Billie Holiday (1915-1959): Legendary, iconic and innovative singer, songwriter, ensemble leader

SOUND PROJECTIONS 

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER,  2015

VOLUME ONE                                     NUMBER TWO

THELONIOUS MONK

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

ESPERANZA SPALDING
January 31-February 6

MARY LOU WILLIAMS
February 7-13

STEVE COLEMAN
February 14-20

JAMES BROWN
February 21-27

CURTIS MAYFIELD
February 28-March 6

ARETHA FRANKLIN
March 7-13

GEORGE CLINTON
March 14-20

JAMES CARTER
March 21-27

TERENCE BLANCHARD
March 28-April 3

BILLIE HOLIDAY
April 4-10
[In glorious tribute and gratitude to this great legendary artist we celebrate her centennial year in 2015]
 
VIJAY IYER
April 11-17

CHARLES  MINGUS
April 18-24
 

FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY
by Kofi Natambu
 
Deep within her voice
there is a bird
and inside that bird is a song
and inside that song is a light
and inside that light is a Joy
and inside that Joy is a Monster
and inside that Monster is a memory
and inside that memory is a celebration
and inside that celebration is a hunger
and inside that hunger is a dance
and inside that dance is a moan
and inside that moan is a majesty
and inside that majesty is a longing
and inside that longing is a history
and inside that history is a mystery
and inside that mystery is a fear
and inside that fear is a truth
and inside that truth is a passion
and inside that passion is a whisper
and inside that whisper is a wolf
and inside that wolf is a howl
and inside that howl is a lover
and inside that lover is an escape
and inside that escape is a regret
and inside that regret is a fantasy
and inside that fantasy is a death
and inside that death is a life
and inside that life is a woman
and inside that woman is a scream
and inside that scream is a release
and inside that release is a power
and inside that power is a voice
and inside that voice is a song
and inside that song is a singer
and inside that singer is a Holiday
and inside that Holiday is Billie

Poem from THE MELODY NEVER STOPS. Past Tents Press,  1991



THE DAY LADY DIEDby Frank O'Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfield Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face
on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
 
This immortal poem about Billie written upon her death in 1959 is from LUNCH POEMS by Frank O'Hara (City Lights, 1961)-- Pocket Poets Series 

WKCR presents: The Billie Holiday Centennial Festival

Tuesday, April 7th marks the 100th birthday anniversary of the one and only Billie Holiday. We'll be celebrating the hauntingly honest, lyrical virtuosity of Lady Day with a weeklong centennial broadcast, featuring her entire 1933-1959 discography, as well as on-air interviews with musicians and scholars. WKCR has a precedent of commemorating Holiday and her incredibly important contributions to vocal jazz, jazz as a whole, and Black music in our annual birthday broadcast schedule and in a special 360-hour Billie Holiday Festival that aired in 2005.


Tune in to WCKR 89.9FM-NY or online at www.wkcr.org from Sunday, April 5th at 2pm through Friday, April 9th at 9pm as we spend a week listening to and examining the life, career, and distinctive sound of Lady Day. We'll be posting a full broadcasting schedule soon, but so far, look forward to a combination of continuous and show-specific programming throughout the week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/arts/music/for-billie-holidays-100th-birthday-tributes-and-new-releases.html

Music

For Billie Holiday’s 100th Birthday, Tributes and New Releases

By BEN RATLIFF 

APRIL 2, 2015

New York Times 

Billie Holiday, circa 1952, seven years before her death. Credit Bob Willoughby/Redferns-Getty Images

In Billie Holiday’s “I Cried for You,” recorded at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem in 1941, time feels unimportant. She’s flooding the entire thing, doing a long yell, a game of phrasing and pitch, with words delayed and shaken and skywritten.

She sounds unbothered by the placement of the bar lines but grounded by her relationship with the song’s form and the band’s groove. (The audience knows: It is screaming.) At 26, she sounds as if she has been on this particular stage all her life, playing with the song’s possibilities, and isn’t ready to leave. “ ‘I Cried’ was my damn meat,” she wrote in her memoir, “Lady Sings the Blues.” The song connects backward to Louis Armstrong’s phrasing and silences and Bessie Smith’s volcanic projection; it connects forward to purposeful, idiosyncratic, brash or subtle or sideways vocal phrasers in the jazz and blues aesthetic and beyond: Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, Shirley Caesar, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, Erykah Badu. Holiday died in June 1959, at 44, sounding twice that age. This Tuesday she would have turned 100. This is as good a reason as any to think about her essence, and it makes her the focus of concerts and albums over the next several weeks by singers who have been doing their own thinking, as well as a critical biography by the jazz historian John Szwed, “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth,” published this week.

Cassandra Wilson has a completely different vocal tone from Billie Holiday’s: broad and dark rather than thin and piercing. Her new record, “Coming Forth by Day” (Ojah/Legacy), presents songs that Holiday recorded, but revised beyond recognition, with a band including the guitarist Kevin Breit and the rhythm section of the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave’s band. There’s no attempt at an impersonation of Holiday’s sound, whether with a small swing band or a string orchestra. There’s a reason for this.

Cassandra Wilson - You Go to My Head (Audio) Video by CassandraWilsonVEVO
 

“She was the kind of woman who did things her way,” Ms. Wilson said recently, speaking about Holiday and often slipping into present tense. We were in Woodstock, N.Y., in the barn formerly owned by the drummer Levon Helm, where Ms. Wilson was rehearsing her band for a tour. (She will play the new music in a concert at the Apollo in Harlem next Friday, after a ceremony that will put a Holiday plaque under the marquee.) “And so I think the music has to match that. She was very defiant, very stubborn. But it’s not a rebel-without-a-cause-type stubbornness. I think deep down she feels certain inequalities in her world, she senses the balance of power, and she’s part of that energy that challenges that.

Billie Holiday at a Commodore recording session in 1939. The musicians are, from left, Johnny Williams, Frankie Newton, Stan Payne and Kenneth Hollon. Credit Charles Peterson/Hulton Archive-Getty Images

“Coming Forth by Day” is part of the post-tragic phase in the history of the perception of Billie Holiday. It’s not enough to see her as a passive or static entity — a victim, a sufferer, a collection of vocal mannerisms. The closer you look, the less she seems stuck in her time. She sang with Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman in the 1930s, and recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939, a brave and piercing meditation on American racism. But she wasn’t widely known outside jukeboxes and jazz circles, among either black or white audiences, until the mid-’40s. In 1947 she was convicted on drug charges, spent almost a year in jail and lost her cabaret card, preventing her from performing anywhere that sold alcohol. It is generally known that she was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was looking for a splashy arrest; her conviction started more than a decade of almost constant law-enforcement surveillance.

   Billie Holiday / Strange Fruit/ Commodore 526A Video   by  Taro Cross

“Lady Sings the Blues,” written by Holiday and William Dufty — long tainted by its inaccuracies but a much better book than its reputation suggests — was candid about drug use, which gave it an underworld allure. But Mr. Szwed argues that it was meant to help restore her reputation and get her cabaret card back; she was controlling her own story. It ends on a note of rehabilitation and argues progressively for addiction to be seen as an illness. “The story of her life was made public as part of the first war against drugs,” Mr. Szwed writes. He adds, “Yet she quickly realized that it was possible for her to use some of the same media and methods to defend and redefine herself.”

Socially, Holiday lived with purpose and curiosity, hanging out with musicians, Hollywood stars, professors, female impersonators. But she also sang dark songs about sorrow and loving bad men. For decades after her death, she was understood as a doomed hero, especially through the tragic narrative of the Diana Ross movie version of “Lady Sings the Blues.” The change in that understanding has come slowly ever since, partly thanks to books that go beyond biography and look into her meaning and reception: Mr. Szwed’s, as well as others by Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert G. O’Meally.

But it’s also partly thanks to musicians who have made records around Holiday and talked about her publicly, including Abbey Lincoln — whose thoughts about Holiday cycled through admiration, skepticism (in a 1962 interview, she called Holiday a masochist) and finally a full, complex respect — and Ms. Wilson.

Holiday was a wicked maker of sound. Many have compared her voice to a horn, but Ms. Wilson compares it to the generalized sound of a jazz ensemble of the 1930s as heard on record, flattened out through mono and single-microphone technology. (She stands by “Strange Fruit” as Holiday’s greatest accomplishment.) The pianist and educator Ran Blake, who has taught courses on Holiday’s music at New England Conservatory for many years, particularly loves her moody recordings for Decca in the mid-’40s, including “No More” and “Deep Song”; he praises the rhythmic and harmonic confidence she found through subtlety, without overemoting. “Students who try to notate ‘Deep Song,’ ” he told me in a recent conversation, “find it vastly harder than five or six bars of a Bartok piece.

Cassandra Wilson Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

 

Billie Holiday - Deep Song (Decca Records 1947) Video by RoundMidnightTV

Cécile McLorin Salvant, who will perform a concert of Billie Holiday’s songs next Friday in the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, first heard Holiday through “Lady in Satin,” a divisive album released a year before her death. Her voice is striking but shaky, diminished in range and volume; the arrangements are suffused with strings.

“She sounded like an old witch,” Ms. Salvant said. Later she discovered Holiday’s earlier music, and found in the singer a genius of rhythm and of a kind of acting or storytelling. “The way she says certain words is pretty intense and crazy,” she told me, citing “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone,” from 1949. “The sounds she uses goes beyond words,” she explained. “She’s resigned; it’s kind of like a moan. She takes her time.”

 

Billie Holiday - I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone (Live) Video by jerrytravers1

The baritone singer José James has also made a record inspired by Holiday, “Yesterday I Had the Blues,” which Blue Note released last week. He says that Holiday’s Verve recordings in the 1950s taught him everything he knows about phrasing and harmony in jazz singing; he singles out “I Don’t Want to Cry Anymore,” from 1955, for its sudden drop into a tonality that sounds almost Middle Eastern. (He pinpoints the spot: It’s on the line “some careless thing you would do.”)

 

Billie Holiday - I Don't Want To Cry Anymore (1955) Video by Okmusix

Like Ms. Wilson, Mr. James felt a strong obligation to make his record original, and the only way to do that was for himself and his band — including the pianist Jason Moran, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Eric Harland — to slow down. The record has an after-hours, outside-the-clock feeling, a bit like “I Cried for You.” But he saved some of his strongest praise for “Lady in Satin,” which he compared to late Coltrane in its depth and mystery, and which scared him at first too. “At that point she couldn’t lean on anything except her spirit,” he figured. “To me, that album more than any other proves how committed she was to really expressing the sort of maze of the human heart. She was really a professor. And she was trying to figure it out for herself too. Yeah, she’s super-real. She’s somebody who I need to study with for the rest of my life. Not just as a singer, but as a person.”

José James Credit Adrian Ruiz De Hierro/European Pressphoto Agency

Lady Day, Celebrated

CASSANDRA WILSON Next Friday at 8 p.m., Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street, Harlem; apollotheater.org.

CéCILE MCLORIN SALVANT Next Friday and Saturday at 7 and 9:30 p.m., Appel Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, jazz.org.

ANDY BEY, MOLLY JOHNSON AND SARAH ELIZABETH CHARLES IN ‘CELEBRATING LADY DAY’ Next Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center; jazz.org.

‘QUEEN ESTHER SINGS BILLIE HOLIDAY: THE RARE SIDES’ Tuesdays, April 14, 21 and 28 from 6 to 11 p.m., Minton’s, 206 West 118th Street, Harlem; mintonsharlem.com.

‘WHEN THE MOON TURNS GREEN: THE MYTH AND MUSIC OF BILLIE HOLIDAY’ A discussion with the writers John Szwed, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert G. O’Meally on April 28 at 7:30 p.m., Harlem Stage Gatehouse, 150 Convent Avenue, at 135th Street, Hamilton Heights; harlemstage.org.

JOSÉ JAMES May 7 and 8 at 7:30 p.m., Harlem Stage Gatehouse; harlemstage.org.

WKCR’S BILLIE HOLIDAY CENTENNIAL FESTIVAL This radio station’s weeklong programming examines her life, career and sound from Sunday through next Friday.

A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Moving Beyond a Singer’s Tragedy. 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life

April 3, 2015

The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life

By Richard Brody

The New Yorker

Billie Holiday, like all great artists, is as distinctive, as idiosyncratic, as original off-stage and off-mike as on. Credit Photograph by Charles Hewitt / LIFE / Getty

Some biographies of artists take in the whole life—preferably with equal attention to the work, and integrating the two elements to the extent that the work invites it. Others offer a bio-slice or synecdoche, centered on one particular period, relationship, or field of activity to provide an exemplary angle on the life and work. John Szwed’s brief but revelatory new book, “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth” (Viking), which comes out this week—just under the wire for her centenary (Holiday was born April 7, 1915)—is in another category. It’s a meta-biography, about the creation of Holiday’s public image in media of all sorts: print, television, movies, and, of course, her recordings, but with special attention to the composition of her autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” which was published in 1956.

Szwed, whose other books include a superb biography of Sun Ra, “Space is the Place,” reconstructs, through ardent archival research as well as his own interviews, the circumstances of the making of Holiday’s book. In the process, he both evaluates the first-hand significance of “Lady Sings the Blues” as Holiday’s factual and emotional account of her own life—as a record of Holiday’s experiences and ideas—and also, secondarily, treats the writing and the publication of the book as important events in Holiday’s life. She died on July 17, 1959, at the age of forty-four, and had been suffering from liver disease and heart disease. She was, as she writes, addicted to heroin “on and off” since the early nineteen-forties. Szwed says that, when she went to the hospital in 1959, “No one at the hospital knew who she was, and with needle marks on her body, she was left in the hall for hours, since the institution was not allowed to treat drug addicts.”

Holiday’s recording career was precocious: she made her first records in 1933, with a small group headed by Benny Goodman (who wasn’t yet a big-band leader). On the very first page of the first chapter, Szwed writes wisely about the timing of Holiday’s own book, nothing that at the time it was published, “jazz had moved from being the popular music of 1940s America to a more rarefied place in the public view.” This fact, for Szwed, mitigated the response that Holiday’s book received. The critics now defending jazz were mainly “closet high modernists who wanted no mention of drugs, whorehouses, or lynching brought into discussions of the music.” And those are among the subjects addressed, in unsparing detail, in Holiday’s book. (Among the critics who attacked the book was Whitney Balliett, this magazine’s longtime jazz critic, who wrote about it in the Saturday Review.)

The first section of Szwed’s book is one of the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I’ve read. First, he establishes the bona fides of William Dufty, Holiday’s collaborator on the book, rescuing him from charges of being a hack. Dufty was an award-winning journalist at the New York Post at a time when it was a leading liberal paper; he and his wife, Maely Daniele, a longtime friend of Holiday’s, welcomed her to their apartment as “a place of refuge from the police, her husband Louis McKay, reporters, and the various unsavory figures who haunted her life.” Dufty did the actual writing, based on long and detailed conversations with Holiday augmented by archival research that sparked her recollections.

Szwed sketches a handful of the book’s divergences from the independently established biographical record, starting with the legendary first sentences: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.” Szwed explains, “When Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married . . . She was born not in Baltimore but in Philadelphia. Some questioned her claim of having been raped at age ten.”

Holiday’s book is unstinting in its depiction of the hardships she faced. As a child, she heard from her great-grandmother about life as a slave; she grew up away from her mother, in the home of a cousin who beat her; she scrubbed floors in a “whorehouse” in order to hear music on the record player; and the man who raped her when she was ten was a neighbor. She quit school at twelve and travelled to New York alone, where she worked first as a maid and then as a prostitute. Jailed and released, she moved in with her mother, who lived in Harlem. They were on the verge of eviction when Holiday, who was about fifteen, got a job singing—more or less by accident—at a local nightspot. Holiday details the roughness of the world of music, exacerbated by relentless racism—travelling through the South in the age of Jim Crow, being forced to darken her skin with makeup in order to perform in Detroit. She describes in detail her addiction to heroin, her resulting troubles with the law, and its impact on her career.

For all its confessional frankness and accusatory clarity, there is, as Szwed reveals, much more to her story—and the circumstances of the composition of “Lady Sings the Blues” are an exemplary part of it.

Delving into earlier drafts of “Lady Sings the Blues” and other archival materials, Szwed finds echoes of the book in other published sources to which Holiday had referred Dufty as particularly reliable. Holiday told Dufty some stories that were ultimately kept out of the book, including the agonizing home abortion that her mother forced her to undergo as a teen. But Szwed finds that the book’s most important omissions were demanded by lawyers (including one representing Holiday and McKay) and by many of the public figures who played major roles in Holiday’s life and autobiography.

In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of “Citizen Kane.”

In 1941, Welles wanted to make a film called “The Story of Jazz,” in collaboration with Duke Ellington. It would be set in the nineteen-teens and twenties, centered on the rise of Louis Armstrong, playing himself. He wanted Holiday to play Bessie Smith. Welles’s movie, Szwed writes, was “intended to be radically innovative, mixing together different styles of jazz, using the surrealist drawings of Oskar Fischinger.” It was put off, Szwed reports, due to the start of the Second World War. When Welles went to Rio to make “It’s All True,” he thought that the jazz story could be woven into it—but his filming of “the everyday interaction of races in Brazil” soured Welles’s studio, RKO, on the entire production.

Holiday and Bankhead (whom she called “Banky”) had an intense, stormy relationship that lasted a few years. “Bankhead seemed obsessed by her,” Szwed writes, and the extent of her devotion is revealed in a section that was cut from Holiday’s book, an extraordinary story of Bankhead’s attempt to intervene personally with J. Edgar Hoover to exonerate Holiday of the drug charges that played havoc with her career. Yet they were driven apart by the same sorts of pressures that induced Bankhead to insist on being kept out of the book: Bankhead feared that her career would be destroyed by the revelation of their relationship.

Szwed makes a strong case for the autobiography’s authenticity—if not absolute veracity—as Holiday’s self-representation, or her representation of her self-image, especially in the light of all that it originally contained: “Shouldn’t an author have the right to create a self different from what readers think that they already know about her? If an autobiography is an account of a woman’s experiences, those experiences may be felt in one way as they happen, but in a completely different way later in life.” He interprets her book “as a form of autobiographical fiction” and suggests that “Holiday’s own changes or omissions were perhaps a means of preventing readers from knowing too much, of distancing herself to keep from being too closely identified with how others saw her, and especially from what the press had written about her.”

Nonetheless, he suggests that “Lady Sings the Blues” is “Dickensian”:

. . . filled as it is with miseries and rejections in a neighborhood in which houses of prostitution were the elite establishments. Her narrative of her artistic successes, tinged with bitterness toward the music business, the police, the courts, the press, and her mother, did not make for motivational reading. Nor did her revelations of her husbands as con men, pimps, and possible drug dealers sit well with her attempts to move beyond them near the end of the book.

I’d characterize the book’s Dickensian aspect more simply: it depicts a life lived in a pathologically, brazenly, unrepentantly, systematically, and casually racist country. Those are Holiday’s formative and constant experiences—racism and the hardness, the ugliness, the danger that it imposes as her unrelenting daily lot, and from which her ideas, her career, and her art are inseparable.

Her book details the exhausting physical and mental cruelty of racism—of the overt and institutionalized Southern kind that she sang about in “Strange Fruit,” and of the inflictions and duplicities of Northern life, such as segregation in the Fifty-Second Street clubs and in hotels; of the capriciousness and raw indifference of the law to blacks, to the poor, to women; of the degree of control exerted by police and judges and the lack of oversight of their authority; and of the use of drug policy as a mode of discrimination, social control, and racial injustice:

Women like Mom who worked as maids, cleaned office buildings, were picked up on the street on their way home from work and charged with prostitution. If they could pay, they got off. If they couldn’t they went to court, where it was the word of some dirty grafting cop against theirs.

I’m inclined to see this ambient fear as the source of any fudging in Holiday’s life story. “Lady Sings the Blues” may not be the whole truth, it may not even be nothing but the truth, but it’s all the truth that 1956 could handle. The times were censorious; much that had to do with sex couldn’t be published, and much that was deemed immoral wouldn’t be published. But, more important, Holiday offers, in “Lady Sings the Blues,” a picture of a world in which speaking the truth could get her slaughtered or imprisoned. In fact, many of the most awful experiences that she recounts were the result of merely trying to tell the truth—as when, at age ten, she admitted to being raped and was herself put in a home for wayward girls.

When Holiday spoke frankly of her drug addiction in the hope of being cured, she was, instead, imprisoned and stripped of her New York cabaret card, a license to perform where liquor was sold. She couldn’t work in nightclubs, effectively denying her access to her main source of income. As a result, she likens herself to a European postwar “D.P.”—displaced person—in New York. She specifically cites the troubles caused by her plain speaking in the ostensibly integrated and sophisticated downtown milieu, centered around Café Society, where she became a celebrity in the early forties.

Holiday’s unsparing depiction of her own activities is matched by an unsparing view of American society. “Lady Sings the Blues” is an exemplary report of the corruption and self-deception on which the country ran, and the constant threat of violence by which racist policies and practices were enforced. Whatever minor dodges or fudges the book may contain, the creation of a slightly skewed image for public consumption was, above all, a survival instinct in the face of relentless persecution.

