Judith Tick

A professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, Tick blends her understanding of the era with recent interviews and newly accessible digital copies of Black-owned newspapers of the time. 

But Tick, who is a Professor Emerita of music history at Northeastern University, doesn’t help things by lapsing into academic prose.

From early on, music was Fitzgerald’s salvation. It was where she lived. She could lose herself in it and go somewhere else, no matter what was happening around her. Northeastern University music historian Judith Tick imagines the young girl “singing by herself in a corner of a recess schoolyard and looking happy, smiling and laughing.” […]