It was a warm summer night last year when Genevieve Sims first heard the singer Billie Holiday.

Listen In: Maggie Mayer, 8, performs her original tune that goes with her winning essay about Eubie Blake, composer, lyricist and pianist. Maggie Mayer's "Eubie Blake Superstar"

The singer's throaty lyrics were drifting from a radio clutched by a man in tattered clothes lying on a Downtown street.

Haunted by the music, Genevieve went home and listened to Ms. Holiday all night, falling asleep to her melodies.

Genevieve, who is 12, never forgot the lady who sang the blues and when National City Bank announced its 15th annual African American History Essay contest this February, which was focused on black musicians, she wrote about Ms. Holiday.

Yesterday, Genevieve walked away with one of the first-place prizes awarded at the Engineers Club, Downtown for her touching essay on the jazz singer.

Reminiscences of musicians such as Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Jimi Hendrix, Jay-Z and Diana Ross were all around the club's second-floor dining room.

Ms. Holiday was 44 when she died in 1959. She had lived the life of someone older, having survived drugs and alcohol, imprisonment, racism and depression.

Through her pain, she sang.

"Her music is able to open my feelings in a way I had never thought about before," wrote Genevieve, a student at Christ the Divine Teacher Catholic Academy in Aspinwall who has played guitar since age 8 and writes her own music.

Kati Falk, 14, of Campus School at Carlow, was another first-place winner.

She wrote about the Staple Singers, a family of musicians that gained fame for their positive lyrics and gospel, soul and rhythms and blues music.

Kati did not know the group, known as God's Greatest Hitmakers, until she was introduced to them about a year ago by her mom. That was fine with her. She enjoys music from the Who, Janice Joplin and "anything from the 1960s." Her father calls her his "hippie child."

Part of Kati's motivation to write her essay was to show that there are artists who are antithetical to many of the singers of today's music who "are so disrespectful toward women."

Kati plays piano, drums and guitar.

She said much of today's music is upsetting and that groups like the Staple Singers worked too hard to bring black musicians into the mainstream to have them "take that hard work and talk about nothing."

Her favorite lyrics from the Staple Singers come from a song in which they lament: If you don't respect yourself; Ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot, na, na, na, na. Respect yourself."

"Amen to that," wrote Kati.

Maggie Mayer, 8, in her pigtails and white stockings, was one of the youngest winners yesterday. The second-grader at the Falk Laboratory School at the University of Pittsburgh wrote about Eubie Blake, a composer, lyricist and pianist who penned "Shuffle Along," the first Broadway musical ever written and directed by black Americans.

Maggie, herself a piano player, discovered Mr. Blake while watching the "Broadway: The American Musical" series on PBS and her mom encouraged her to write about him.

Maggie wrote a song to accompany her essay. That song will be produced and aired on radio.

The 21 winners were chosen from among more than 500 entries. First-place winners received $500, second-place finishers earned $250, and third-place $100.