Szwed goes further, delving into the other aspects of Holiday’s public persona—television and movies—to reveal just how resistant to harsh truths the media, especially audiovisual media, were at the time. (He includes, as a tantalizing aside, mention of the original plan for a movie adaptation of “Lady Sings the Blues,” which would have starred Dorothy Dandridge and been directed by Anthony Mann—whose 1954 film “The Glenn Miller Story” is among Hollywood’s best musical biopics.)

The second part of the book, centered on the music, is a much tougher nut for Szwed—or anyone—to crack. Though Holiday’s music, like all music, defies description, it doesn’t defy analysis, and Szwed, joining musicological precision to historical insight, traces the course of Holiday’s career through recordings. The account of Holiday’s music is insightful—he provides a diagrammed example of how she lags behind the beat, for instance, and an examines her melodic transformations of songs, showing that she “virtually recomposed” the songs that she sang. (He cites her 1937 recording of “I’ll Get By,” where “she reduces the melody’s range by repeating the same note (A) twenty-six times.”)

The basic idea is the crucial one: of all jazz singers, Holiday is the one who is a jazz musician, the equal in musical invention of the epoch-making instrumentalists who played alongside her. Szwed picks up on the negative effect on her career that her style risked when she was starting out. He quotes one club manager who told her, “You sing too slow . . . sounds like you’re asleep!” Music publishers—who still made lots of money from the sale of sheet music—didn’t like her singing, which didn’t present the melodies clearly enough. His analysis shines all the more brightly when he goes behind the scenes of the recordings to unfold the life of performance—her initial experience as a cabaret singer, going table to table for tips in the Prohibition-era cabarets on 133^rd Street, where she got her start; the peculiarities of the Fifty-Second Street clubs where she performed in the late thirties, which fostered a casual musical intimacy (“They were small, maybe fifteen feet by sixty feet, and were located in the basements of brownstone residences. They featured miniature tables for a few dozen people.”). He also explains the painful conditions of some of her later recordings, when her health and her voice were in bad shape (“The on-the-spot rehearsals, the false starts, retakes, and overdubs began to pile up on the tape reels”).

Szwed looks closely at her choice of songs and the origins of ones with which she’s closely associated, including “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” He details the life-threatening conflicts that she faced on the road in the South, where she performed as a member of the (white) Artie Shaw band. And he carefully considers the specifics of performance later in her career, when she sang at Carnegie Hall and recorded with far more elaborate arrangements than she had used in her youth—and focusses on the musical implications of these circumstances.

Above all, in analyzing her art, Szwed argues for the difference between the performer and the life—between the on-stage persona and the person: “Her ability to communicate strong and painful emotions through singing led many to believe that she was suffering and in real pain. But real suffering is not necessary for great singing, only the ability to communicate it in song . . . Like actors, singers create their identities as artists through words and music. . . . All we can know for certain is the performance itself.”

In general, the desire of even the most discerning critics, such as Szwed, to separate art and life, to analyze the formal traits of works as if they were dissociable from the experience and the emotions that inspire them and that they convey, is both noble and doomed—noble, because artists deserve to be honored for their achievements, and doomed, because the formal and systematic nature of those achievements isn’t what makes them endure. The individuality, the immense complexity of inner life that art conveys—including Holiday’s seemingly straightforward and instantly appreciable art—doesn’t occur in a laboratory-like isolation.

Holiday herself, in “Lady Sings the Blues,” took care to depict the unity of her personal life and her musicianship, starting with the haphazard circumstances under which she began her career, as a teen-age ex-prostitute in need of a fast way of making rent for herself and her mother. She specifically connects the way she sings with her experiences—and with her readiness to face them. (“Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island.”)

Holiday, like all great artists, is as distinctive, as idiosyncratic, as original off-stage and off-mike as on. The life doesn’t explain the art; rather, life is an art in itself—whether a creation of sublime moments and fascinating gestures, or of terrifying confrontations and mighty endurances—that is illuminated by the same inner light, inspired by the same genius, inflected by the same touch that makes the works of art endure on their own. The biographer of an artist is a critic in advance, in acknowledging and appreciating the actions of an artist’s life and recognizing what’s personal and distinctive in their being—in discerning the artistic aspect of the life. Szwed, in his brief book, accomplishes this goal, perhaps even better than he intended.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.

 
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/photos/2015/04/billie-holiday-photos

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/02/billie-holiday-musician-myth-john-szwed-review
 

Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth review – reclaiming Lady Day's artistry
 
Everyone knows about the sex and drugs – but John Szwed’s biography makes the case for Holiday as a complex artist who inspired in many different directions



Billie Holiday: one of the most famously indescribable – and inimitable – voices in all of jazz and pop-music history. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

by Seth Colter Walls
Thursday 2 April 2015
The Guardian  (UK)

To the public, Billie Holiday might simply be an icon. But to specialists, she’s the subject of a long and unsettled argument. In the view of some critics, her art has often gotten short shrift compared with discussions over the tabloid particulars of her too-short life. In 1956, she published a co-written autobiography called Lady Sings the Blues, which tried to balance confessional storytelling with assertions of her artistic control. It was accused of doing a disservice to jazz by some self-appointed guardians of the genre.

In later decades, Lady Day – as she was called by fans and fellow musicians – was even accused of having been illiterate. A fast-and-loose 1972 biopic starring Diana Ross, a pop singer ill-suited to capturing Holiday’s swinging sophistication and melodic genius, hardly improved anyone’s understanding. The feminist critic Angela Davis took sharp exception to the film, writing that it “tends to imply that her music is no more than an unconscious and passive product of the contingencies of her life”.

With the approach of Holiday’s centenary, more and more people are coming over to Davis’s side. John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them throughout. That’s not to say that he ignores the singer’s romantic flings (with Orson Welles, among others), the domestic abuse suffered at the hands of multiple partners or the long-term heroin use that are part of the familiar Holiday lore. Crucially, though, he spends more than half his page-count closely considering Holiday’s music. And his book comes just as three new recordings – one from José James, a singer who skillfully bridges the worlds of contemporary R&B and jazz, one by Cassandra Wilson and another by the classical pianist Lara Downes – likewise investigate the musician’s catalogue with respectfully daring air.

As tough as it is for those musicians to interpret songs Holiday made iconic, it’s possible that Szwed’s challenge was more daunting. He is writing in the wake of Holiday biographies that have, by necessity, relied on speculation and hearsay, given the fact that Holiday gave few interviews (and saw her autobiography redacted by a lawsuit-averse publisher). There are also political ambiguities involved in narrating the choices of an African American artist who, as Davis noted, “worked primarily with the idiom of white popular song”. And then there are the difficulties of needing to describe one of the most famously indescribable – and inimitable – voices in all of jazz and pop-music history.

On the latter point, Szwed clears his throat a bit – quoting divergent critical opinions and eminent musicologists – displaying some of the agonies that prose suffers when summing up the Holiday sound. But he does have moments where he succeeds beautifully: “In the upper register she had a bright but nasal sound; she sounded clearer, perhaps even younger, in the middle; and at the bottom, there was a rougher voice, sometimes a rasp or a growl. But even these voices were varied or might change depending on the song she was singing.” Elsewhere, Szwed is on point when he describes Holiday “falling behind the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes and then letting them fall”.

As the author of compelling books on complex figures such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, it’s little surprise that Szwed is also wise and authoritative on the sad, complex interaction of Jim Crow racism and early pop-music practices, in the 20-page chapter The Prehistory of a Singer. And he proves as good at reading Holiday’s political choices – such as revising the “in dialect” lyrics of Gershwin’s I Loves You, Porgy – as he is at spelling out Holiday’s evolving approach to improvisation, over the course of her career.

Like Davis, Szwed hears a hint of feminist consciousness-raising in Holiday’s 1948 rendition of My Man. And on the tortured history of credit-taking for the composition of Strange Fruit – the anti-lynching protest song that stunned one nightclub audience after another, once Holiday added it to her repertoire – Szwed cuts through the brush to show the ways in which Holiday’s melodic approach (as well as her choice to perform it in front of white people) destined the song for a place in history as much as anything else.

If it sounds like the accumulated weight of history makes for solemn reading, a lot of fun can actually be had using Szwed as a listening partner. Go ahead and launch your streaming-music engine of choice and build a playlist with the tracks as Szwed considers them. You probably won’t need much help enjoying three rare Holiday recordings with Count Basie’s 1937 band – available on disc eight of Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933-1944 – since the musicians’ collective brand of ecstasy requires little in the way of selling. But Szwed’s description of Holiday “gliding over rhythm suspensions and finding her way over the glassine 4/4 of a great swing rhythm section” is a treat – as is his song-by-song investigation of Holiday’s musical partnerships with the pianist Teddy Wilson and the saxophonist Lester Young.

In the case of pre-existing songs that Holiday made her own, Szwed cites earlier recordings by other singers before inviting you to compare them with what he deems to be Holiday’s best version (the better to put her skills in relief). And when it comes to the core of Lady Day’s catalogue – the songs she recorded, with great variance, during multiple phases of her career – Szwed’s listening notes shed useful light on the differences, especially for fans who think they can safely dismiss the portion of Holiday’s discography that is less favoured by jazz aficionados.

That very hybridity – Holiday’s ability to help define jazz singing, and then buck the genre’s conventions – is what makes the new spate of tributes to her feel so appropriate. A listener might disagree with an arrangement choice made by Cassandra Wilson, on Coming Forth By Day, or else miss elements of swing in Lara Downes’s classical recital A Billie Holiday Songbook – but their risk-taking is clearly in the service of honoring Holiday’s often-surprising moves. (José James’s Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday is just about perfect, including as it does the playing of MacArthur-winning pianist Jason Moran.)

Plenty of stars from yesteryear had crazy-juicy personal lives; very few left behind conceptual approaches that inspire in so many directions. Each of these new albums is in league with Szwed’s book – a joint persuasion campaign meant to encourage us to consider musicianship as the defining characteristic of Lady Day’s legacy. That’s about as fine a centenary-year gift as anyone had a right to expect.

Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth is published by Viking Press in the USA, and William Heinemann in the UK

http://www.ladyday.net/life/jones.html

BIG STAR FALLIN' MAMA - Five Woman in Black Music

by Hettie Jones
publisher The Viking Press, Inc., New York
ISBN number 0-670-16408-9

Billie Holiday

One day we were so hungry we could barely breathe. I started out the door. It was cold as all-hell and I walked from 145th to 133rd..... going in every joint trying to find work....... I stopped in the Log Cabin Club run by Jerry Preston... told him I was a dancer. He said to dance. I tried it. He said I stunk. I told him I could sing. He said sing. Over in the corner was an old guy playing the piano. He struck Trav'lin and I sang. The customers stopped drinking. They turned around and watched. The pianist... swung into Body and Soul. Jeez, you should have seen those people - all of them started crying. Preston came over, shook his head and said, "Kid, you win."

Billie Holiday was not quite seventeen then; it was 1932. Before she was done singing in the summer of 1959 many more people had cried over her Trav'lin All Alone and Body and Soul. There were popular songs, as were most others she sang, and a lot of other people recorded and performed them. But Billie transformed them. She was a jazz singer; she put the blues inside and made each song her own. She thought of her voice as an instrument: "I don't think I'm singing, she explained. "I feel like I'm playing a horn... What comes out is what I feel."

A lot of different feelings came out of Billie's horn - she sang for over twenty-five years, in the United States and Europe as well. She could be gentle, funny, sarcastic, heartbreaking. Her honesty about feeling was what made people cry; she found it hard to lie. Astonished critics cried: "'She appears to mean every word she is singing" and "You believed every word she sang." There were some words about which Billie was especially believable. People told her no one sang "hunger" like she did, or "love." She sang what she knew, a first rule in playing jazz as Charlie Parker explained it: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Billie said simply, "You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too."

Born Eleanora Fagan, called Billie Holiday and titled Lady Day-she was a beautiful woman, this First Lady of jazz. But so much of her life was a sad song and a bitter story, and heroin as well as hunger and love overwhelmed her finally when she was only forty-four. The recordings she left still tell about it. Some people can let her sing on and on while they listen: "Lady Day has suffered so much she carries it all for you," says a young man in an English novel. But for others the blues, meant for response, carry the listener as well. Either you go with Billie or let her go, and sometimes you have to choose, as LeRoi Jones has written:

At the point where what she did left singing, you were on your own, at the point where what she was in her voice, you listen and make your own promises. More than I have felt to say she says always....

Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.

Though she had always liked to sing, Billie had never thought of becoming a singer, But by the time she arrived at the Log Cabin that day in 1932, singing looked better than some of the other ways she had tried to take care of herself, Billie was a city girl, she had been born in Baltimore, Sadie Fagan, her mother, was thirteen when Billie was born, Her father, Clarence Holiday, was fifteen. They were married three years later, and lived together for a Though she had always liked to sing, Billie had never thought of becoming a singer. But by the time she arrived at the Log Cabin that day in 1932, singing looked better than some of the other ways she had tried to take care of herself. Billie was a city girl, she had been born in Baltimore. Sadie Fagan, her mother, was thirteen when Billie was born. Her father, Clarence Holiday, was fifteen. They were married three years later, and lived together for a while. But World War I took Clarence overseas and after that his musical ambitions took him on the road. He did give Billie her nickname though. Because she was a tomboy he had called her Bill, which she stretched to Billie after Billie Dove, her favorite movie star, and because she wanted to have a pretty name. She may have been tough but she was a tough girl.

With Clarence gone and work in Baltimore hard to find, Sadie had to leave her child to go up North. On her own with grandparents and cousins, Billie was constantly reminded that since her mother had been "bad" she herself would undoubtedly turn out that way. Her grandparents were gentle but they did not rule the cramped household, leaving that to Cousin Ida who, for one thing, beat Billie when her own son Henry wet the bed. For a while there was the great-grandmother Billie loved, who was nearly a hundred years old. During slavery she had borne sixteen children to the man who had owned her. "We used to talk about life," Billie remembered. "And she used to tell me how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul.... She couldn't read or write, but she knew the Bible ... and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures." One night the old lady persuaded Billie to let her lie down to sleep (she wasn't supposed to because of an illness but Billie didn't know). She died later with a rigid arm around the child's neck. Billie woke up screaming and went into shock, but after she came back from a month in the hospital Cousin Ida only had something else to beat her for.

The solution was to work outside. Baltimore is famous for the white marble steps that lead up to some of its old houses, and Billie got to know them well. Her price for cleaning a flight of stairs plus a bathroom was fifteen cents. For five or ten cents she ran errands. For Alice Dean, the madam who lived on the corner near Billie's house, and Alice's girls, errands were free. Instead of money Billie took her pay in time, all of which she spent listening to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong records in Alice's front parlor. Sadie had fits-she didn't want her daughter hanging around a house of prostitution. But Billie was only interested in the music: "If I'd heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree, I'd have loved it just the same.... If I'd heard Pops and Bessie wailing through the window of some minister's front parlor, I'd have been running free errands for him."

For a while at some point, it looked like things might change. Her mother came back and married a longshoreman who was ver kind to Billie, but he died after they had lived together only a short while. Then, when she was just ten, a neighbor attempted to rape Billie. The man got a five-year jail sentence. Billie was placed in a Catholic home for wayward girls and sentenced to remain until she was twenty-one-she never found out why.

At the home each child exchanged her clothes for a uniform. Any disobedient girl was made to wear a ragged red dress; the others were not permitted to speak to or go near her. One girl being punished like this during Billie's stay pushed herself higher and higher on a swing until it broke and she flew, screaming, to her death. The night Billie was made to wear the red dress she was also locked in a room with the body of another girl who had died at the home. She beat on the door all night until her hands were bloody. Somehow, after all this happened, Sadie and Billie's grandfather managed to find a lawyer who got her out. Billie had been afraid she'd never leave the place alive. "For years I used to dream about it and wake up hollering and screaming," Billie wrote in her autobiography. "My God, it's terrible what something like this does to you. It takes years and years to get over it; it haunts you and haunts you."

From then on Sadie tried to keep Billie with her, but there was never enough money for them to manage, even though Billie scrubbed floors after school until she was exhausted. So Sadie returned to New York and Billie to her grandparents' house until she was thirteen. When school let out that year they put Billie on the train with a ticket round her neck for Long Branch, New Jersey, where Sadie was working as a maid and had a job for her. At this normally rebellious time in her life Billie acted like a normally rebellious girl-she ripped up the ticket, determined to go to Harlem, and ended up at the YWCA in Manhattan. Though her mother finally found her and got her to Long Branch, Billie didn't last very long at her job. Both of them realized she just wouldn't be able to work as a maid, so Sadie decided to board her out in Harlem. Unfortunately the lady who was to watch over Billie was not exactly a lady and the establishment she ran was well known, to everyone else apparently but Sadie, whom Billie considered "square."

It was 1928 by then, and everyone was living it up. Billie was still young but as she later admitted, "I thought I was a real hip kitty." Being a twenty-dollar call girl soon got her the silk dress and patent leather high-heeled shoes she wanted, but eventually it got her the kind of trouble she never intended. When Billie refused the attentions of a very influential man, he arranged for her arrest, complete with false witnesses and a false report claiming she was sick. Billie spent four months in a notorious women's prison, some of that time in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water, in a dark cell where one lost track of time. In the course of an investigation during 1931, the judge who convicted Billie as a "wayward woman," was declared unfit and removed from the bench.

After Billie was out of jail and had decided to quit hustling, she and her mother got an apartment together in Harlem. The Depression had hit and things were harder for most people, but not for Billie and Sadie: "A depression was nothing new to us, we'd always had it." But then Sadie got sick, too sick to work, and everything was up to Billie. Her father was playing in the city; he had become a well known guitarist by this time. Billie would go downtown (100 blocks) and beg some money from him while he begged her not to call him Daddy-it spoiled his romantic image. Then she would get back up to Sadie so they could eat and pay the rent. Things went on like thalt-I for a while. The day Billie sang at the Log Cabin they were not only hungry but also about to be thrown out on the street because the rent was overdue, and Sadie was still too sick even to walk. But Billie had walked from 145th to 133rd without a coat and was trying to dance. She asked the pianist to play Trav'lin All Alone because "that came closer than anything to the way I felt."

I'm so weary and all alone
Feet are tired like heavy stone,
Trav'lin, trav'lin, all alone.
Who will see and who will care
Bout this load that I must bear,
Trav'lin, trav'lin, all alone.

Jerry Preston hired Billie for eighteen dollars a week, and she sang every night from midnight to 3 A.M. By 1933 a lot of people had come to hear her at the Log Cabin. She acquired an agent and began to work at various clubs; she made her first record and was paid thirty-five dollars for the effort. People expected a lot for thirty-five dollars in those days. The owner of an employment agency reported receiving a request for "a'nice colored woman' who could cook and typewrite for thirty-five dollars a month."

Many people who had heard Billie would try to pin down her "style." When critics asked her how she did it she was quite specific: Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong were her only influences-she had always aimed for "Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling." But no one could really describe her singing. A disc jockey told the manager of the Apollo Theater, "It ain't the blues. I don't know what it is, but you got to hear her." When he did he hired her, and Billie sang at the Apollo, which has always been an achievement. Her first performance was at 10 A.M., she had been up all the night before singing at a club, and she was so scared she was shaking. Later she remembered the audience: "They were wide awake early in the morning.They didn't ask me what my style was, who I was, how I had evolved, where I'd come from) who influenced me, or anything. They just broke the house up."

But whether or not people liked your music didn't always determine that you'd eat. What little money there was around was spread so thin it amounted to nothing. Danny Barker, a guitarist of the time, remembered how it was

The depression for musicians in New York - man, it was a bitch! I was working, I remember, in the Lenox Club, and there was a ten-piece band, eight chorus girls, four waiters, two bartenders, two managers, a doorman, a porter, and a "whiskey man." 

The hours were like from ten in the evening to five in the morning.... At the end of the night they would pull a table into the middle of the floor and spill out the receipts of the night on the table and give everybody an equal share. Some mornings we'd make seventy-five cents, other mornings we'd get twenty-five. Everybody cooperated, because there was nowhere else to go and, in fact, nobody had nothin'.

Even Billie's earnings didn't amount to much. To help out, Sadie sold fried chicken dinners at their apartment, but she was not the world's best businesswoman-she had a tendency to forget the charges. Sadie loved people and had great faith in them, she was a very good person and always ready to see goodness in others too. Billie adore her and never really minded Sadie's overgenerosity. She described their home as "a boardin house for broke musicians, soup kitchen for anyone with a hard-luck story, community centre, and after after-hours joint.... All you had to do was tell Mom you were a musician and give her a little story and she'd give you everything in the house that wasn't nailed down."

