-moore

Billie Holiday "The Very Thought of You". It is the piano, trumpet and her vocals. It sounds as if she would sing this at some type of night club.  In the beginning it starts off with about 2 counts of just the piano then her voice comes in with the piano accompanying her. Then there are 8 counts of her singing then the trumpet comes in for about an 8 count phrase then she comes in with about 4 counts of her finishing the song. It has an ABA forum 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPJuFxl0bxY

Louise Juliette Talma

She was born October 31, 1906 in Arcachon, France. Her father passed away when she was young and her mother was a singer. Her mother and her moved to New York City in the summer of 1914. She studied chemistry at Columbia University while pursuing piano and composition studies at the Institute of Musical Art. she won the Seligman Prize for composition also. She traveled to Fontainebleau, France in 1926 to 1939, to study at the american Conservatory. She studied under very prestigious people and at that time she was a teacher herself as well as a student. she taught at Hunter College for over 50 years and left in 1979. She became the first American to teach at the Fontainebleau School. 
"It took some time before I knew I was a composer…. I thought all composers were dead. Composers were people you found in a book, who had written all this wonderful music that you heard at concerts. I knew from a very early age that I wanted to compose, but the idea that there were actually people out there now, in the flesh, actively writing music, did not occur to me for quite some time." This is a quote from what she said in the New York Times. Some of her early compositions are "Song of the Songless (1928), Three Madrigals (1928), Two Dances (1934) and In principio erat verbum (1939). She was the first woman to receive the award of Guggenheim fellowship. In the 1970s she went back to Fontainebleau to study during the summer. She composed a piece called Summer sounds for Clarinet and String Quartet written between 1969 and 1973. She is one of Americas foremost composers of the Twentieth century. 

http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Sp-Z/Talma-Louise-Juliette.html

Roots of Blues Ma Rainey
It starts off with a banjo playing then her vocals. The form is ABA. At the end of each stanza she has sort of a drag to each word. It is 12 bar blues. The verses are 12 counts and the chorus is 8 counts. It has a summery feel like maybe it was a hot day and the banjo player and Rainey were sitting on the porch having a good time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsEsjN8dGQg

Florence Beatrice Smith Price

Florence was born on April 9, 1887 in Little Rock (Pulaski county). Her parents names were James H. Smith and Florence Gulliver Smith. When she was little she had musical training from her mother and she also had musical pieces published while she was in high school. She was very well educated, she graduated as valedictorian in 1903 then went to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and in 1907 she got her degree as an organist and as a piano teacher. With a lot of racial tensions in Arkansas in the 1920s the family moved to Chicago in 1927. She kept up with her music the American Conservatory of Music and Chicago Musical College. In 1928 G. Schirmer, a major publishing firm, accepted for publication Price's At the Cotton Gin. She won many awards in 1932 for competitions sponsored by the Rodman Wanamaker foundation for her Piano Sonata in E Minor. Florence's art songs and spiritual arrangements were frequently performed by well-known artist of the day. Overall she composed more than 300 works that ranged from small teaching pieces for piano to large-scale compositions such as symphonies and concertos, as well as instrumental chamber music, vocal compositions, and music for radio. Her music style is a mixture of black spirituals and European music.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1742

You can really here the mixture between the black spiritual and the European style. It sounds like an orchestra mixed with piano, horns, bass, and flutes. Im not exactly sure what the form is but if I had to guess I would say that it is AABC. It has a spring time sound to it. Each phrase is about 12 counts long and then there is a bridge that about 4 counts and then the chorus is 8 counts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xepfezwe1KM