A houseful of musicians did help Billie to understand why she sang the way she did. She paid attention to the discussions about music and the cutting contests, she sat in on jam sessions after regular work was over. There were many fine musicians in New York at that time and she made a lot of friends. Billie liked to sing with saxophonist Lester Young: "I used to love to have him come around and blow pretty solos behind me," It was Lester who gave gave Billie her title, People had been calling her "Lady" ever since at the Log Cabin she had refused to take customers' tips off the tables without using her hands, (This was a well-established custom in bars. Some of the blues singers of the twenties had also refused - Bessie for one. Billie tried - she had even bought fancy underwear for the purpose-but she kept messing up. Finally one man called her a "punk kid" because she kept dropping the twenty-dollar bill he had set out for her. Afterwards he had a change of heart and put the money in her hand. From then on Billie decided that anyone who wanted to give her a tip could just hand it over. The other girls at the Log Cabin used to taunt: "Look at her, she thinks she's a lady." So Lady she was, and when Lester added the "day" out of Holiday, Billie became Lady Day. In return she titled Lester the President, or Pres, because she thought he was "the world's greatest." "Lester sings with his horn," Billie said, "you listen to him and can almost hear the words," Lester convinced Lady Day and Sadie, whom he had named the Duchess, that life was dangerous for a young man alone, even the President, So they gave him the room og the air. shaft. "It was wonderful having a gentleman around the house," Billie recalled. "We were the Royal Family of Harlem.

Earning a living was still so uncertain in New York that when Billie was offered fourteen dollars a day to tour with Count Basie's band she accepted, Besides, Lester would be along to look out for her, and she thought traveling would be fun. But it turned out to be less romantic than she'd anticipated. They traveled everywhere by bus, sometimes covering five or six hundred miles between engagements.

The fourteen dollars was barely enough to pay for necessities and for hotel rooms, where instead of sleeping they "took a long look at the bed." Mostly they slept - or tried to. They played the South, the Midwest - for black audiences and white. They didn't have time to rehearse and they didn't always have the proper horns or equipment. It was sosmething like the T.O.B.A. but modernized - the railroad had been replaced by a "Blue Goose" bus. Most jazz musicians were city people like Billie; many were northerners. The South was a different place still, and there were lessons to be learned in it. As the minstrels had discovered a century before, musicians were not always welcome. Earl "Fatha" Hines, the pianist said that going South was "an invasion" for them

Things happened all the time. They made us walk in the street off the sidewalk in Fort Lauderdale,and at a white dance in Valdosta, Georgia, some hecklers in the crowd turned off the lights and exploded a bomb under the bandstand.... Sometimes when we came into a town that had a bad reputation the driver would tell us-and here we were in our own chartered bus-to move to the back of the bus just to make it look all right and not get anyone riled up.

With only the scenery out the window and each other for company, they enjoyed themselves when they could:

We were always seeing new territory, new beauty. In those days the country was a lot more open and sometimes we'd run into another band and just park the buses by the road and get out and play baseball in a field.

And how they could:

There was always a little tonk game [cards] on the bus at night. The boys put something for a table across the aisle and sat on Coke boxes and hung a light from the luggage rack on a coat hanger. ... They played most of the night, and it was amusing and something to keep you interested if you couldn't sleep.

Billie once spent twelve hours on her knees throwing dice, on the floor of the bus from West Virginia to New York - and won $1,000 to take home to her mother.

Count Basie was originally from the New York area, stranded in Kansas City in the late twenties, he had found musicians who shared his sympathies and he had stayed on. What the Basie group with them out of their home was a skill they had been perfecting long before they took to the road. A lot of music had been played in Kansas City during the early thirties. Musicians were able to play often, and many people went there just to be part of what was going on. Before Billie sang with Count Basie her group experience had been at jam sessions, or with studio orchestras that depended on written out "arrangements" to keep, each band member carefully playing his part in place, The Basie band's style of group improvisation appealed to her because it avoided the kind of copying which she knew could lead to a lack of feeling. Though they did use arrangements, these were "edited" by Basie; solos were improvised and a tune rarely played the same way twice. Billie remembered later how the sixteen of them worked up arrangements of pop songs for her: "The cats would come in, somebody would hum a tune. Then someone else would play it over on the piano once or twice. Then someone would set up a riff [rhythmic pattern], a ba-deep, a ba-dop. Then Daddy Basie would two-finger it a little. And then things would start to happen." The band, according to Billie, knew about a hundred songs without music and from memory. Those among them who did read music, as she pointed out, "didn't want to be bothered anyway." But this deceptively casual approach was after all an approach by people who could do it. They knew their instruments, they knew music, and they knew each other.

We'd get off a bus after a five-hundred-mile trip, go into the [recording] studio with no music, nothing to eat but coffee and sandwiches.... 

I'd say, "What'll we do, a two-bar or four-bar intro?" Somebody'd say make it four and a chorus - one, one and a half. 

Then I'd say, "You play behind me the first eight, Lester," and then Harry Edison would come in or Buck Clayton and take the next eight bars. "Jo, you just brush and don't hit the cymbals too much." 

... If we were one side short on a date, someone would say, "Try the blues in A flat," and tell me, "Go as far as you can go, honey."

Musicians were especially impressed with Billie's sense of time, Bobby Tucker, who played piano for her, explained it

One thing about Lady, she was the easiest singer I ever played for. You know, with most singers you have to guide 'em and carry 'em along - they're either layin' back or else runnin' away from you

But not Billie Holiday. Man, it was a thrill to play for her. She had the greatest conception of a beat I ever heard. It just didn't matter what kind of a song she was singin'. She could sing the fastest tune in the world or else something that was like a dirge, but you could take a metronome and she'd be right there. Hell! With Lady you could relax while you were playin' for her. You could damn near forget the tune.

Though Billie never "forgot" her tunes, she always altered them: "I hate straight singing," she said. "I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it." Her ways were surprising and effective, almost always making more of a tune than its composer had. For popular songs Billie had a light but sharp sarcasm, "a mixture of clarity and caricature," someone called it, as in "Ooo-ooo-ooo / What a lil moonlaight can do-oo-oo." When she felt that a song was worthy of serious attention she treated it with great care, emphasizing the beauty she found there. When it came to the blues, she simply sang, straight out in her clear, controlled voice, and let the feeling come through. The timbre or tone of her voice varied. At the bottom of the scale she would be hoarse, sometimes growly like a saxophone, higher up she'd sound like an oboe, at the top she could ring like a bell.

Billie was someone to look at too, and she was careful about her appearance because she believed it important. That was an elegant time; women were supposed to be "glamour girls" and Billie liked to appear onstage in a beautiful gown with her hair done and her make-up just so despite having traveled on a bus for days. She tended to be round rather than slender, and when she sang she'd tilt her head back a little and snap her fingers softly. People writing about the way she looked then tended to be vague - it was the strange and haunting quality of her voice that captured them. It was through her voice that she established her "personality." As an old friend pointed out, that voice was "really Lady," for singing was the only way she could show her real self. But Billie found it difficult enough just to be herself without interference. She stayed with Count Basie's band for two years and finally quit when they were playing an extended engagement in Detroit, which was "between race riots then," as she remembered it. Among other things, the manager of the theater insisted that Billie blacken her face so audiences not mistake her light skin for white and get upset about her sitting onstage with sixteen black musicians.

Her next tour, in 1937, was with sixteen white musicians in Artie Shaw's band, and though they looked after her she again couldn't be herself without causing trouble. This time there was even more of it. In the South there were big scenes when Billie wanted to eat; she remembered one musician yelling at a waitress who had refused: "This is Lady Day. Now you feed her I" Sleeping and finding a bathroom presented the same problem and at least one time she was in pain for months because of inadequate medical attention. But Billie preferred the South's clarity ("What's Blackie going to sing?" a Kentucky sheriff asked) to the North's hypocrisy. When at last the band had enough of a reputation to play New York, they appeared at a hotel from which radio broadcasts originated. The hotel refused to let her be heard on coast-to-coast radio, the biggest deal in those days. But the refusal came slowly. First the management gave her a separate room, then showed her how to come in the back door, and finally cut her off the air.

Artie Shaw's band hadn't been any musical milestone for Billie; in fact a Downbeat critic had suggested that her talents were being wasted: "Artie has a swell group but they don't show off Billie any." By 1939 Billie had decided not to sing with any more dance bands-which is what most of the "swing" bands were-because there were always too many managers telling everyone what to do. The managers were there because jazz-or what sometimes was passing for it-had become big bands, big sound, big business by the late thirties. As far back as the twenties white musicians had learned to play jazz, some of them well. By the time swing was the thing, they were getting the jobs that paid, at the radio stations and in the recording studios. Black musicians could play together, certainly, but they couldn't make a living. Their own people still had little or no money to pay them, still were hungry and out of work: "Last winter," a newspaper columnist reported in the late thirties, "while men stood idly and starvingly by, two and one-half miles of Harlem's beloved boulevard-Seventh Avenue-was repaved by a crew of all whites." In Harlem the Depression lasted a long time.

So Billie went to sing to the very rich and their famous friends who could pay to hear her. At Cafe Society, a new nightclub in Greenwich Village, the management had promised to do away with segregationist policies. Billie was very successful there and became a celebrity, though an underpaid one. Her engagement lasted two years-seven nights a week-at seventy-five dollars a week. She came to know some of white society's attitudes, and especially resented the assumption that all black-white relationships were of a sexual nature-it was degrading to be accused of having an affair every time she went out for a drink with a friend.

Billie left Cafe Society a star and went next to where all the other stars were then - California: Hollywood, Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley. A lot of movie people used to come to listen to her sing. Bob Hope defended her once when someone began to heckle her, and Clark Gable fixed her car. Billie had a good time in California; it was very glamorous and added that kind of air to her. She said she came home from Hollywood knowing more about clothes and make-up but still as poor as ever. She had to come all the way back to New York by bus. Travelling cross-country by bus in the 1940s meant one travelled on a series of buses subject to different state laws. No doubt Billie had to ride in the back at least part of the way home. That was the thing about being a black celebrity-one was invariably two people: the star on the stage and the black person who lived in the world. A trumpeter told how this conflict made him feel:

When I was with Artie Shaw, I went to a place where we were supposed to play a dance and they wouldn't even let me in the place. "This is a white dance," they said, and there was my name right outside,  and I told them who I was. When I finally did get in, I played that first set, trying to keep from crying. 

Man, when you're on the stage, you're great, but as soon as you come off, you're nothing.

When Billie returned to New York she got a job as an intermission feature at a nightclub on Fifty-second Street, known then as Swing Street, and soon she became one of its main attractions. Working on The Street, she recalled, was like a homecoming every night. Some nights there were as many as five trumpets and five saxophones on the stand all at once, In any of the big bands of the thirties this would not have been remarkable, but Swing Street clubs were small and intimate, most of them having clubs were small and intimate, most of them having started out as speakeasies during Prohibition.

Though downtown was where the money could be made, Harlem was still where musical decisions were made, at Minton's Playhouse and at Clarke Monroe's Uptown House, places where all the musicians used to jam. Billie had often worked the Uptown House and naturally she came there to see her friends. It was around this time that she met Jimmy Monroe (Clarke's younger brother). He had been around, even in Europe, he was handsome and he was, as Billie said, "a big deal." They eloped in 1941 and Billie was triumphant - her mother had disapproved, she had claimed he'd never marry her. Jimmy Monroe had good taste and "class," but he too had a "past" and Billie felt that made them equals. He also had a mistress he never gave up and a habit he showed no sign of giving up either, when Billie found out about it. But she wanted to be with him, wanted to have a successful marriage. She was now in her late twenties, she wanted to be happy, and she wasn't. She had quarreled with her mother over Jimmy, and it looked like she had made a mistake, It was at this time she began to use hero!. Jimmy gave it to her first, got it for her when after a while she was hooked. She never had any idea of what a habit would mean until she found herself in Los Angeles, alone because Jimmy had gotten into trouble, faced with the problem of having to provide herself with drugs. Billie said she felt like a baby who was hungry but too helpless to do anything about it but cry, and it didn't help that she knew it was all her own fault.

There was a lot of heroin around musicians in the forties, but even those who eventually died of a habit swore it never did their music any good, that though they may have thought they were playing better, as Charlie Parker explained, they actually weren't. "If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you're crazy," Billie said. "It can fix you so you can't play nothing or sing nothing." At least some of the addiction can be blamed on the confusion of the times: there was a painful amount of coming and going as World War II affected everyone's life.

Billie spent those years saying goodbye to lonely soldiers, and to everyone else who was leaving her then. Her father died of pneumonia, alone and untreated in a Jim Crow hospital in Texas. Her marriage was finished. The Street was disappearing gradually too, along with the friendship and the learning atmosphere that had been its attraction. Drugs meant pushers, who preyed on audiences even more than musicians - a serviceman on leave was an easy mark for hustlers. Club owners deserted Fifty-second Street for Broadway, where everything was much bigger and they could make more money. Billie earned $1,000 a week on Broadway, but most of it went for junk. She was living with trumpeter Joe Guy then, whom she had met when she had first begun to need someone who "could be a big help," as she put it, in getting her drugs. With a thousand a week and a steady supply, Billie was "one of the highest paid slaves around."

It was after her mother died that Billie's life somehow lost its direction. Perhaps, as one friend suggested, it was Sadie who had held her up all the time: "Her mother fed her well and loved her so. Maybe that's what helped to carry her before. Maybe after she lost her mother, she kind of goofed." She recalled coming home with Billie and Joe Guy from the funeral: "She was telling him over and over again, "Joe I don't have anybody in the world now except you." She needed someone to say that to. She felt completely alone."

Billie felt guilty too, thinking she'd worried her mother to an early grave by becoming an addict. In 1946 she entered a hospital that for $2,000 promised complete privacy and medical attention while she kicked her habit. Her mother would have been proud. But there was no Sadie now, to provide the kind of trust and support any ex-addict needs. There were only club owners and managers, all sympathetic and helpful but in the long run having their own attitudes about drug addiction. Soon after Billie had paid all that money she realized that someone had betrayed her confidence, perhaps the hospital-she never knew. But she knew the Narcotics Bureau was after her, waiting for her to make a mistake. An addict was a criminal to be pursued, and an ex-addict was the same. Agents tailed her for a year, from New York to California and points between. It was the United States of America versus Billie Holiday from then on for the rest of her life, a series of pas de deux in a long slow dance of death.

In May, 1947, Billie was arrested for possession of narcotics. Sick and alone, she signed away her right to a lawyer and no one advised her to do differently, though Joe Guy and another man arrested along with her went free on technicalities. Billie was convinced that no one could help her, even if someone had wanted to. Her agent only suggested that it was the best thing that could have happened to her, her lawyer refused to come down to Philadelphia for the trial, and she was too wealthy to qualify for legal aid. She was terribly sick and had been given morphine when she appeared in the courtroom. Billie had been promised a hospital cure in return for a plea of guilty; instead she was convicted as a "criminal defendant," a "wrongdoer," and sentenced to a year and a day in the Federal Women's Reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia.

At Alderson, which was segregated, Billie had to endure cold turkey withdrawal. She was further "cured" by performing useful cleaning chores, hauling coal, keeping pigs, and setting tables. She was not allowed to receive any of the letters and gifts that arrived from people all over the world who wanted to remind her that they loved her. She could have used more love and less work-her early life had taught her enough about scrubbing floors. She also needed to reconsider her addiction with some sort of guidance, but this was not given. As she said later, "With all the doctors, nurses, and equipment, they never get near your insides at what's really eating you." Billie never once sang during the ten months she was in jail. When asked to, her answer was that she was there to be punished, and that was that.

Despite her temporary "cure," Billie's encounter with the law had disastrous results. She held on to her sense of shame, to the idea of herself as a "wrongdoer." "When I die," she said in her book, "they're going to start me off in hell and move me from bad to worse." (Billie, like her mother, was Catholic.) But the worst punishment came in the world to which she returned. She was denied a "cabaret card," the New York police permit that is required for any engagement over four days in a club where liquor is sold. None of the nightclubs where Billie used to sing could hire her. Friends tried to help-she gave a successful Carnegie Hall concert (singing thirty-four songs, ten days after she left Alderson , after not having sung for ten months). A Broadway show was organized around her and it was well received but it closed after three weeks. But Billie's singing belonged in the intimate atmosphere of a nightclub and she preferred to work in clubs. Her manager could do nothing, since legally she could not work New York.

But illegally was something else again. Billie met a man named John Levy and opened at his Ebony Club; obviously he had his own kind of police permit. Levy worked Billie hard for a while. She made a lot of money, most of which he kept, although he also kept her in minks and Cadillacs with telephones and all the other luxuries. When she decided she had had enough of luxury he tried to frame her by getting her arrested on a phony dope charge while they were in San Francisco in 1949. The fact that John Levy was a liar and a police informer and that Billie Holiday was clean at the time made little difference. It was Billie who had to endure once more the notoriety, the headlines "Billie Holiday Arrested on Narcotics Charges" - and most of all, people's contempt. She had grown very wary of public acclaim anyway; when crowds showed up at her performances she was not at all sure they hadn't come just to see how high she was.

With the help of friends who made sure she had a very good lawyer, Billie proved her innocence and was acquitted, but it took months, and money. It took her a while to get free of Levy too. She solved the work problem by playing clubs in every major city except New York, but she referred to herself as a DP-a "displaced person," the name given to refugees after World War II. As far as New York was concerned, she was Billie Holiday, Junky, and she had been kicked out. Between engagements out of town Billie lived alone in a New York hotel after her involvement with Levy, until she married Louis McKay. (She had first met McKay when she was sixteen, but they did not have an ongoing relationship, as the 1972 movie, Lady Sings the Blues, suggested. He is said to have mistreated her.) With Louis, Billie toured Europe, where she was greeted with enthusiasm and respect; she in turn was impressed with the European attitude toward jazz.

When Billie played her yearly concerts at the Apollo and at Carnegie Hall everyone came out in full force either to hear her sing or to see whether she was still together. Each time a new record was issued it was compared with her early ones, and she was often judged to be imitating herself, to be working with the wrong musicians, the wrong arrangers, etc. Most everyone liked to believe that Billie made her best records when she sang with Count Basie and the other geniuses of swing. It's hard to disagree, for she was, like all of them, an incredible horn in those days. Billie's later records, usually in a much slower tempo, are a different music. They are the songs of a woman alone and lonely and without much sympathy. No one blows pretty solos behind her like Lester did. Sometimes there are unintelligent voices in the background going oo-oo-oo with none of the wit Billie had on "Ooo-oo-oo what a lil moonlight can doo-oo-oo." Nevertheless, these are the songs of Lady Day too, and if the sorrow sounds a little heavier it was because she'd been carrying it a while. "I remember when she was happy-" Carmen McRae said in 1955, "that was a long time ago."

Billie and Louis both were arrested in 1956. Billie knew by this time that if the Narcotics Bureau wanted to get her it only had to be arranged, the evidence "found" and she could be convicted on her past record. In her book she pleaded that the addict be treated rather than punished. She knew how little good punishment had ever done to help her. And her stated purpose in revealing all that she considered shameful in her life was to warn young people away from heroin. "If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind.... The only thing that can happen to you is sooner or later you'll get busted, and once that happens, you'll never live it down. Just look at me."

Billie never was able to stop using heroin completely, though she tried very hard. Some people thought she could have tried harder: "That girl's life... was just snapped away from foolishness." But there were others who knew and loved her. Lena Horne and Billie had been friends since Cafe Society days, and she understood how life had been spoiled for Billie:

Billie didn't lecture me - she didn't have to. Her whole life, the way she sang, made everything very plain. It was as if she were a living picture there for me to see something I had not seen clearly before.

Her life was so tragic and so corrupted by other people-by white people and by her own people. There was no place for her to go, except finally, into that little private world of dope. She was just too sensitive to survive.

Billie survived long enough to sing a few days at the Five Spot, a club that opened in downtown New York in the fifties. Her last appearance was at the Phoenix Theater in New York in May, 1959. On May 31 she was brought to a hospital unconscious, suffering from liver and heart ailments, the papers said. Twelve days later someone allegedly found heroin in her room. She was arrested while in her hospital bed and police came to guard her, to make sure this now thin, suffering woman could not get away from the law one more time. But she escaped the judgment of the United States of America versus Billie Holiday for a higher judgment, on July 17, 1959.

http://www.sfgate.com/music/article/Billie-Holiday-at-100-Artists-reflect-on-jazz-6177350.php

Billie Holiday at 100: Artists reflect on jazz singer’s legacy

By Aidin Vaziri

Friday, April 3, 2015

Photo: Associated Press

Image 1 of 13 

FILE - This Sept. 1958 file photo shows Billie Holiday. The Apollo Theater is planning events to commemorate the 100th birthday of Holiday. The legendary American jazz vocalist was born on April 17, 1915 and died in 1959 at the age of 44. Holiday performed at least two dozen times at the Apollo. She will be inducted into its Walk of Fame on April 16, 2015. (AP Photo/FILE)

Billie Holiday would have turned 100 this week, but who’s counting? The famed jazz singer and songwriter’s voice is ageless, still luring fans with its effortless swagger and unblinking candor. It carried with it all the difficulty she endured throughout her tumultuous life — born Eleanora Fagan, an illegitimate child, on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore; died strung out and broken 44 years later in New York — along with all the hope, fear and desperation that came with it. “What comes out is what I feel,” she once said.

No one else can sound like Billie Holiday because no one else lived like Billie Holiday.

Yet in generation after generation, her influence is unmistakable. To mark the centennial of her birth, which will be celebrated with concerts, books, albums, tributes and reissue packages around the world, we spoke with some people closer to home whose lives were deeply touched by Holiday.

Paula West

Longtime Bay Area jazz singer, torchbearer of the American Songbook popularized by Holiday

I’m not quite sure when I first heard Billie Holiday. I believe it was before the Diana Ross biopic (“Lady Sings the Blues”) was released. Of course their voices were dissimilar. I was young at the time, and had only been exposed to those “greatest hits,” such as “Fine and Mellow,” “Them There Eyes” and “Good Morning Heartache.”

I feel the best singers have always been able to get across the raw emotions of the lyrics. She had no great vocal range, but that was never needed. It was about telling the truth, the story, and not too many singers could ever match her natural interpretations. No vocal histrionics, melisma necessary. She was respected by musicians, as well, and her singing was influenced by musicians such as Louis Armstrong.

There are dozens of her interpretations I love, but “Lady in Satin” is my favorite, particularly her version of “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The arrangement is beautiful yet heartbreaking, of course, and no one could deliver that better than Billie Holiday.

Lavay Smith

Blues and jazz singer with Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, renowned for her tributes to the first ladies of jazz

I remember seeing Billie Holiday singing on TV on an oldies station that would show the Little Rascals, Shirley Temple and old black-and-white movies. Like everyone who hears her, I loved her right away.

Billie remains an icon because she was true to herself. As a singer, she made you believe that she meant every word she sang. Lyrics were very important to her, which isn’t true of all jazz singers. And the feeling that she creates through her use of rhythm was always swingin’ and happy. A lot of people think of her music as being sad, but she had a great sense of humor that comes through, and I’ve always found her music to be uplifting.

The first album I bought was “Lady Sings the Blues,” and I played the heck out of. It included “Strange Fruit” and many of her hits, like “Traveling Light” and “Good Morning Heartache.” I love all of the Columbia recordings that she did with Lester Young and Teddy Wilson, including all of the obscure songs. I just love the feeling and the soul of these records. The interplay between Billie and Lester Young is the textbook definition of how an instrumentalist should interact with a singer.

Joey Arias

New York cabaret singer and drag artist, who recently performed a tribute to Billie Holiday at Lincoln Center

I remember hearing her voice and thinking how lovely she sounded. I wanted to have that same sound that she was emoting. It was a magic spell that was sent to me. I feel as though we were connected at the hip from stories I’ve heard from friends and family.

Billie was an outspoken person. She was class all the way and never wanted to be treated any other way. She was being followed and became public enemy for standing up for her rights and acting strong and never letting her guard down. She dressed beautifully and had such presence.

“Lady in Satin” is my favorite album. It all depends on what period you want to hear her style, but I love her in the late ’50s. She summed it all up — her life, her singing and her thoughts, and her love of life and love.

Randall Kline

SFJazz executive director

I heard her on the home stereo as a teenager. My parents were jazz fans. One hearing of her voice — soft, persuasive, mournful, honest, beautiful — told you to listen more closely. “Don’t Explain” for its raw pathos. “Strange Fruit” for its power, poignancy and, sadly, its contemporary relevance.

Getting to know Billie Holiday

Here are some albums to help you get better acquainted with the jazz singer’s magic.

“Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday,” Legacy. A two-CD set containing many of the classic sides Holiday cut for Columbia and its Brunswick, Vocalion and Okeh labels in the 1930s and early ’40s, including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “A Fine Romance,” “You Go to My Head” and “The Man I Love.”

“Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Recordings,” GRP. An excellent two-CD box featuring the torch songs, raucous renditions of signature Bessie Smith numbers, and other material Holiday recorded for Decca from 1944 to 1950.

“Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years,” Verve. A good two-disc survey of Holiday’s small-band recordings of the 1950s, featuring stellar soloists like Ben Webster and Benny Carter.

“Lady in Satin,” Legacy. A heartbreaking beauty. Writer Michael Brooks wrote that this 1958 album feels “as if a group of family and friends are gathered around a loved one and saying their last goodbyes.”

“Ken Burns Jazz — Definitive Billie Holiday,” Verve. Compiled by the documentary filmmaker, this single-disc collection culls material from the three major phases of the singer’s career.

— Jesse Hamlin

Kitty Margolis

San Francisco jazz singer, trustee at the Recording Academy, founder of Mad-Kat Records

I remember staring at a girlish, chubby Billie on the cover of this brown Columbia three-LP box set released in 1962, “Billie Holiday: The Golden Years.” It had an extensive photo book with detailed track listings inside and liner notes by John Hammond and Ralph Gleason. I still have it. Opening it and smelling the paper takes me right back. I realize now that a lot of the tunes in this box became very important to my early core repertoire.

I don’t think there is one genuine female jazz singer in the world who doesn’t have Billie inside. She defined the idiom.

One major thing that set Billie apart as a jazz singer is that she was a musician’s singer, a master improviser without ever uttering one scat syllable. She was not a classically “pretty”-sounding singer like Ella or Sarah. Billie’s sound was a bittersweet brew: raw, tart, personal, intimate, relaxed, understated, urgent.

Billie’s storytelling was always 100 percent emotionally intelligent and believable, an ironic cocktail of longing, pride, pain, strength with a sharp glint of humor. No one could sound happier (“Them There Eyes”) and no one could sound darker (“I’m a Fool to Want You”). Billie sang the truth. There was no “acting” involved. She could take even the most banal pop lyric of the time and imbue it with subtext that gave it a much deeper message, almost like a code.  

THE MUSIC OF BILLIE HOLIDAY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MS. HOLIDAY:

https://vimeo.com/124039741

The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (33-44) [vol. 1—5] + Lady Day: The Complete Columbia Golden Years + The Essential Brunswick Recordings (35-39)

by AJSesinando
1349 videos

http://www.billieholiday.com/
 
Billie Holiday - The Best Of Jazz Forever

1.This Year's Kisses 0:00
2.I Must Have That Man! 3:08
3.I'll Get By 6:05
4.Mean to Me 9:16
5.I'll Never Be the Same 12:21
6.Easy Living 15:25
7.Foolin' Myself 18:30
8.Without Your Love 21:31
9.Me, Myself and I (Are All in Love With You) 24:24
10.A Sailboat in the Moonlight 27:02
11.Trav'lin' All Alone 29:55
12.She's Funny That Way 32:10
13.Getting Some Fun out of Life 34:48
14.I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me 37:50
15.Back in Your Own Backyard 40:35
16.You Can't Be Mine (And Someone Else's Too) 43:16
17.Say It with a Kiss 46:37
18.The Man I Love 48:11


 

Best Songs Of Billie Holiday (Full Album HD) || Billie Holiday's Greatest Hits:
 
♫ TrackList:

00:00 01.Me Myself And I - Billie Holiday
03:15 02.Nice Work If You Can Get It - Billie Holiday
08:05 03.Summertime - Billie Holiday
11:43 04.A Fine Romance - Billie Holiday, Her Orchestra
15:17 05.Moanin' Low - Teddy Wilson, His Orchestra, Billie Holiday
19:06 06.God Bless The Child - Billie Holiday
24:04 07.My Man - Billie Holiday
29:00 08.Easy Living - Billie Holiday
32:49 09.That's Life I Guess - Teddy Wilson, His Orchestra, Billie Holiday
36:45 10.Billie'S Blues - Billie Holiday
40:40 11.These Foolish Things - Billie Holiday
44:46 12.Pennies From Heaven - Billie Holiday
48:49 13.I've Got My Love To Keep Me - Billie Holiday
53:44 14.They Can't Take That Away From Me - Billie Holiday
59:00 15.Don't Explain - Billie Holiday
1:02:40 16.I'm A Fool To Want You - Billie Holiday
1:06:54 17.I'll Be Around - Billie Holiday, Ray Ellis And His Orchestra
1:11:08 18.It's Easy To Remember - Billie Holiday, Ray Ellis, His Orchestra
1:16:09 19.Glad To Be Unhappy - Billie Holiday, Ray Ellis, His Orchestra
1:21:19 20.For All We Know - Billie Holiday
1:24:42 21.All Of Me - Billie Holiday
1:28:30 22.Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday
1:32:22 23.Speak Low (Bent Remix) - Billie Holiday
1:37:48 24.You Go To My Head - Billie Holiday
1:41:24 25.Always - Billie Holiday
1:46:21 26.April In Paris - Billie Holiday
1:50:08 27.Body And Soul - Billie Holiday



Billie Holiday Playlist
by Andi Andreas
2/21 videos
Recorded with Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra.



Vocals: Billie Holiday
Piano: Teddy Wilson
Trumpet: Jonah Jones
Clarinet: Benny Goodman
Tenor Sax: Ben Webster
Guitar: Allan Reuss
Bass: John Kirby
Drums: Cozy Cole

Recorded November 19th, 1936.
New York, NY.

Billie Holiday - "Fine And Mellow"- (Live CBS Studios 1957):

Personnel:

Billie Holiday, leader and vocals
Roy Eldridge, trumpet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Lester Young, tenor saxophone
Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone
Ben Webster, tenor saxophone
Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone
Mal Waldron, piano
Danny Barker, guitar
Milt Hinton, bass - See more at: http://www.jazzonthetube.com/videos/billie-holiday/fine-and-mellow.html#sthash.EA5419ku.dpuf

Personnel:

Billie Holiday, leader and vocals
Roy Eldridge, trumpet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Lester Young, tenor saxophone
Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone
Ben Webster, tenor saxophone
Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone
Mal Waldron, piano
Danny Barker, guitar
Milt Hinton, bass - See more at: http://www.jazzonthetube.com/videos/billie-holiday/fine-and-mellow.html#sthash.T1fUqRME.dpuf

 

Personnel:

Billie Holiday, leader and vocals
Roy Eldridge, trumpet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Lester Young, tenor saxophone
Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone
Ben Webster, tenor saxophone
Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone
Mal Waldron, piano
Danny Barker, guitar
Milt Hinton, bass - See more at: http://www.jazzonthetube.com/videos/billie-holiday/fine-and-mellow.html#sthash.EA5419ku.dpuf

Personnel:

Billie Holiday, leader and vocals
Roy Eldridge, trumpet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Lester Young, tenor saxophone
Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone
Ben Webster, tenor saxophone
Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone
Mal Waldron, piano
Danny Barker, guitar
Milt Hinton, bass - See more at: http://www.jazzonthetube.com/videos/billie-holiday/fine-and-mellow.html#sthash.T1fUqRME.dpuf

From 'The Sound of Jazz', 8 December 1957, one of the first major programs focusing on jazz to air on American network television (CBS).


Billie Holiday with Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan and Vic Dickenson.

Jazz critic Nat Hentoff recalled that during rehearsals, Billie Holiday and Lester Young kept to opposite sides of the room. During the performance of "Fine and Mellow", Hentoff recalled, "Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half--smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways."

On the way to Lester Young's funeral in 1959, Billie Holiday said she thought she'd be next to go. She was dead less than four months later.

Billie Holiday--"God Bless The Child" 

Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own

Yes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don't ever make the grade
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own

Money, you've got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you're gone, spending ends
They don't come no more
Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don't take too much
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own

Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own
He just worry 'bout nothin'
Cause he's got his own

[Playlist Mix - Billie Holiday]:

Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong - "The Blues Are Brewin"

 

[Playlist Mix - Billie Holiday & others]:

Lady sings The Blues - Billie Holiday [Full Album] (1956):

Lady Sings the Blues is an album by jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. It was Holiday's last album released on Clef Records; the following year, the label would be absorbed by Verve Records. Lady Sings the Blues was taken from sessions taped during 1954 and 1956. It was released simultaneously with her ghostwritten autobiography of the same name.

The tunes are:

1.- Lady Sings The Blues 3:45 (Billie Holiday - Herbie Nichols)
2.- Trav'lin' Light 3:08 (James Mundy - Johny Mercer- James Oliver)
3.- I Must Have That Man 3:03 (Jimmy McHugh - Dorothy Fields)
4,. Some Other Spring 3:35 (Arthur Herzog, Jr.)
5. Strange Fruit 3:02 (Lewis Allan)
6.- No Good Man 3:18 (Irene HIgginbotham - Dan Fisher - Sammy Gallop)
7.- God Bless The Child 3:57 (Billie Holiday - Arthur Herzog, Jr.)
8.- Good Morning Heartache 3:27 (Irene Higginbotham - Ervin Drake - Dan Fisher)
9.- Love Me Or Leave Me 2:33 (Walter Donaldson - Gus Kahn)
10.- Too Marvelous For Words 2:11 (Johny Mercer - Richard Whiting)
11.- Willow Weep For Me 3:06 (Ann Ronell)
12.- I Thought About You 2:46 (Jimmy Van Heusen - Johnny Mercer)  

Billie Holiday - "I'll Be Seeing You"

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/margolick-fruit.html

CHAPTER ONE

Strange Fruit
Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
By DAVID MARGOLICK
Running Press
 
Read the Review

---

    Southern trees

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

AS BILLIE HOLIDAY later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at a New York nightclub called Café Society changed the history of American music that night in early 1939, the night that she first sang "Strange Fruit." 

    Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there, she was afraid to sing this new song, a song that tackled racial hatred head-on at a time when protest music was all but unknown, and regretted it—at least momentarily—when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she later wrote in her autobiography. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping." 

    The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as "Strange Fruit" became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform. For throughout Holiday's short life—she died in 1939 at the age of forty-four—the song existed in a kind of artistic quarantine: it could travel, but only to selected places. And in the forty years since her death, audiences have continued to applaud, respect, and be moved by this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the repertoire of American music, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and other listeners, both black and white, in America and throughout the world. 

    An "historic document," the famed songwriter E.Y. "Yip" Harburg called "Strange Fruit." The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called "Strange Fruit" "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." To Bobby Short, the song was "very, very pivotal," a way of moving the tragedy of lynching out of the black press and into the white consciousness. "When you think of the South and Jim Crow, you naturally think of the song, not of `We Shall Overcome,'" said Studs Terkel. Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary record producer, called "Strange Fruit," which Holiday first sang sixteen years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, "a declaration of war ... the beginning of the civil rights movement." 

    Holiday performed the song countless times in her last two decades. So much about her—her appearance, her physical well-being, her personal fortunes, the sound of her voice—seemed to fluctuate wildly during that time. Though heroin and alcohol were killing her, she also experienced great moments of triumph. But whether they heard her on record or on the radio (where it was played occasionally and hesitantly by black or "nigger-loving" white disc jockeys) or got to see it performed by Holiday or someone else, those who've encountered "Strange Fruit" have found the song engraved into their consciousness. Though they may not have heard it for years, many can still recite the lyrics by heart. "Outside of knowing all of the words to `America the Beautiful,'" a retired English professor and writer named Feenie Ziner remembered, "I don't know that there has been another song, or another singer, I could recall so completely—what is it?—sixty years later." Why? Because, as Ziner put it, "Billie Holiday tore your heart out" when she sang it. Fans of the song do not say they like it—how can one actually like a song on such a subject?—but they acknowledge its lasting impact. They credit it with helping awaken them to the realities of racial prejudice and the redemptive, ameliorative power of art. Whether they protested in Selma or took part in the March on Washington or spent their lives as social activists, many say that it was hearing "Strange Fruit" that triggered the process. "Would my empathy for and with the underdogs of the world have drawn me into the same career paths if I had never heard of Billie Holiday? I doubt it," said George Sinclair, a native Southerner who spent his life working with the underprivileged and disenfranchised. "If Billie Holiday didn't light the fuse, she unquestionably fed the flame." 

    And yet "Strange Fruit," both as a song and a historical phenomenon, seems surprisingly unknown today. No doubt in large part because of its subject matter, it's not one of the many, many Holiday standards one encounters continually, whether on radio stations or piped in over speakers in the ubiquitous Starbucks, like "God Bless the Child," "Lover Man," "Miss Brown to You," or "I Cover the Waterfront." It is an anomaly, both inside and outside Holiday's body of work. 

    "Strange Fruit" defies easy musical categorization and has slipped between the cracks of academic study. It is too artsy to be folk music, too explicitly political and polemical to be jazz. Surely no song in American history has ever been so guaranteed to silence an audience or to generate such discomfort. Joe Segal has run the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, the second oldest jazz club in America, for fifty years, but he still won't listen to it when it comes on the radio. "It's too stark," he told me. "I can't handle it." 

    Coming out in 1939—the same year as Gone With the Wind, a film that embodied contemporary condescension toward blacks and black performers—and around the time that Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was more what people expected from black "girl singers"—"Strange Fruit" "put the elements of protest and resistance back at the center of contemporary black musical culture," Angela Davis wrote in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Sixty years after it was first sung, jazz musicians still speak of the song with a mixture of awe and fear. "When she recorded it, it was more than revolutionary," the drummer Max Roach said of Holiday. "She made a statement that we all felt as black folks. No one was speaking out. She became one of the fighters, this beautiful lady who could sing and make you feel things. She became a voice of black people and they loved this woman." When the song appeared, most radio stations found it too sensitive to put on the air; to this day even the most progressive disc jockeys play it only occasionally. "It's pretty intense and I'm trying to be entertaining," said Michael Bourne, who runs one of the most popular jazz programs in metropolitan New York. Those who perform the song do so almost gingerly ("It's like rubbing people's noses in their own shit," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years) and, often, only when they have to; sometimes it's just too much to take. 

    A few years back, Q a British music publication, named "Strange Fruit" one of "ten songs that actually changed the world." Like any revolutionary act, the song initially encountered great resistance. Holiday and the black folksinger Josh White, who began performing it a few years after Holiday first did, were abused, sometimes physically, by irate nightclub patrons—"crackers" as Holiday called them. Columbia Records, Holiday's label in the late 1930s, refused to record it. And, again like revolutionary acts, the song has generated its own share of mythology, none more enduring than Holiday's oft-uttered claim that she partly wrote it herself or had it written for her. "Strange Fruit" marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by others, in Holiday's evolution from exuberant jazz singer to chanteuse of lovelorn pain and loneliness. Once Holiday added it to her repertoire, some of its sadness seemed to cling to her; as she deteriorated physically, the song took on new poignancy and immediacy. The jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason even saw it as a metaphor for her entire life. "She really was happy only when she sang," he once wrote. "The rest of the time she was a sort of living lyric to the song `Strange Fruit,' hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself." 

    In its own small way, "Strange Fruit" might even have accelerated Holiday's decline. Surely a song that forced a nation to confront its darkest impulses, a song that maligned an entire portion of the country, did not win her any friends in high places who might have cut her some slack as she degenerated into substance abuse and assorted scrapes with the law. "I've made lots of enemies, too," she told Down Beat in 1947, shortly after she was busted for drugs in Philadelphia. "Singing that [`Strange Fruit'] hasn't helped any. I was doing it at the Earle [Theater in Philadelphia] 'til they made me stop." William Dufty, the man who cowrote Holiday's autobiography, is convinced that Holiday short-changed the creator of "Strange Fruit" because she felt the song only brought her grief—even leading her at one point to be hauled before red-baiting federal investigators. 

    After its initial run of popularity, "Strange Fruit" fell into disuse for many years—the victim of the conservatism of one era, the idealism and hopefulness of another, and the disillusionment of a third. Josh White and Nina Simone were among the few artists to attempt it in the 1950s and 1960s. But recently many other musicians—from Sting to Dee Dee Bridgewater to Tori Amos to Cassandra Wilson to UB40 to Siouxsie and the Banshees—have recorded "Strange Fruit," each cut an act of courage given Holiday's continuing hold over the song. (That might not apply to 101 Strings, which recorded an orchestral version.) Sidney Bechet did an instrumental version shortly after Holiday's own record appeared; though it contained no words, Victor chose not to release it for many years. 
    
The song now pops up in many places. Leon Litwack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, uses it in his classes at the University of California at Berkeley, and Stephen Bright cites it in "Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty and Disadvantage," a class he teaches in the law schools of Harvard, Yale, and Emory. Don Ricco, a teacher in Novato, California, plays it for his eighth-graders when they're studying the Civil War; while they review the tortured saga of American race relations, they can also learn about the power of metaphor. "Strange Fruit" is what Mickey Rourke inexplicably puts on his turntable to seduce Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks (predictably, it fails miserably as mood music). A federal appeals court judge cited it a few years ago to show that execution by hanging was inherently "cruel and unusual." It was banned from South African radio during the apartheid era. Khallil Abdul Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan's notoriously anti-Semitic disciple and maestro of the "Million Man March," has quoted it in speeches assailing American racism—unaware, apparently, that the song was written by a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City. 

    That schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name "Lewis Allan," had not written the song for Holiday; several others, including Meeropol's wife, Anne, had sung it before her. And yet, so completely did Holiday come to own "Strange Fruit" that Meeropol—who is better remembered nowadays for adopting the orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg following their parents' execution than for his thousands of other songs and poems—spent half a lifetime, starting with the moment the song became famous, reminding people that it was really his creation, and his alone. 

    It didn't always work; no one could seem to accept that so potent a song could come from so prosaic a source. Various articles saddled Meeropol with a wide range of purported collaborators. One French magazine described him as the headmaster of a school for blacks somewhere along the Mississippi. "One Lewis Allen [sic] is cited as the author of `Strange Fruit,' but did he compose both words and music?" the composer and diarist Ned Rorem, a passionate Holiday devotee, wrote in the New York Times in 1995, nine years after Meeropol's death. "Indeed, who was he? Was he black?" (To the organizers of a celebration of music by black composers at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1999, the answer was yes, for they included "Strange Fruit" on the program.) 

    In a way, Meeropol sealed his particular fate, his status as a historical footnote, when he decided that it was Billie Holiday to whom he'd bring the song: she, more than any other artist ever could have, effectively made it her own." When you listen to her, it's almost like an audio tape of her autobiography," said Tony Bennett, who called "Strange Fruit" a "magnificent" song. "She didn't sing anything unless she had lived it." 

(C) 2000 David Margolick All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-7624-0677-1

Billie Holiday Speaking

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

http://www.allmusic.com/…/the-billie-holiday-songbook-mw000…

Review by Ron Wynn of
The Billie Holiday Songbook by Terence Blanchard
SONY, 1994

Terence Blanchard / Lady Sings The Blues 

from his Sony 1994 recording:  

The Billie Holiday Songbook

Billie Holiday songbook CDs have become a major marketing tool, but trumpeter Terence Blanchard's most recent effort is so magnificently performed and engineered that it defies any attempts at being cynically lumped into a trend. He plays soothing, appealing ballads, anguished uptempo tunes and wonderful melodies on muted and open horn, cleanly and fully hitting high and low notes, while executing mellow or intense statements smoothly and with flair. Guest vocalist Jeanie Bryson isn't overwhelmed by the task of singing immortal compositions previously made anthems by a legend. She won't make anyone forget Holiday, but her renditions don't lack their own authority or passion either. This is a smash tribute and arguably Terence Blanchard's finest work.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life

LIFE Icons

Wynton Marsalis Recalls Billie Holiday on 100th Anniversary of Her Birth

April 3, 2015

 

VIDEO OF WYNTON MARSALIS DISCUSSING BILLIE HOLIDAY:  http://ti.me/1DrAM43

The acclaimed musician describes what made Holiday a peerless talent and why her music endures today

When Wynton Marsalis was 24, he spent a year listening to Billie Holiday. “I listened to every record I could find of hers,” he says, “and every day I only listened to her.” One might expect a young Marsalis to spend a year with Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie, musicians who excelled on the trumpet, which he plays. But Holiday’s own instrument, her voice, contains multitudes — lessons on rhythm, phrasing and sophistication that any student of jazz would do well to study.

Marsalis spoke with LIFE to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Holiday’s birth on April 7, 1915. In the video above, he discusses her rhythmic sensibility, why it’s a mistake to attribute the quality of her voice to the hardship of her life and how she came to be recognized as one of the greatest voices in the history of jazz.

Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesBillie Holiday singing “Fine & Mellow” accompanied by James P. Johnson at piano.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Billie Holiday Festival takes place on April 9-12. Go to www.jazz.org for event and live webcast information.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/audra-mcdonald-to-repeat-tony-winning-lady-day-at-emersons-bar-and-grill-performance-for-hbo-337641

Audra McDonald to Repeat Tony-Winning Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill Performance for HBO

By Adam Hetrick
17 Dec 2014

Audra McDonald
Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva

HBO announced Dec. 17 that it will film Audra McDonald in her Tony Award-winning performance as Billie Holiday in Lanie Robertson's play with music Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill for future broadcast.

Lady Day will film in front of a live audience later this month at New Orleans' Cafe Brasil. Lonny Price, who helmed the Broadway production, will direct for HBO.
The HBO film, which has not set an air date, will be produced by Allen Newman and Two Hands Entertainment.

"The great Audra McDonald's brilliant performance as the legendary Billie Holiday was a Broadway landmark," HBO programming president Michael Lombardo said in a statement. "I'm thrilled that we will be able to bring this riveting show to viewers who weren't able to experience it in person."

McDonald added, "Playing Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill on Broadway was one of the most challenging and artistically rewarding experiences of my career, and it is an absolute honor to be able to bring Lanie's incredible work about this extraordinary woman to film, thanks to HBO." McDonald made Tony Awards history June 8, becoming the first woman to win Tony Awards in all four eligible acting categories. She now holds the record for the most Tony Award wins of any actor in competitive Tony categories.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill began previews March 25 and opened to strong critical notices April 13 at Circle in the Square. Read the reviews here.

The Broadway production was originally scheduled as a limited, 10-week engagement. Lady Day extended for a fourth and final time through Oct. 5.

The play also earned the Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play for Steven Canyon Kennedy.

A cast album of the play was recorded live by PS Classics and was released July 15.

Watch the Performance That Won Audra McDonald Her Sixth Tony Award:

http://v.playbill.com/services/player/bcpid82993908001?bctid=3467762885001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAAEX25ttk~,qVVep19cvaUd_MvoBnuGVanJsQIaFNkH

The 1959-set play, which centers on one of Billie Holiday's final public appearances, takes place in Philadelphia four months before the singer's death. The 90-minute show includes such songs as "God Bless the Child," "Strange Fruit," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "When a Woman Loves a Man," "Foolin' Myself," "Don't Explain," "Somebody's On My Mind," "Taint Nobody's Bizness," "Baby Doll" and more. According to producers, "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill recounts Holiday's life story through the songs that made her famous. 1959, in a small, intimate bar in Philadelphia, Holiday puts on a show that unbeknownst to the audience, will leave them witnesses to one of the last performances of her lifetime. Through her poignant voice and moving songs, one of the greatest jazz singers of all-time shares her loves and her losses."

McDonald also earned Tony Awards for her work in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime and A Raisin in the Sun. Her work on stage also includes Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with Patti LuPone, as well as Tony-nominated performances in 110 in the Shade and Marie Christine. On screen she has appeared in the television adaptations of "A Raisin in the Sun," "Wit" and "Annie." She is known to television audiences for "Private Practice" and "Grey's Anatomy."

Her solo albums include "Go Back Home" (2013), "Way Back to Paradise" (1998), "How Glory Goes" (2000), "Happy Songs" (2002) and "Build a Bridge" (2006).

Lady Day was produced by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jessica Genick, and Will Trice, who are joined by Ronald Frankel, Rebecca Gold, Roger Berlind, Ken Greiner, Gabrielle Palitz, Irene Gandy and GFour Productions.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/639738 

Audra McDonald Sings Billie Holiday on  Charlie Rose PBS:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-jazz-cassandra-wilson-20150303-column.html#page=1

Cassandra Wilson reflects on Billie Holiday at 100

by Howard Reich

Chicago Tribune

hreich​@chicagotribune.com

March 3, 2015  

Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. (Handout)

 
How does Cassandra Wilson salute Billie Holiday's centennial? With a stunning new album

Even now, as we approach next month's centennial of Billie Holiday's birth, the singer's story remains swathed in sensationalism.

Junkie, prostitute, rape victim, prison inmate, bloodied lover – these are the terms that dominate her biography and overshadow the single fact that matters most: her prowess as jazz singer.

It's not difficult to understand why the tawdry facets of her narrative would be prominent in a Hollywood film such as "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972) and in the popular imagination. But that focus doesn't do justice to her stature as a jazz singer who ennobled, expanded and deepened the art form.

Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. (Mark Seliger)

 

Which is partly why Cassandra Wilson – a stylistic heir to Holiday's unflinching, stripped-to-its-essence brand of jazz singing – next month will release the album "Coming Forth by Day" (Sony Legacy). In this unconventional tribute from one singular artist to another, Wilson doesn't mimic Holiday yet clearly evokes the master's gifts for probing beneath the surface of a song and into its hidden meanings. And because Wilson's honeyed alto is accompanied by lush strings and bluesy guitars – sometimes on the same track – the music sounds more like a celebration of Holiday's artistic achievements than yet another re-examination of the tragedies of Holiday's personal life.

"I felt it was time to set the record straight," says Wilson, who will give Chicago a sneak preview of this music when she performs Thursday night at Thalia Hall.

"There's so much focus on the negative – the negative surrounding her career and life. And because it is the 100th anniversary of her birth, I think it was time for her to be recognized for the great contributions she's made to the music.

Related

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AACM celebrates a golden anniversary

"There's so much emphasis on the drug addiction and her difficulties with her relationships," continues Wilson. "You don't do the same thing when you talk about Sigmund Freud. Everyone knows he was a coke addict … but we don't talk about that. We talk about him being the father of psychoanalysis."

Even among those who admire Holiday's art, a prevailing and misleading narrative long has held sway. According to conventional wisdom, Holiday was at her greatest in the 1930s, when her voice was young and bright, her tempos danceable, her message warm and often ebullient.
By the late 1940s and '50s, however, her voice was increasingly ravaged by the vicissitudes of her life, critics widely dismissing her efforts as a mere shadow of what once was.

"By the time she entered the Fifties," critic John S. Wilson wrote shortly before Holiday's death in 1959, at age 44, "her private life was becoming increasingly difficult, her voice would no longer respond as readily as it once had and, like the aging fastball pitcher who has lost his stuff, she was depending more and more on craft and guile to put across her songs."

To critic Wilson, and other detractors, Holiday's late recordings suggested a performer "who is depending largely on mannerisms to carry her through tempos which are often killingly slow for a limited voice. … She seems reduced to a ragged, wavering ghost of the inspired singer she once was, straining for the remembered effects that she can no longer achieve."

But it was the naysayers who were remembering – and yearning for – vocal effects that Holiday had outgrown. The sorrow and pain that Holiday evokes in "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" and the crying, long-held notes she delivers on "Body and Soul" (both from 1957) point to an artist of tremendous interpretive depth extending the expressive possibilities of what a jazz song could achieve. When Holiday dovetails softly cushioned phrases with Ben Webster's tenor saxophone on "Willow Weep for Me" (1957) and seems to suspend time in "My Man" (1952), there's no doubt that Holiday is using her somewhat battered instrument to attain a degree of musical and dramatic insight matched by only one singer of that era, Frank Sinatra.

Even toward the very end, in the late 1950s, Holiday's soft-spoken utterances and somewhat tremulous vibrato bring obvious eloquence to recordings such as "There'll Be Some Changes Made" and "All of You," suggesting the last glowing embers of her art.

Recordings of Holiday in rehearsal reaffirm that she knew exactly what she was doing.

"They run me out of Chicago," she says during one rehearsal captured in the 10-CD boxed set "The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959." "The Grand Terrace in Chicago . … Aw man, they say, 'I don't dig her, she's a drag.' They just didn't like my singing. 'She sounds like she's asleep. She sounds like she's tired.' They didn't dig me, and I wouldn't change. I wouldn't change. (Manager) Joe Glaser had me about seven, eight years and he say, 'You got to sing pop songs, you gotta speed up the tempo.'

"I gonna sing like I wanna sing. This is my way of doing it, and Mr. Glaser, I'm sorry. And when I get mad I say, 'Look you (expletive), you sing. I gonna sing my way, you sing your way.'"

Similarly, Wilson sings in her own way in "Coming Forth by Day," yielding fervently personalized versions of songs associated with Holiday. So perhaps it's not surprising that Wilson, too, hears great art in Holiday's much-maligned, late-period work.

"I'm on the same page with you on that," says Wilson, "that it's just more powerful. There are so many more layers of meaning in her delivery. … For me, this is Billie at her height."

Wilson recalls that she first became aware of Holiday as a child, when she discovered in her father's photo album a picture of Wilson's aunt with Holiday. Wilson's father was not a big fan of Holiday's, "I think because there was so much negativity attached to her career," says Wilson. "And perhaps he thought she would be a bad role model for me."

But the family photo only piqued Wilson's interest, leading her to begin a lifelong exploration of Holiday's art.

"She was the very first one, I think, with this very special style of singing, where she's conversational, and she's very emotional, and she's digging deep into the material – the context of the song, as well as handling what's happening musically," says Wilson.

"This is what I learned from listening to her. It's a very specific style of phrasing. And I learned a lot from that, from listening to her do that, speak her story, speak her truth. It's a very honest delivery that she gives. She's not just singing because her voice is pretty. She's singing because she has a story to tell."

As does Wilson, who on "Coming Forth By Day" taps a Southern blues sensibility in "Crazy He Calls Me" and a disarming vulnerability in "All of Me." Wilson's vocals float over translucent orchestral accompaniment in "What a Little Moonlight Can Do"; her amber tone is bathed in lush strings in "You Go to My Head." String arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, guitar laments from T-Bone Burnett and from Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, plus contributions from the rhythm section of the Bad Seeds and others might seem like a clash of styles on paper but come together surprisingly well under producer Nick Launay (known for his work with Nick Cave).

Most searing is Wilson's version of "Strange Fruit," which she sang introspectively on her "New Moon Daughter" album (1996) but here emerges as an epic plea for justice. Perhaps in the era of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and other slain black men, Holiday's dirge on lynching speaks to our times.

"That was exactly the thought," says Wilson. "It's not the same process that's used to murder young men, but the feeling behind it is the same."

And Wilson's performance of this work – like the rest of her Holiday homage – is not easily forgotten.

Cassandra Wilson performs at 8 p.m. Thursday at Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St.; $42-$500; 312-526-3851 or thaliahallchicago.com.

"Portraits in Jazz": Howard Reich's e-book collects his exclusive interviews with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald and others, as well as profiles of early masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. 

Get "Portraits in Jazz" at chicagotribune.com/ebooks.

hreich@tribpub.com

Twitter @howardreich

Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune

http://www.baltimoresun.com/…/bs-ae-billie-holiday-centenni…

On her centennial, what Billie Holiday means to Baltimore
by Tim Smith
April 3, 2015
The Baltimore Sun

 

Photos of Billie plus original murals by Baltimore artists depicting and celebrating her life

In her youth, she played hooky on the streets of Fells Point. As a woman, she performed at clubs on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now, a century after Billie Holiday's birth on April 7, 1915, admirers are invoking her spirit, making sure that one of history's greatest jazz singers — the greatest, many would say — will be honored in her hometown and around the world.

"You don't have to sing or be in music to know how really phenomenal she was," said Ethel Ennis, the exceptional 82-year-old Baltimore-born jazz artist who, at the start of her own career, received encouragement from Holiday. "When you hear her, you know it's the truth, and that's hard to find."

Holiday's centennial has prompted widespread interest again in her troubled life — she had an untimely death at age 44 — and her artistic legacy, preserved on such classic recordings as "God Bless the Child"; "Strange Fruit," a chilling reflection on lynching Holiday bravely sang at the height of Jim Crow; and the many standard songs she transformed with her indelible voice and phrasing.

A biography, "Billie Holiday: The Musicians and the Myth," was released this week by John Szwed. A "Centennial Collection" from Columbia Records was issued recently.
Cassandra Wilson, who sang a salute to Holiday at the Kennedy Center last week, will perform another on April 10 at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem — Holiday will be inducted into the Apollo Walk of Fame on Monday.

Wilson's Holiday tribute album, "Coming Forth By Day," is due out Tuesday. And at least two other contemporary singers, Jose James and Lara Downes, have released Holiday-themed recordings as well.

In Baltimore, there is no major civic event to mark the Holiday anniversary. Kevin R. Harris, chief of public affairs at the mayor's office, said no one was available to comment about that. He added that "plans are still being finalized as to what exactly city officials will be participating in." Harris did not respond to requests for additional information.

Tracy Baskerville, spokeswoman for the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, said there have been discussions about honoring Holiday at the 2015 Artscape festival. (The Billie Holiday Vocal Competition, which was part of Artscape for its final few years, ended in 2009 after two decades due to dwindling attendance.)

Meanwhile, fans of Holiday, nicknamed "Lady Day" by an accompanist early in her career, have planned numerous events for the 100th birthday.

"I feel like these are all grass-roots celebrations," said jazz vocalist Rhonda Robinson. "I was hoping the city would make a big to-do about it."

Robinson will perform with her quartet April 12 in the 200 block of S. Durham Street where Holiday lived as a child, a spot vividly decorated with murals and painted screens honoring the singer.

"Even though she was born in Philadelphia, we claim her," said Thomas Saunders, 57, a longtime operator of tours to the city's African-American heritage sites. "She grew up in Fells Point, and she would come back and sing at the Club Tijuana and Royal Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue."

Those nightclubs are gone, but the Pennsylvania Avenue neighborhood is home to James Earl Reid's striking statue of the singer, complete with the signature gardenias in her hair.

"On our tours, we always stop the bus by the Billie Holiday statue and people want to get out and see it," Saunders said.

For Holiday's actual centennial Tuesday, Saunders has organized a musical birthday party at the Orchard Street Church, home of the Greater Baltimore Urban League.

On Pennsylvania Avenue, the 103-year-old Arch Social Club will be the site on Saturday of a re-creation of a program Holiday performed at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 10, 1956, three years before her death.

Producer William Pleasant said the objective of the event "is to get people talking more about Billie Holiday. "And I'm working on taking the show out of Baltimore to New York and Europe," said Pleasant, 56.

Jazz vocalist Denyse Pearson will sing Holiday's Carnegie Hall program in this re-creation.

"Stepping into the role has taken me into the depths of [Holiday's] music and her life," Pearson said. "It's painful to learn about what she went through."

It is difficult to find "definitive truths" about Holiday, said Mark Osteen, professor of English at Loyola University Maryland and co-editor of the 2010 book "Music at the Crossroads: Lives & Legacies of Baltimore Jazz."

"There's still a lot of mystery about her," said Osteen, 61. "She remains elusive, which I guess adds to the idea of the enigmatic Billie Holiday."

The long-held belief that she was born in Baltimore was challenged about 25 years ago with evidence that the singer's unwed mother, Sadie Fagan, left home in Baltimore to have the birth in Philadelphia, returning shortly after. Holiday's estranged father, Clarence Holiday, another Baltimorean, was a jazz musician.

Among the few things known about Holiday's youth — her first name was Eleanora then — is that she was sent to the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls at Calverton Road and Franklin Street at the age of 9 for about nine months, apparently because of truancy.

By 14 or so, Holiday and her mother were living in New York, where the budding singer took the name Billie from silent screen star Billie Dove and added her father's surname. Holiday was soon singing in jazz clubs and, by 18, had made her first commercial recording.

In those early recordings, Osteen said, "Holiday was always behind the beat, which gave it a swing feel. Nothing was rushed. There was something so nonchalant about it."

Holiday enjoyed considerable acclaim during her lifetime, despite the racially insensitive and restrictive times. ("When she toured with Artie Shaw's band, she had to sleep in the bus and sometimes had to use it as her dressing room," Osteen said.) Success away from audiences and the recording studio was more elusive.

"She said that she wanted nothing more than to have a happy home with a man she loved, but it wasn't to be," Holiday's godchild, singer-songwriter Lorraine Feather, wrote in an email to The Sun.

In addition to failed marriages, Holiday went through a much-publicized arrest for narcotics possession in 1947 and prison time.

"My folks both loved her deeply, admired her to the skies, and were very unhappy that no one seemed to be able to help her with her addiction," said Feather, 66. "She wrote them from prison, once on toilet paper when she wasn't allowed to have writing paper."

Holiday continued to have brushes with the law, including an arrest while a patient in a New York hospital a month before her death. She died there of cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959.

Not everyone responded enthusiastically to Holiday in her day, especially her rawer sound in the later years, when a gravelly timbre reflected the toll of drinking and drugs.

"Honestly, I wasn't that crazy about her as a kid," said Sheila Ford, one of the vocalists taking part in the Orchard Street Church concert. "I associated slow, somber songs with Billie, but I kept listening and had that aha moment when I realized she didn't just sing those kinds of songs. She sang everything. I can listen to her all day long now."

Even in Holiday's earliest records, with their infectious swing and charm, a maturity comes through in the phrasing. The interpretive senses became all the more astute when Holiday wrapped her vocal cords around first-rate songs. And as her singing frayed, it seemed she could communicate all the more deeply.

"The pain of her life, the pain of the moment, is reflected in a less-than-perfect voice perfectly," said Ken Burns, the director and producer whose documentaries include "Jazz" in 2001.

Holiday's singing "is so spectacularly expressive, we are possessed by her world," Burns said.

Eighty-six-year-old Charlotte Geller, a Baltimore resident since 1961, knows what that means.

"In the summer of 1946, I was living in the Bronx and a young man invited me to go with him to a club on East 52nd Street to hear Billie Holiday," Geller said. "I had no idea who she was. But I was very impressed, especially when she sang 'Strange Fruit.' She had such expression in her eyes. I will never forget that look in her eyes. It moved me so much."

Ennis had only a verbal experience with Holiday, but it left a lasting impression, too.

In 1955, a friend of Ennis' took a copy of her first recording with him to New York when he visited Holiday. Ennis laughs about her friend's report on Lady Day's reaction to the album: "Who is that b—— in Baltimore?"

Holiday decided she wanted to speak with Ennis.

"The phone rang very early, around 3 or 4 [a.m.]," Ennis said. "She told me I was a musician's musician, I didn't fake it, and if I kept on singing that way, one day I would be famous. I'm glad I got those thoughts from her. It was almost like passing the torch."

The two singers never met, but Holiday remains a vivid presence for Ennis, especially the late-career Holiday, so compellingly captured in the 1958 album "Lady in Satin."

"That's my bible," Ennis said. "The voice was waning, but you hear the words coming alive. It's almost like watching someone painting a picture, and slowly you see the figures taking shape. Oh, man, it's all there. Having a lovely voice, that's nice, that's icing on the cake. But the cake is what you're after."

Baltimore Sun reporter Chris Kaltenbach contributed to this article.

tim.smith @baltsun. com
Copyright © 2015, The Baltimore Sun

Photos of Billie and original murals above by Baltimore artists depicting and celebrating her life

http://www.billieholiday4ever.com/in-books-en

Billie in Books

“ Ian Clayton works as a writer and broadcaster in northern England. Over the last 25 years he has worked on more than fifty books and hundreds of TV and Radio programmes. He is a workshop leader specialising in combining musi with the written and spoken word. Ian’s lates book ‘BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME’ published January 2007 contains many references to his inspiration Billie Holiday. Ian first became interested in Billie when he discovered a pile of second hand Verve LP’s in a shop in York the day after an elderly man had traded in his collection at the beginning ofthe 1980’s”

Ian Clayton
You may contact Ian at: mail[at]: ianclayton.f9.co.uk

BILLIE IN BOOKS TOWARD A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF BILLIE HOLIDAY AND THE PRINTED WORD.

Biography

1. Billie Holiday(with William Dufty). Lady sings the Blues. Doubleday. 1956.
The notorious autobiography on which the film of the same name is ‘loosely” based.
2. John Chilton. Billies Blues. Quartet. 1975.
Well researched hard facts about Billie’s recording career.
3. Chris Ingham. Billie Holiday. Unanimous. 2000.
An entry in the“Diva’s” series.
4. David Margolick. Strange Fruit. Running ¨ress. 2000.
The impact of “Café Society and an early cry for human rights.
5. Bud Kliment. Billie Holiday-Singer. Chelsea House. 1990.
Black Americans of achievment series.
6. Leslie Gourse. Billie Holiday Companion. Schirmer. 1997.
Compilation of various, mostly hard to find writings on Billie.
7. John White. Billie Holiday. Spellmount. 1987.
Larger format book in “Jazz Lifetimes” series.
8. Leslie Gourse. Billie Holiday. Franklin Watts. 1995.
The tragedy and triumph of Lady Day.
9. Stuart Nicholson. Billie Holiday. Victor Gollancz. 1995.
A model of biographical writing, much prviously unknown material.
10. Michel Fontanes. Billie et Paris. ( English translation available) . Editions Rive Droite 1999.
Thoroughly researched chronicle of Billies time in Paris 1954 and 1958.
11. Marc-Edouard Nabe. L‘âme de Billie Holiday. L’infini Denoël. 1986.
novel. Not published in English.
12. Farah Jasmin Griffin. If you ca’nt be free, be a mistery. The Free Press. 2001.
A groundbreaking study that confronts the myths.
13. Robert O’Meally. Lady Day. The many faces of Billie Holiday. Arcade. 1991.
Superbly illustrated; scholarly and enlightened.
14. Donald Clarke. Wishing on the Moon. Viking Penguin. 1994.
A near definite account.
15. Burnett James. Billie Holiday. Spellmount/Hippocrene. 1984.
Small Format. An introduction in the Jazz Masters series.
16. Melvin Maddocks. Billie Holiday (Giants of Jazz) Time Life. 1979.
Biography to accompany a Time Life record set.
17. Ken Vail. Lady Day’s diary. Castle. 1996.
A month by month Chronology of Lady’s career.
18. Paola Boncompagni. Lady Day Life and Songs. Nuovi Equilibri. 1992.
Small format book to accomany mini CD from Italy.
19. Julia Blackburn. With Billie. Jonathan Cape 2005.
A well constructed book, uses interviews undertaken by Linda Kuehl in the 1970’s.
20. Magdalena Alagna. Billie Holiday. Rosen 2003.
An entry in the “rock and roll hall of famers” series, introduction for teenagers.
21.Alain Gerber. Lady Day . Histoires d’amour. Fayard 2005.
A novel about Billie in French.
22.Danièle Robert. Les Chants de l’Aube de Lady Day.
Le temps qu’il faut 1995.
A novel about Billie’s life in French.
23. Sylvia Fol. Billie Holiday. Folio 2006.
A complete book in French of Billie’s life with several insights on Billie ambiguous sexuality.

BOOKS WITH AN IMPORTANT ESSAY OR AT LEAST ONE CHAPTER ON BILLIE HOLIDAY

1. Gary Giddins. Faces in the crowd. Oxford University Press. 1992.
A fine collection of essays and criticism.
2. Eric Hobsbawm. Uncommon people. Rebellion and Jazz. Wiedenfield and Nicholson. 1998.
Includes an obituary of Billie.
3. Françoise Sagan. Avec mon meilleur souvenir. Folio. 1984.
In english” With fondest regards” ( Alison and Busby 1988.) Affectionate and candid tribute.
4. Angela Y. Davies. Blues Legacies, Black Feminism. Vintage 1999.
Scholarly research into the sociology of blues and jazz from female standpoint.
5.Robyn Archer/Diane Symonds. A Star is Torn. Virago.1986.
An anthology of various women singers. Part of a stageshow.
6. Burnett James. Essays on Jazz. Jazz Book Club. 1964.
An essay called” Billie Holiday and the Art of Communication”.
7. Bennu Green. The Reluctant Art. Jazz Book Club. 1964.
A forty page essay called” Billie Holiday”.
8. Martin T. Williams. The Art of Jazz. Jazz Book Club. 1962.
Essay entilted “ Billie Holiday” by Glen Coulter.
9. Martin T. Williams. Jazz Panorama. Jazz Book Club. 1965.
Another essay by Glen Coulter, reviewing Billie records.
10. Leonard Feather. From Satchmo to Miles. Stein and Day. 1974.
Personal stories from the great jazz writer.
11. Martin Williams. The Jazz Tradition. Oxford Univ. Press. 1983.
An essay entitled:” Actress without an act”.
12. Max Jones. Talking Jazz. McMillan Press. 1987.
Adventures involving the writer and Billie in tour in England 1954.
13. Roy Carr (exec. ED.) Jazz singers. Hamlyn. 1999.
Glossy, Large format introduction to jazz vocalists..
14. Francis Davis. Outcats. Oxford Univ. Press. 1990.
Essays on jazz people including “ The Man who Danced with Billie Holiday”.
15. Will Friedwald. Jazz Singing. Quartet. 1991.
Superb Book. Essay called “ Lady Day and Lady Time”.
16. Hettie Jones. Big Star Fallin’Mama. Viking. 1974.
Warm portraits of five singers inc. Billie.
17. Henry Pleasants. The Great American Popular Singers. Victor Gollancz. 1974.
A wonderful survey of vocal art.
18. Kitty Grime. Jazz Voices. Quartet 1983.
A patchwork of interviews with jazz people, a chapter about Billie.
19. Studs Terkel. Giants of Jazz. The New Press. 1957.
A series of beautifully observed protraits, chapter on Billie “ God Bless The Child”.
20. Becoming Billie Holiday by Carol Boston Weatherford. 120 pages

BOOKS WITH A SIGNIFICANT REFERENCE TO BILLIE HOLIDAY

1. John Hammond (with Irving Townsend). John Hammond on Record. Penguin. 1981.
Autobiography of the jazz buff and record company man.
2. Maya Angelou. The Heart of a Woman. Virago. 1986.
Fourth vol. Of the great black writers autobiography.
3. Jeremy Reed. Angels Divas and Black Listed Heres. Peter Owen. 1999.
A challenging series of essays by poet and novelist.
4. Leslie Gourse. Madame Jazz. Oxford Univ. Press. 1995.
The history of women in Jazz.
5. Sally Placksin. Jazz Women. 1900 to the Present. Pluto. 1985
Words, lives and music of nearly a century of jazz women.
6. Leslie Gourse. Louis’Children, American Jazz Singers. Quill. 1984.
A comprehensive overview of the Louis Armstrong legacy.
7. Harry Shapiro. Waiting for the Man. Quartet. 1988.
Drugs and their links to popular music.
8. Arnold Shaw. 52nd Street. The Street of Jazz. Da Capo. 1977.
Originally published as “The Street that never Slept” A slice of jazz nightlife.
9. Buck Clayton. Buck Clayton’s Jazz World. McMillan. 1986.
Story of the great trumpeter and Billie accompanist.
10. Ted Fox. Show Time at the Apollo. Quartet 1985.
A survey of 50 years of the great Harlem theatre.
11. William P. Gottleib. The Golden Age of Jazz. Pomegranate. 1995.
A nostalgic look back to the 1930’s and 40’s.
12. Charles Fox/Valerie Wilmer. The Jazz Scene. Hamlyn. 1971.
A nicely illustrated overview.
13. Joachim Berendt. The Jazz Book (Revised Edition). Paladin 1984.
One of the truly great jazz histories.
14. Geoffrey C. Ward/Ken Burns. Jazz. A History of America’s Music. Pimlico. 2000.
Excellent research, beautifully illustrated tie in to TV series.
15. Teddy Wilson. (A Lightart, H Van Loo) Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz. Cassell.1996.
A candid account account of Wilson’s life and career.
16. Arnold Shaw. Black Popular Music in America. Schirmer. 1986.
Comprehensive and well researched.
17. John Chilton. Jazz. Hodder and Stoughton. 1979.
Intro. To history and practice of jazz music. Best of his type.
18. Whitney Balliet. Dinosaurs in the Morning. J.Dent. 1964.
Essays by the New York Times Jazz critic.
19. Stanley Dance. The world of Swing. Scribners. 1974.
A chronicle of the big band era.
20. Philip Larkin. All what Jazz. Faber. 1970.
Criticism and record reviews by famous English poet.
21. Cynthia Palmer/Michael Horowitz. Sisters of the Extreme. Park St Press. 2000.
Women writing about their drug experience.

NOVELS, POETRY ANTHOLOGIES, CHILDRENS STORIES

1. Alice Adams. Listening to Billie. Penguin. 1984.
A beautiful novel that starts in a 1950’s Manhattan night- club.
2. John Wieners. 707 Scott St. Sun and Moon. 1996.
Poetry and Prose dedicated to Billie.
3. Anne Grifalconi. Tinny’s hat. Harper Collins. 1999.
For children. A young girl wears her musician father’s hat.
4. Robert Somma (ed.) No One Waved Goodbye. Charisma. 1973.
Includes the poem “ The Day Lady Day Died”. ( Lunch Poems 1963).
5.Alexis De Veaux. Don’t Explain. Writers and Readers. 1988.
A prose poem in tribute to Billie.
6. Carlos Sampayo/Jose Munoz. Billie Holiday. Fantagraphics Books. 1993.
Imaginative stuff. A graphic novel.
7. Elisabeth Hardwick . Sleepless Nights. Random House. 1979.
A stunning novel, taking in memory, affection and Billie Holiday in Harlem.
8. Jeremy Reed. Saint Billie. Enitharmon Press 2001.
An anthology that captures the drama of Billie’s life and the jazz age.

ENCYCLOPAEDIAS AND REFERENCE BOOKS

Billie is of course mentioned in every reference work on jazz. Following are strongly recommended.
1. Leonard Feather. The eEncyclopeadia of Jazz. Arthur Baker . 1960.
One of the first in the field and still very reliable.
2. John Chilton. Who’s Who of Jazz. Bloomsbury. 1970.
Obsessively comprehensive.
3. David Meeker. Jazz in the Movies. Talisman. 1981.
Indispensable guide to jazz on film. Includes all of Billie appearances plus TV ones.
4. John Fordham. Jazz. Dorling Kindersley. 1993.
History, instruments, musucians, Recordings. A connoisseur’s book.
5 Ian Carr, D. Fairweather, B. Priestlet. Jazz. Essential Companion. Grafton. 1987.
Homage to jazz musicians everywhere.
6. Richard Cook, Brian Morton. Pengin Guide to Jazz on CD. LP and Cassette. Penguin 1992.
Definitive reference work with criticism of all available recordings.
7. Roy Carr. A Century of Jazz. Hamlyn. 1998.
Beautifully illustrated celebration of jazz history.
8. Brian Case S Britt C Murray. Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Jazz. Salamender. 1986.
For the buff or the new fan.
9. Barry MaCraae. The Hazz Handbook. Longman 1987.
Practical, easy to use and insightful.

DISCOGRAPHY

1. Jorgen Grunnet Jepsen. Discography of Billie Holiday. Knudsen (Denmark). 1969.
Small, Home published Discography.
2. Jack Millar. Born to Swing. JazzMedia.(Denmark). 1979.
A model for all discographical writing.
Updated by Jack Millar until his death in July 1999.
Available on Amazon.com
3. Alberto Varela. A complete discography of Billie, available on the site: varelasite from a dedicated Brazilian fan of Lady.

http://www.jazz.com/dozens/b-holiday-dozens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday

Billie Holiday

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Billie Holiday
Portrait from Down Beat magazine, c. February 1947
Background information
Birth name	Eleanora Fagan
Also known as	Lady Day
Born	April 7, 1915 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Origin	Harlem, New York, U.S.
Died	July 17, 1959 (aged 44) New York City, New York, U.S.
Genres	Vocal jazz, jazz blues, torch songs, swing, blues, R&B
Occupation(s)	Singer and songwriter
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1933–1959
Labels	Brunswick, Vocalion, Okeh, Bluebird, Commodore, Capitol, Decca, Aladdin, Verve, Columbia, MGM
Associated acts	Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Carmen McRae, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Lester Young
Website	Official website

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan;^[1][2] April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959)^[3] was an American jazz singer and songwriter.

Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.

Contents

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early life
  • 1.2 Attempted rape and prostitution
  • 1.3 Early singing career
  • 1.4 Recordings with Teddy Wilson (1935–1938)
  • 1.5 Working for Count Basie and Artie Shaw (1937–1938)
  • 1.6 Commodore recordings and mainstream success (1939)
  • 1.7 Successes (1940–1947)
  • 1.8 Legal troubles, Carnegie Hall Concert (1947–1952)
  • 1.9 Lady Sings the Blues (1952–1959)
  • 1.10 Death
• 2 Voice
• 3 Hit records
• 4 Discography
  • 4.1 Studio LPs
• 5 Awards and honors
  • 5.1 Grammy Hall of Fame
  • 5.2 Grammy Best Historical Album
  • 5.3 Other honors
  • 5.4 Tributes
  • 5.5 Honors
• 6 Filmography
  • 6.1 Television appearances
• 7 See also
• 8 Notes
• 9 References
• 10 External links

Biography

Early life

Holiday was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of Sarah Julia "Sadie" Fagan and Clarence Holiday. Her father, a musician, did not marry or live with her mother. Not long after Holiday's birth, Clarence left her and her mother to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist.^[4] Sarah had moved to Philadelphia aged 19,^[5] after being ejected from her parents' home in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland for becoming pregnant. With no support from her parents, Holiday's mother arranged for the young Holiday to stay with her older married half-sister, Eva Miller, who lived in Baltimore. Holiday, who was of African American ancestry, was also said to have had Irish ancestors through her mother's mixed heritage.

Holiday aged 2 in 1917

Holiday had a difficult childhood. Her mother often took what were then known as "transportation jobs", serving on passenger railroads. Holiday was left to be raised largely by Eva Miller's mother-in-law, Martha Miller, and suffered from her mother's absences and leaving her in others' care for much of the first ten years of her life.^[6] Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, first published in 1956, was sketchy about details of her early life, but much was confirmed by Stuart Nicholson in his 1995 biography of the singer. Some historians have disputed Holiday's paternity, as a copy of her birth certificate in the Baltimore archives lists the father as a man named Frank DeViese. Other historians consider this an anomaly, probably inserted by a hospital or government worker.^[7] DeViese lived in Philadelphia and Sadie Harris may have known him through her work.

Sadie Harris, then known as Sadie Fagan, married Philip Gough, but the marriage was over in two years. Holiday was left with Martha Miller again while her mother took more transportation jobs.^[8] Holiday frequently skipped school and her truancy resulted in her being brought before the juvenile court on January 5, 1925, when she was nine years old. She was sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school. She was baptized there on March 19, 1925. After nine months in care, she was "paroled" on October 3, 1925, to her mother, who had opened a restaurant called the East Side Grill, where she and Holiday worked long hours. By the age of 11, Holiday had dropped out of school.^[9]

Attempted rape and prostitution

Holiday's mother returned to their home on December 24, 1926, to discover a neighbor, Wilbur Rich, attempting to rape Billie, but failing. She fought back. Rich was arrested. Officials placed Billie in the House of the Good Shepherd under protective custody as a state witness in the rape case.^[10] Holiday was released in February 1927, nearly twelve. She found a job running errands in a brothel.^[11] During this time, Holiday first heard the records of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. By the end of 1928, Holiday's mother decided to try her luck in Harlem, New York, and left Holiday again with Martha Miller.^[12]

By early 1929, Holiday joined her mother in Harlem. Their landlady was a sharply dressed woman named Florence Williams, who ran a brothel at 151 West 140th Street. Holiday's mother became a prostitute and, within a matter of days of arriving in New York, Holiday, who had not yet turned fourteen, also became a prostitute at $5 a client.^[13] On May 2, 1929, the house was raided, and Holiday and her mother were sent to prison. After spending some time in a workhouse, her mother was released in July, followed by Holiday in October, at the age of 14.

Early singing career

In Harlem she started singing in various night clubs. Holiday took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and the musician Clarence Holiday, her probable father.^[2] At the outset of her career, she spelled her last name "Halliday", the birth surname of her father, but eventually changed it to "Holiday", his performing name. The young singer teamed up with a neighbor, tenor sax player Kenneth Hollan. From 1929 to 1931, they were a team, performing at clubs such as the Grey Dawn, Pod's and Jerry's on 133rd Street, and the Brooklyn Elks' Club.^[14][15] Benny Goodman recalled hearing Holiday in 1931 at The Bright Spot. As her reputation grew, Holiday played at many clubs, including Mexico's and The Alhambra Bar and Grill where Charles Linton, a vocalist who later worked with Chick Webb, first met her. It was also during this period that she connected with her father, who was playing with Fletcher Henderson's band.^[16]

By the end of 1932 at the age of 17, Billie Holiday replaced the singer Monette Moore at a club called Covan's on West 132nd Street. The producer John Hammond, who loved Monette Moore's singing and had come to hear her, first heard Holiday in early 1933.^[17] Hammond arranged for Holiday to make her recording debut, at age 18, in November 1933 with Benny Goodman, singing two songs: "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the Scotch," the latter being her first hit. "Son-in-Law" sold 300 copies, but "Riffin' the Scotch," released on November 11, sold 5,000 copies. Hammond was quite impressed by Holiday's singing style. He said of her, "Her singing almost changed my music tastes and my musical life, because she was the first girl singer I'd come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius." Hammond compared Holiday favorably to Armstrong and said she had a good sense of lyric content at her young age.^[18]

In 1935, Billie Holiday had a small role as a woman being abused by her lover in Duke Ellington's short Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. In her scene, she sang the song "Saddest Tale."^[19]

Recordings with Teddy Wilson (1935–1938)

Holiday was signed to Brunswick Records by John Hammond to record current pop tunes with Teddy Wilson in the new "swing" style for the growing jukebox trade. They were given free rein to improvise the material. Holiday's improvisation of the melody line to fit the emotion was revolutionary. Their first collaboration included "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," and "Miss Brown to You (1935)." The record label did not favor the recording session, because producers wanted Holiday to sound more like Cleo Brown. After "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" garnered success, however, the company began considering Holiday an artist in her own right.^[20] She began recording under her own name a year later (on the 35-cent Vocalion label), producing a series of extraordinary performances with groups comprising the swing era's finest musicians. The sessions were co-produced by Hammond and Bernie Hanighen.^[21]

With their arrangements, Wilson and Holiday took pedestrian pop tunes, such as "Twenty-Four Hours a Day" (#6 Pop) or "Yankee Doodle Went To Town", and turned them into jazz classics. Most of Holiday's recordings with Wilson or under her own name during the 1930s and early 1940s are regarded as important parts of the jazz vocal library. She was then in her early to late 20s.

Another frequent accompanist was the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had been a boarder at her mother's house in 1934 and with whom Holiday had a special rapport. He said: "Well, I think you can hear that on some of the old records, you know. Some time I'd sit down and listen to 'em myself, and it sound like two of the same voices, if you don't be careful, you know, or the same mind, or something like that."^[22] Young nicknamed her "Lady Day", and she, in turn, dubbed him "Prez".

Hammond spoke about the commercial impact of the Teddy Wilson-Billie Holiday sides from 1935 to 1938, calling them a great asset to Brunswick. The record label, according to Hammond, was broke and unable to record many jazz tunes. Because Wilson, Holiday, Lester Young, and other musicians came into the studio without any arrangements, which cost money, and improvised the material as they went along, the records they produced were very cheap. Holiday was never given any royalties for her work, instead being paid a flat fee, which saved the record label money. Some of the records produced were largely successful, such as the single "I Cried for You" which sold 15,000 copies. Hammond said of the record, "15,000 ... was a giant hit for Brunswick in those days. I mean a giant hit. Most records that made money sold around three to four thousand." ^[23]

Working for Count Basie and Artie Shaw (1937–1938)

 

In late 1937, Holiday had a brief stint as a big band vocalist with Count Basie.^[24] The traveling conditions of the band were often poor and included one-nighters in clubs, moving from city to city with little stability. Holiday chose the songs she sang and had a hand in the arrangements, choosing to portray her then developing persona of a woman unlucky in love. Her tunes included "I Must Have That Man", "Travelin' All Alone", "I Can't Get Started", and "Summertime", a hit for Holiday in 1936, originating in the opera Porgy and Bess a few years earlier. Count Basie had gotten used to Holiday's heavy involvement in the band. He said, "When she rehearsed with the band, it was really just a matter of getting her tunes like she wanted them, because she knew how she wanted to sound and you couldn't tell her what to do."^[25]

Holiday found herself in direct competition with popular singer Ella Fitzgerald, with whom Holiday would later become friends.^[26] Fitzgerald was the vocalist for the Chick Webb Band, who were in competition with Count Basie. On January 16, 1938, the same day that Benny Goodman performed his legendary Carnegie Hall jazz concert, the Count Basie and Chick Webb bands had a battle at the Savoy Ballroom. Chick Webb and Fitzgerald were declared winners by Metronome magazine. Down Beat magazine declared Holiday and Basie the winners. A straw poll of the audience saw Fitzgerald win by a three-to-one margin.

Some of the tunes Holiday performed with Basie were recorded. "I Can't Get Started", "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and "Swing It Brother Swing," are all commercially available.^[27] Although Holiday was unable to record in the studio with Count Basie, she did include many of his musicians in her recording dates with Teddy Wilson.

By February of that year, Holiday was no longer singing for Basie. The reason given for her firing varies from person to person. Jimmy Rushing, Basie's male vocalist, called her unprofessional. According to All Music Guide, Holiday was officially fired for being "temperamental and unreliable". Holiday complained of low pay and working conditions and may have refused to sing the tunes requested of her or change her style.^[28]

Holiday was hired by Artie Shaw a month after being fired from the Count Basie Band. This association placed her among the first black women to work with a white orchestra, an unusual arrangement for the times. Also, this was the first time a full-time employee black female singer toured the segregated Southern US with a white bandleader. In situations where there was a lot of racial tension, Shaw was known to stick up for his vocalist. Holiday describes one incident in her autobiography where she could not sit on the bandstand with other vocalists because she was black. Shaw said to her, "I want you on the band stand like Helen Forrest, Tony Pastor and everyone else." ^[29] When touring the American South, Holiday would sometimes be heckled by members of the audience. In Louisville, Kentucky a man called her a "nigger wench" and requested she sing another song. Holiday lost her temper and needed to be escorted off the stage.^[30]

By March 1938, Shaw and Holiday had been broadcast on Radio WABC. Because of their success, they were given an extra time slot to broadcast in April, which increased their exposure. The New York Amsterdam News reported an improvement in Holiday's performance ability while reviewing the broadcasts. Metronome reported that the addition of Holiday to Shaw's band put it in the "top brackets". Holiday could not sing as often during Artie Shaw's shows as she could Basie's. The songs were more instrumental with fewer vocals. Shaw was also pressured to hire a white singer, Nita Bradley, with whom Holiday did not get along but had to share a bandstand. In May 1938, Shaw won band battles against Tommy Dorsey and Red Norvo with the audience favoring Holiday. Although Shaw admired Holiday's singing in his band, saying she had a "remarkable ear" and an "remarkable sense of time", her time in the band was nearing an end.^[31]

In November 1938 Holiday was asked to use the service elevator at the Lincoln Hotel, instead of the passenger elevator, because white patrons of the hotels complained. This may have been the last straw for her. She left the band shortly after. Holiday spoke about the incident weeks later, saying "I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room as did other members of the band ... [and] I was made to leave and enter through the kitchen."

There are no surviving live recordings of Holiday with Artie Shaw's band. Because she was under a separate recording label and possibly because of her race, Holiday was only able to record one record with Shaw, "Any Old Time".

By the late 1930s, Billie Holiday had toured with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, scored a string of radio and retail hits with Teddy Wilson, and became an established artist in the recording industry. Her songs "What A Little Moonlight Can Do" and "Easy Living" were being imitated by singers across America and were quickly becoming jazz standards.^[32] In 1938, Holiday's single "I'm Gonna Lock My Heart" ranked 6th as the most-played song for September of that year. Her record label Vocalion listed the single as its fourth best seller for the same month. "I'm Gonna Lock My Heart" peaked at number 2 on the pop charts according to Joel Whitburn's "Pop Memories: 1890–1954" book.^[33]

Commodore recordings and mainstream success (1939)

 

Holiday was recording for Columbia in the late 1930s when she was introduced to "Strange Fruit", a song based on a poem about lynching written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Meeropol used the pseudonym "Lewis Allan" for the poem, which was set to music and performed at teachers' union meetings.^[34] It was eventually heard by Barney Josephson, proprietor of Café Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, who introduced it to Holiday. She performed it at the club in 1939, with some trepidation, fearing possible retaliation. Holiday later said that the imagery in "Strange Fruit" reminded her of her father's death and that this played a role in her resistance to performing it.^[35]

When Holiday's producers at Columbia found the subject matter too sensitive, Milt Gabler agreed to record it for his Commodore Records. That was done on April 20, 1939, and "Strange Fruit" remained in her repertoire for twenty years. She later recorded it again for Verve. While the Commodore release did not get any airplay, the controversial song sold well, though Gabler attributed that mostly to the record's other side, "Fine and Mellow", which was a jukebox hit.^[36] "The version I recorded for Commodore," Holiday said of "Strange Fruit," "became my biggest-selling record.^[37] "Strange Fruit" was the equivalent of a top twenty hit in the 1930s.

For her performance of "Strange Fruit" at the Café Society, she had waiters silence the crowd when the song began. During the song's long introduction, the lights dimmed and all movement had to cease. As Holiday began singing, only a small spotlight illuminated her face. On the final note, all lights went out and when they came back on, Holiday was gone.^[38]

Holiday said her father Clarence Holiday was denied treatment for a fatal lung disorder because of prejudice and that singing "Strange Fruit" reminded her of the incident. "It reminds me of how Pop died, but I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South," she said in her autobiography.^[39]

Holiday's popularity increased after "Strange Fruit". She received a mention in Time magazine.^[40] "I open Café Society as an unknown," Holiday said. "I left two years later as a star. I needed the prestige and publicity all right, but you can't pay rent with it." Holiday demanded her manager Joe Glaser give her a raise shortly after.^[41]

Holiday soon returned to Commodore in 1944, recording songs she made with Teddy Wilson in the 1930s like "I Cover The Waterfront", "I'll Get By", and "He's Funny That Way". She also recorded new songs that were popular at the time, including, "My Old Flame", "How Am I To Know?", "I'm Yours", and "I'll Be Seeing You", a Bing Crosby number one hit. She also recorded her version of "Embraceable You", which would later be inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005.

During her time at Commodore, Billie Holiday also babysat the young Billy Crystal; his father being Jack Crystal and uncle being Milt Gabler, the co-founders of Commodore Records.^[42]

Successes (1940–1947)

 

Holiday's mother, Sadie Fagan, nicknamed "The Duchess," opened a restaurant called Mom Holiday's. She used money from her daughter while playing dice with members of the Count Basie band, with whom she toured in the late 1930s. "It kept mom busy and happy and stopped her from worrying and watching over me," Holiday said. Fagan began borrowing large amounts from Holiday to support the restaurant. Holiday obliged but soon fell on hard times herself. "I needed some money one night and I knew Mom was sure to have some," she said. "So I walked in the restaurant like a stockholder and asked. Mom turned me down flat. She wouldn't give me a cent." The two argued and Holiday shouted angrily: "God bless the child that's got his own," and stormed out. With Arthur Herzog, Jr., a pianist, she wrote a song based on the line "God Bless the Child" and added music.^[43]

"God Bless the Child" became Holiday's most popular and covered record. It reached number 25 on the charts in 1941 and was third in Billboard's songs of the year, selling over a million records.^[44][45] In 1976, the song was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.^[46] Herzog claimed Holiday contributed only a few lines to the lyrics. He said Holiday came up with the line "God Bless the Child" from a dinner conversation the two had had.^[47]

On June 24, 1942, Holiday recorded "Trav'lin Light" with Paul Whiteman for a new label, Capitol Records. Because she was under contract with Columbia, she used the pseudonym "Lady Day."^[48] The song reached 23 on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, then called the Harlem Hit Parade.^[49]

In September 1943, Life wrote: "She has the most distinct style of any popular vocalist and is imitated by other vocalists."^[50]

Milt Gabler became an A&R man for Decca Records as well as owning Commodore Records, and he signed Holiday to the label on August 7, 1944, when she was 29.^[51] Her first recording for Decca was "Lover Man" (#16 Pop, No. 5 R&B), one of her biggest hits. The success and distribution of the song made Holiday a staple in the pop community, leading to solo concerts, rare for jazz singers in the late 40s. Gabler said: "I made Billie a real pop singer. That was right in her. Billie loved those songs."^[52] Jimmy Davis and Roger "Ram" Ramirez, "Lover Man"'s songwriters, had tried to interest Holiday in the song in .^[53] In 1943, a flamboyant male torch singer, Willie Dukes, began singing "Lover Man" on 52nd Street.^[54] Because of his success, Holiday added it to her shows. The record's other side was "No More", one of her favorites.^[51]

Holiday asked Gabler for strings on the recording. They were associated with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. "I went on my knees to him," Holiday said. "I didn't want to do it with the ordinary six pieces. I begged Milt and told him I had to have strings behind me."^[55] On October 4, 1944, Holiday entered the studio to record "Lover Man" and saw the string ensemble and walked out. The musical director, Toots Camarata said she was overwhelmed with joy.^[55] She may also have wanted strings to avoid comparisons between her commercially successful early work with Teddy Wilson and everything produced afterwards. Her 1930s recordings with Wilson used a small jazz combo; recordings with Decca often involved strings.^[56]

A month later, in November, Holiday returned to Decca to record "That Ole Devil Called Love", "Big Stuff", and "Don't Explain". She wrote "Don't Explain" after she caught her husband, Jimmy Monroe, with lipstick on his collar.^[57]

Holiday did not return to the studio until August 1945. She recorded "Don't Explain" for a second time, changing the lyrics "I know you raise Cain" to "Just say you'll remain" and "You mixed with some dame" to "What is there to gain?" Other songs recorded were "Big Stuff", "What Is This Thing Called Love?", and "You Better Go Now". Ella Fitzgerald named "You Better Go Now" as her favorite Holiday recording.^[58] "Big Stuff" and "Don't Explain" were recorded again but with additional strings and a viola.

Billie Holiday and her dog Mister, New York, c. June 1946

In 1946, Holiday recorded "Good Morning Heartache". Although the song failed to chart, it remained in her live shows, with three known live recordings.^[59]

In September 1946, Holiday began her only major film New Orleans. She starred opposite Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman. Plagued by racism and McCarthyism, producer Jules Levey and script writer Herbert Biberman were pressed to lessen Holiday's and Armstrong's roles to avoid the impression that black people created jazz. The attempts failed because in 1947 Biberman was listed as one of the Hollywood Ten and sent to jail.^[60]

Several scenes were deleted from the film. "They had taken miles of footage of music and scenes," Holiday said, "[and] none of it was left in the picture. And very damn little of me. I know I wore a white dress for a number I did... and that was cut out of the picture."^[61] She recorded the track "The Blues Are Brewin'", for the film's soundtrack. Other songs included in the movie are "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" and "Farewell to Storyville".

Holiday's drug addictions were a problem on the set. She earned more than a thousand dollars a week from club ventures but spent most on heroin. Her lover Joe Guy traveled to Hollywood while Holiday was filming and supplied her with drugs. When discovered by Joe Glaser, Holiday's manager, Guy was banned from the set.^[62]

By the late 1940s, Holiday had begun recording a number of slow, sentimental ballads. Metronome expressed its concerns in 1946 about "Good Morning Heartache," saying "there's a danger that Billie's present formula will wear thin, but up to now it's wearing well."^[38] The New York Herald Tribune reported of a concert in 1946 that her performance had little variation in melody and no change in tempo.^[63]

Legal troubles, Carnegie Hall Concert (1947–1952)

Billie at the Club Bali, Washington with Al Dunn (drums), and Bobby Tucker (piano)

By 1947, Holiday was at her commercial peak, having made 250,000 dollars in the three previous years.^[64] Holiday came 2nd in the Down Beat poll for 1946 and 1947, her highest ranking in the poll.^[65] She came 5th on July 6, 1947 in Billboard's annual college poll of "girl singers". Jo Stafford came first.^[66] In 1946, Holiday won the Metronome Magazine popularity poll.^[67]

Billie Holiday, New York, c. February 1947

On May 16, 1947, she was arrested for possessing narcotics in her New York apartment. On May 27, 1947, she was in court. "It was called 'The United States of America versus Billie Holiday'. And that's just the way it felt," she recalled.^[68] During the trial, Holiday heard that her lawyer would not come to the trial to represent her. "In plain English that meant no one in the world was interested in looking out for me," she said. Dehydrated and unable to hold down food, she pleaded guilty and asked to be sent to the hospital. The district attorney spoke in her defense, saying, "If your honor please, this is a case of a drug addict, but more serious, however, than most of our cases, Miss Holiday is a professional entertainer and among the higher rank as far as income was concerned." At the end of the trial, Holiday was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, popularly known as "Camp Cupcake".

Holiday was released early (March 16, 1948) because of good behavior. When she arrived at Newark, her pianist Bobby Tucker and her dog Mister were waiting. The dog leaped at Holiday, knocking off her hat, and tackled her to the ground. "He began lapping me and loving me like crazy," she said. A woman thought the dog was attacking Holiday. She screamed, a crowd gathered, and reporters arrived. "I might just as well have wheeled into Penn Station and had a quiet little get-together with the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service," she said.^[69]

Ed Fishman (who fought with Joe Glaser to be Holiday's manager) thought of a comeback concert at Carnegie Hall. Holiday hesitated, unsure audiences would accept her after the arrest. She gave in and agreed to appear.

On March 27, 1948, Holiday played Carnegie Hall to a sold-out crowd. There were 2,700 tickets sold in advance, a record at the time for the venue. Her popularity was unusual because she didn't have a current hit record.^[70] Her last hit was "Lover Man" in 1945, her last on the record charts. Holiday sang 32 songs at the Carnegie concert by her count, including Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and her 30s hit, "Strange Fruit". During the show, someone sent Holiday a box of gardenias. "My old trademark," Holiday said. "I took them out of box and fastened them smack to the side of my head without even looking twice." There was a hatpin in the gardenias and Holiday, unknowingly, stuck it into the side of her head. "I didn't feel anything until the blood started rushing down in my eyes and ears," she said. After the third curtain call, she passed out.^[71]

On April 27, 1948, Bob Sylvester and her promoter Al Wilde arranged a Broadway show for her. Titled Holiday on Broadway, it sold out. "The regular music critics and drama critics came and treated us like we were legit," she said. But it closed after three weeks.^[72]

Holiday was arrested again on January 22, 1949, in her room at San Francisco's Hotel Mark Twain.

Billie Holiday in court in late 1949. She was brought to court over a contract dispute.

Holiday said she began using hard drugs in the early 1940s. She married trombonist Jimmy Monroe on August 25, 1941. While still married, she became involved with trumpeter Joe Guy, who was her drug dealer. She divorced Monroe in 1947 and also split with Guy.

In October 1949, Holiday recorded "Crazy He Calls Me", which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010. Gabler said the hit was her most successful recording for Decca after "Lover Man". The charts of the 1940s did not list songs outside the top 30, making it impossible to recognize minor hits. By the late 1940s, despite her popularity and concert power, her singles were little played on radio, perhaps because of her reputation.^[73]

Holiday's New York City Cabaret Card was revoked because of her 1947 conviction, preventing her working anywhere that sold alcohol for the remaining 12 years of her life.

The Cabaret system started in 1940 and was to prevent people of "bad character" from working on licensed premises. A performer had to renew the license every two years. This lasted until 1967.^[74] Clubs that sold alcohol in New York were among the highest paying in the country. Club owners knew blacklisted performers had limited work and could offer a smaller salary. This reduced Holiday's earnings. She had not received proper royalties until she joined Decca, so her main revenue was club concerts. The problem worsened when Holiday's records went out of print in the 1950s. She seldom received royalties in her later years. For instance, in 1958 she received a royalty of only 11 dollars.^[75][76] Her lawyer in the late 1950s, Earle Warren Zaidins, did not register with BMI on all but two songs she had written or co-written, costing her revenue.^[77]

In 1948, Holiday played at the Ebony Club, which, because she lost her cabaret card, was against the law. Her manager, John Levy, was convinced he could get her card back and allowed her to open without one. "I opened scared," Holiday said, "[I was] expecting the cops to come in any chorus and carry me off. But nothing happened. I was a huge success."^[78]

Holiday recorded Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" in 1948.

In 1950, Holiday appeared in the Universal-International short film Sugar Chile Robinson, Billie Holiday, Count Basie and His Sextet, singing "God Bless the Child" and "Now, Baby or Never".^[79]

Lady Sings the Blues (1952–1959)

By the 1950s, Holiday's drug abuse, drinking, and relationships with abusive men caused her health to deteriorate. She appeared on the ABC reality series The Comeback Story to discuss attempts to overcome her misfortunes. Her later recordings showed the effects of declining health on her voice, as it grew coarse and no longer projected its former vibrancy.

Holiday first toured Europe in 1954 as part of a Leonard Feather package. The Swedish impresario, Nils Hellstrom, initiated the "Jazz Club U.S.A." (after the Leonard Feather radio show) tour starting in Stockholm in January 1954 and then Germany, Netherlands, Paris and Switzerland. The tour party was Holiday, Buddy DeFranco, Red Norvo, Carl Drinkard, Elaine Leighton, Sonny Clark, Berryl Booker, Jimmy Raney, and Red Mitchell. A recording of a live set in Germany was released as Lady Love - Billie Holiday.^[80]

Holiday's late recordings on Verve constitute about a third of her commercial recorded legacy and are as popular as her earlier work for the Columbia, Commodore and Decca labels. In later years, her voice became more fragile, but it never lost the edge that had always made it so distinctive.

Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, was ghostwritten by William Dufty and published in 1956. Dufty, a New York Post writer and editor then married to Holiday's close friend Maely Dufty, wrote the book quickly from a series of conversations with the singer in the Duftys' 93rd Street apartment. He drew on the work of earlier interviewers as well and intended to let Holiday tell her story in her own way.^[81]

To accompany her autobiography, Holiday released an LP in June 1956 entitled Lady Sings the Blues. The album featured four new tracks, "Lady Sings the Blues" (title track), "Too Marvelous for Words", "Willow Weep for Me", and "I Thought About You", as well as eight new recordings of Holiday's biggest hits to date. The re-recordings included "Trav'lin' Light" "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child".^[82] On December 22, 1956, Billboard magazine reviewed Lady Sings the Blues, calling it a worthy musical complement to her autobiography. "Holiday is in good voice now," said the reviewer, "and these new readings will be much appreciated by her following." "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child" were called classics, and "Good Morning Heartache", another reissued track in the LP, was also noted positively.^[83]

On November 10, 1956, Holiday performed two concerts before packed audiences at Carnegie Hall, a major accomplishment for any artist, especially a black artist of the segregated period of American history. Live recordings of the second Carnegie Hall concert were released on a Verve/HMV album in the UK in late 1961 called The Essential Billie Holiday. The thirteen tracks included on this album featured her own songs, "I Love My Man", "Don't Explain" and "Fine and Mellow", together with other songs closely associated with her, including "Body and Soul", "My Man", and "Lady Sings the Blues" (her lyrics accompanied a tune by pianist Herbie Nichols).^[84]

The liner notes on this album were written partly by Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who, according to these notes, served as narrator in the Carnegie Hall concerts. Interspersed among Holiday's songs, Millstein read aloud four lengthy passages from her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. He later wrote:

“

The narration began with the ironic account of her birth in Baltimore – 'Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three' – and ended, very nearly shyly, with her hope for love and a long life with 'my man' at her side. It was evident, even then, that Miss Holiday was ill. I had known her casually over the years and I was shocked at her physical weakness. Her rehearsal had been desultory; her voice sounded tinny and trailed off; her body sagged tiredly. But I will not forget the metamorphosis that night. The lights went down, the musicians began to play and the narration began. Miss Holiday stepped from between the curtains, into the white spotlight awaiting her, wearing a white evening gown and white gardenias in her black hair. She was erect and beautiful; poised and smiling. And when the first section of narration was ended, she sang – with strength undiminished – with all of the art that was hers. I was very much moved. In the darkness, my face burned and my eyes. I recall only one thing. I smiled."[85]

”

The critic Nat Hentoff of Down Beat magazine, who attended the Carnegie Hall concert, wrote the remainder of the sleeve notes on the 1961 album. He wrote of Holiday's performance:

“

Throughout the night, Billie was in superior form to what had sometimes been the case in the last years of her life. Not only was there assurance of phrasing and intonation; but there was also an outgoing warmth, a palpable eagerness to reach and touch the audience. And there was mocking wit. A smile was often lightly evident on her lips and her eyes as if, for once, she could accept the fact that there were people who did dig her. The beat flowed in her uniquely sinuous, supple way of moving the story along; the words became her own experiences; and coursing through it all was Lady's sound – a texture simultaneously steel-edged and yet soft inside; a voice that was almost unbearably wise in disillusion and yet still childlike, again at the centre. The audience was hers from before she sang, greeting her and saying good-bye with heavy, loving applause. And at one time, the musicians too applauded. It was a night when Billie was on top, undeniably the best and most honest jazz singer alive.

”

Her performance of "Fine and Mellow" on CBS's The Sound of Jazz program is memorable for her interplay with her long-time friend Lester Young. Both were less than two years from death.

When Holiday returned to Europe almost five years later in 1959, she made one of her last television appearances for Granada's Chelsea at Nine in London. Her final studio recordings were made for MGM in 1959, with lush backing from Ray Ellis and his Orchestra, who had also accompanied her on Columbia's Lady in Satin album the previous year—see below. The MGM sessions were released posthumously on a self-titled album, later re-titled and re-released as Last Recordings.

On March 28, 1957, Holiday married Louis McKay, a Mafia enforcer. McKay, like most of the men in her life, was abusive,^[86] but he did try to get her off drugs. They were separated at the time of her death, but McKay had plans to start a chain of Billie Holiday vocal studios, à la Arthur Murray dance schools.

Although childless, Billie Holiday had two godchildren: singer Billie Lorraine Feather, daughter of Leonard Feather, and Bevan Dufty, son of William Dufty.^[81]

Death

By early 1959 Holiday had cirrhosis of the liver. She stopped drinking on doctor's orders, but soon relapsed.^[87] By May she had lost 20 pounds (9 kg). Friends Leonard Feather, Joe Glaser, and Allan Morrison unsuccessfully tried to get her to a hospital.^[88]

On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York with liver and heart disease. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, under the order of Harry J. Anslinger, had been targeting Holiday since at least 1939.^[89] She was arrested and handcuffed for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided.^[89] Police guarded her room. Holiday continued staying under police guard. On July 15, she received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church,^[90] before dying two days later from pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959, at 3:10 am.^[91][92] In her final years, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her person. Her funeral mass was at Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City on July 21, 1959. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery.

Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had been the narrator at Billie Holiday's 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts and had partly written the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday (see above), described her death in these same 1961-dated sleeve notes:

“

Billie Holiday died in Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her. The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.[93]

”

Voice

Holiday's delivery made her performances recognizable throughout her career. Her improvisation compensated for lack of musical education. Her voice lacked range and was thin, and years of drug use altered its texture and gave it a fragile, raspy sound. Holiday said that she always wanted her voice to sound like an instrument and some of her influences were Louis Armstrong and singer Bessie Smith.^{[94][full citation needed]} Her last major recording, a 1958 album entitled Lady in Satin, features the backing of a 40-piece orchestra conducted and arranged by Ray Ellis, who said of the album in 1997:

“

I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You." There were tears in her eyes ... After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was.[95]

”

Frank Sinatra was influenced by her performances on 52nd Street as a young man. He told Ebony in 1958 about her impact:

“

With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.[96]

”

Hit records

In 1986, Joel Whitburn's Record Research, Inc. company compiled information on the popularity of record releases from the pre-rock and roll era and created pop charts dating all the way back to the beginning of the commercial recording industry. The company's findings were published in the book Pop Memories 1890–1954. Several of Holiday's records are listed on the pop charts Whitburn created.^[97]

Billie Holiday began her recording career on a high note with her first major release "Riffin' the Scotch" selling 5,000 copies. The song was released under the band name "Benny Goodman & his Orchestra."^[97]

Most of Holiday's early successes were released under the band name "Teddy Wilson & his Orchestra." During her stay in Wilson's band, Holiday would sing a few bars and then other musicians would have a solo. Teddy Wilson, one of the most influential jazz pianists from the swing era,^[98] accompanied Holiday more than any other musician. He and Holiday have 95 recordings together.^[99]

In July 1936, Holiday began releasing sides under her own name. These songs were released under the band name "Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra."^[100] Most noteworthy, the popular jazz standard "Summertime," sold well and was listed on the available pop charts at the time at number 12, the first time the jazz standard charted under any artist. Only Billy Stewart's R&B version of "Summertime" reached a higher chart placement than Holiday's, charting at number 10 thirty years later in 1966.^[101]

Holiday had 16 best selling songs in 1937, making the year her most commercially successful. It was in this year that Holiday scored her sole number one hit as a featured vocalist on the available pop charts of the 1930s, "Carelessly". The hit "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm", was also recorded by Ray Noble, Glen Gray and Fred Astaire whose rendering was a best seller for weeks.^[102] Holiday's version ranked 6 on the year-end single chart available for 1937.^[44]

In 1939, Holiday recorded her biggest selling record, "Strange Fruit" for Commodore, charting at number 16 on the available pop charts for the 1930s.^[103]

In 1940, Billboard began publishing its modern pop charts, which included the Best Selling Retail Records chart, the precursor to the Hot 100. None of Holiday's songs placed on the modern pop charts, partly because Billboard only published the first ten slots of the charts in some issues. Minor hits and independent releases had no way of being spotlighted.

"God Bless the Child", which went on to sell over a million copies, ranked number 3 on Billboard's year-end top songs of 1941.^[45]

On October 24, 1942, Billboard began issuing its R&B charts. Two of Holiday's songs placed on the chart, "Trav'lin' Light" with Paul Whiteman, which topped the chart, and "Lover Man", which reached number 5.

"Trav'lin' Light" also reached 18 on Billboard's year-end chart.

Discography

Main article: Billie Holiday discography

Billie Holiday recorded extensively for four labels: Columbia Records, issued on its subsidiary labels Brunswick Records, Vocalion Records, and OKeh Records, from 1933 through 1942; Commodore Records in 1939 and 1944; Decca Records from 1944 through 1950; briefly for Aladdin Records in 1951; Verve Records and on its earlier imprint Clef Records; from 1952 through 1957, then again for Columbia Records from 1957 to 1958 and finally for MGM Records in 1959. Many of Holiday's recordings appeared on 78 rpm records prior to the long-playing vinyl record era, and only Clef, Verve, and Columbia issued Holiday albums during her lifetime that were not compilations of previously released material. Many compilations have been issued since her death; as well as comprehensive box sets and live recordings.^[104][105]

Studio LPs

• Billie Holiday Sings (1952)
• An Evening with Billie Holiday (1952)
• Billie Holiday (1954)
• Stay with Me (1955)
• Music for Torching (1955)
• Velvet Mood (1956)
• Lady Sings the Blues (1956)
• Body and Soul (1957)
• Songs for Distingué Lovers (1957)
• All or Nothing at All (1958)
• Lady in Satin (1958)
• Last Recordings (1959)

Awards and honors

Grammy Hall of Fame

Billie Holiday was posthumously inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least 25 years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance."

Billie Holiday: Grammy Hall of Fame Awards[106]
Year Recorded	Title	Genre	Label	Year inducted	Notes
1949	"Crazy He Calls Me"	Jazz (single)	Decca	2010
1944	"Embraceable You"	Jazz (single)	Commodore	2005
1958	Lady in Satin	Jazz (album)	Columbia	2000
1945	"Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)"	Jazz (single)	Decca	1989
1939	"Strange Fruit"	Jazz (single)	Commodore	1978	Listed also in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002
1941	"God Bless the Child"	Jazz (single)	Okeh	1976

Grammy Best Historical Album

The Grammy Award for Best Historical Album has been presented since 1979.

Year	Title	Label	Result
2002	Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday	Columbia 1933–1944	Winner
1994	The Complete Billie Holiday	Verve 1945–1959	Winner
1992	Billie Holiday — The Complete Decca Recordings	Verve 1944–1950	Winner
1980	Billie Holiday — Giants of Jazz	Time-Life	Winner

Other honors

Year	Award	Honors	Notes
2004	Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame[107]	Inducted	Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York
2000	Rock and Roll Hall of Fame	Inducted	Category: "Early Influence"
1997	ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame[108]	Inducted
1947	Esquire Magazine Gold Award	Best Leading Female Vocalist	Jazz award
1946	Esquire Magazine Silver Award	Best Leading Female Vocalist	Jazz award
1945	Esquire Magazine Silver Award	Best Leading Female Vocalist	Jazz award
1944	Esquire Magazine Gold Award	Best Leading Female Vocalist	Jazz award

Tributes

• 1972, Diana Ross portrayed Holiday in the film Lady Sings the Blues, which is loosely based on the 1956 autobiography of the same name. The film earned Ross a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
• She was portrayed by Ernestine Jackson in the play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill by Lanie Robertson.
• Singer Miki Howard released the Holiday tribute album, Miki Sings Billie: A Tribute to Billie Holiday in 1993. Miki Howard also portrayed Lady Day in a club scene in the 1992 motion picture " Malcolm X " starring Denzel Washington.
• Paula Jai Parker portrayed Holiday in a Season 7 episode of the TV series Touched by an Angel, entitled "God Bless the Child," the title derived from a song which Holiday had written and performed.^[109]
• Jazz pianist Mal Waldron performed as Holiday's accompanist and released several tribute albums including:
  • Left Alone (Bethlehem, 1959)
  • Blues for Lady Day (Black Lion, 1972)
  • Left Alone '86 with Jackie McLean (Paddle Wheel, 1986)
  • No More Tears (For Lady Day) (Timeless, 1989)
• Billie Hollidy, Croatian National Theatre in Split by A.Ostojić & Ksenia Prohaska (2006)^[110]
• Argentinean comic artists Carlos Sampayo and José Antonio Muñoz made a graphic novel on her life, titled Billie Holiday (Fantagraphics Books, 1991; Spanish edition: Ojo de Pez, Buenos Aires, 2007).

Honors

• 1987, Billie Holiday was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
• 1993, R&B singer Miki Howard released an album dedicated to Holiday titled Miki Sings Billie.
• 1994, the United States Postal Service introduced a Billie Holiday postage stamp.
• 1999, Holiday ranked No. 6 on VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n' Roll.
• 2000, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Over the years, there have been many tributes to Billie Holiday, including "The Day Lady Died", a 1959 poem by Frank O'Hara, and Langston Hughes' poem "Song for Billie Holiday".

• In 1970 Frank Sinatra recorded the song Lady Day as a tribute.^[111]
• In 1988 the group U2 released "Angel of Harlem" in her honor.
• "My Only Friend" by The Magnetic Fields is a tribute to Billie Holiday.
• Arthur Phillips features Holiday's 1953 concert in New York in his novel The Song is You (2009).

Filmography

• 1950: 'Sugar Chile' Robinson, Billie Holiday, Count Basie and His Sextet
• 1947: New Orleans
• 1935: "Symphony in Black", short (with Duke Ellington)
• 1933: The Emperor Jones, appeared as an extra

Television appearances

Year	Program	Host	Songs
1949	Adventures in Jazz	Fred Robbins	Unknown Songs
8/27/1949	Arlene Francis Show, NY (1)	Arlene Francis	"The Man I Love", "All of Me", "Lover Man"
8/27/1949	Eddie Condon's Floor Show, NY (1)	Eddie Condon	"I Love My Man", "Keeps on Rainin'", "Lover Man"
9/3/1949	Eddie Condon's Floor Show, NY (1)	Eddie Condon	"Fine & Mellow", "Porgy", "Them There Eyes", "I Love My Man"
9/10/1949	Art Ford Show, NY (1)	Art Ford	"Lover Man", "I Cover the Waterfront", Two-Minute Interview, "All of Me"
10/15/1949	Art Ford Show, NY (1)	Art Ford	"Them There Eyes", "Detour Ahead", "Now or Never"
1/7/1950	Eddie Condon's Floor Show, NY	Eddie Condon	Unknown
5/24/1950	Apollo Theatre Show, NY (1)	-	"You're My Thrill"
7/25/1951	Apollo Theatre Show, NY (1)	-	"My Man"
12/10/1952	Apollo Theatre Show, NY (1)	Count Basie	"Tenderly"
10/16/1953	The Comeback Story, NY (1)	George Jessel	Twenty-Minute Interview, "God Bless the Child"
2/8/1955	The Tonight Show, NY (1)	Steve Allen	"My Man", "Them There Eyes", "Lover Man"
2/10/1956	The Tonight Show, NY (1)	Steve Allen	"Please Don't Talk About Me", Two-Minute Interview, "Ghost of a Chance"
8/19/1956	Stars of Jazz, LA, CA (2)	Bobby Troup	"Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone", "Billie's Blues", "My Man"
10/29/1956	Bandstand USA, NY (1)	Bert Parks	"Willow Weep for Me", "I Only Have Eyes for You", "My Man", "Please Don't Talk About Me"
11/7/1956	Night Beat, NY (1)	Mike Wallace	Fifteen-Minute Interview
11/8/1956	Peacock Alley, NY (1)	Tex McCrary	Twenty-Minute Interview
11/8/1956	The Tonight Show, NY (1)	Steve Allen	"Porgy"
3/11/1957	Live Broadcast from Mr. Kelly's, Chicago (1)	-	"Good Morning Heartache", "You Better Go Now"
12/8/1957	The Seven Lively Arts: The Sound of Jazz, LA (2)	-	"Fine & Mellow"
4/12/1958	Club Oasis, NY (1)	Martha Raye	"You've Changed", "My Man"
5/26/1958	Telethon, NY	Dean Martin	Unknown Songs
5/29/1958	Art Ford's Jazz Party, WNTA-TV NY (2)	Art Ford	"You've Changed", "I Love My Man", "When Your Lover Has Gone"
6/5/1958	Art Ford's Jazz Party, NY	Art Ford	"All of Me", "Good Morning Heartache", "Travelin’ Light"
7/10/1958	Art Ford's Jazz Party, NY (2)	Art Ford	"What a Little Moonlight Can Do", "Foolin' Myself", "It's Easy to Remember"
7/17/1958	Art Ford's Jazz Party, NY (2)	Art Ford	"Moanin' Low", "Don't Explain", "When Your Lover Has Gone"
9/25/1958	Today Show	Dave Garroway	"My Funny Valentine"
11/18/1958	Mars Club, Music Hall Parade Voyons Un Peu, Paris France (2)	-	"I Only Have Eyes for You"
11/20/1958	Gilles Margaritis Programme, Paris France (2)	Gilles Margaritis	"Trav'lin' Light"
1/7/1959	Timex All-Star Jazz Show IV, NY	Jackie Gleason	Unknown
2/23/1959	Chelsea at Nine, London, England (2)	Robert Beatty	"Porgy", "Please Don't Talk About Me", "Strange Fruit"

(1) = Available on Audio (2) = Available on DVD

See also

Jazz portal

• Billie Holiday – Wikipedia book

Notes

1. 
   

History "Billie Holiday wishing on the Moon" p. 9.

Howard, Patrick. "About Billie Holiday: Biography". Retrieved March 13, 2013.

"Billie Holiday Biography". Biography.com.

Dufour, American National Biography Online

O'Meally, Robert (1991). Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 9780306809590. OCLC 45009756.

Nicholson, pp. 18—23.

Clarke, p. xiii.

Nicholson, pp. 21—22.

Nicholson, pp. 22–24.

Nicholson, p. 25.

Nicholson, p. 27.

Nicholson, p. 31.

Nicholson, p. 32.

Nicholson, pp. 35—37.

Vail, Ken (1997). Lady Day's Diary. London, England: Sanctuary Publishing. p. 32. ISBN 1-86074-131-2.

Nicholson, pp. 35—39.

Nicholson, p. 39.

Gourse, p. 73.

Nicholson, p. 56.

Nicholson, p. 65.

Billie Holiday Discography – The Composers. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Network Offline. Jazznbossa.ning.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Gourse, pp. 73 – 74.

Billie Holiday Page, Soulwalking.co.uk. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Nicholson p.93-94

Gourse, p. 40.

"Billie Holiday Live Songs". Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved 2012-04-07.

Nicholson p.96-97

Holiday p. 80

Gourse, p. 103-104.

Nicholson, pp. 100-107.

Nicholson, p. 70.

Nicholson, p. 102.

David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000), pp. 25–27.

Margolick, Strange Fruit, pp. 40–46.

Clarke, p. 169.

Holiday, Billie (2006). Lady Sings the Blues. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Harlem Moon (originally published: New York: Doubleday, 1956). p. 95.

Nicholson, p. 113.

Lady Sings the Blues, p. 95.

Nicholson, p. 115.

Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 104–105.

"Billy Crystal: Biography". IMDB. Retrieved March 30, 2011.

Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 100–101.

Song artist 250 – Billie Holiday. Tsort.info. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Jazz History: The Standards (1940s). Jazzstandards.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

GRAMMY.com. GRAMMY.com (2009-02-08). Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Ghosts of Yesterday: Billie Holiday and the Two Irenes (March 4, 2006)

Nicholson, p. 130.

Harlem Hit Parade – The eMusic Dozen. Emusic.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Nicholson, p. 133.

Billie Holiday Studio Songs. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Nicholson, p. 150.

Nicholson, p. 122.

52nd Street, the street of jazz – Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) (1942) JazzStandards.com

Jazz Standards Songs and Instrumentals (Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)). Jazzstandards.com (1944-10-04). Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Alagna, Magdalena. Billie Holiday, The Rosen Publishing Group (2003), p. 61 – ISBN 0-8239-3640-6.

Billie Holiday Studio Songs. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday Live Songs. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Nicholson, pp. 152–155.

Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 136–140.

Nicholson, pp. 152–157.

Nicholson, p. 151.

Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 147–149.

Nicholson, p. 155.

Search the Billboard Magazine Archives. Billboard.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

John Chilton, Billie's Blues: the Billie Holiday story, 1933–1959 (1975), Part 3.

Lady Sings the Blues, p. 146.

Lady Sings the Blues, p. 165.

Nicholson, pp. 165–167.

Lady Sings the Blues pp. 168–169.

Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 172–173.

Clarke p. 327.

New York City Cabaret Card. En.academic.ru. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Nicholson, p. 229.

Nicholson, p. 167.

Nicholson, p. 215.

Autobiography "Lady Sings the Blues" p. 175.

Nicholson, p. 181.

Record notes, Lady Love - Billie Holiday, United Artists Records, UAL 8073; notes by Leonard Feather and LeRoi Jones.

Hamlin, Jesse (September 18, 2006). "Billie Holiday's Bio, 'Lady Sings the Blues,' May be Full of lies, But It Gets at Jazz Great's Core". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved July 31, 2010.

Billie Holiday Vinyl Discography. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billboard – Google Books. Books.google.com (1956-12-22). Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday – 1956 At The Carnegie Hall. The Essential Billie Holiday.

The Essential Billie Holiday, liner notes.

Robert Fulford, "Trying to find the real Lady Day: Those who try to tell Billie Holiday's story often discover an unknowable life".

Feather, Leonard (1987). From Satchmo to Miles. Da Capo Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-306-80302-4.

Feather, p. 83.

Johann Hari (January 17, 2015). "The Hunting of Billie Holiday. How Lady Day found herself in the middle of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' early fight for survival". Politico. Retrieved March 22, 2015.

White, John (1987). Billie Holiday: Her Life & Times. Spellmount Limited.

"Billie Holiday Biography". Biography.com. p. 3.

"Billie Holiday Dies Here at 44. Jazz Singer Had Wide Influence". New York Times. July 18, 1959. Retrieved 2013-11-25. Billie Holiday, famed jazz singer, died yesterday in Metropolitan Hospital. Her age was 44. The immediate cause of death was given as congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure. ...

Millstein, Gilbert. ""The Essential Billie Holiday" liner notes".

Billie Holiday — a booklet published by New York Jazz Museum in 1970.

Interview on KCSM

Clarke, p. 96.

Donald, p. 74.

: JazzNotes : JazzNotes for Educators – Teddy Wilson. Riverwalkjazz.org. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday Discography – Her Musicians. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday Studio Songs. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Song title 70 – Summertime. Tsort.info. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

No. 1 Songs – 1930–1989. Ntl.matrix.com.br. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday Studio Songs. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday Long Play Discography. Billieholidaysongs.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Billie Holiday. AllMusic. Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

Grammy Hall of Fame Database.

Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame 2004.

The ASCP Jazz Wall of Fame list.

Touched by an Angel: God Bless the Child Episode Summary on. Tv.com (2008-06-25). Retrieved on 2010-11-13.

"Anton Arsen Ostojić / Ksenija Prohaska: LADY SINGS THE BLUES / HNK Split, 11. 02. 2006". Arhiva.hnk-split.hr. Retrieved 2012-04-07.

111. http://www.fasinatra.com/biography.htm

References

• Blackburn, Julia (2006). With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-375-40610-7.
• Chilton, John (1989). Billie's Blues: The Billie Holiday Story 1933–1959. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80363-1.
• Clarke, Donald (2000). Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81136-7.
• Davis, Angela Y. (1998). Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-77126-3.
• Gourse, Leslie (2000). The Billie Holiday Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Trade Books. ISBN 0-02-864613-4.
• Griffin, Farah Jasmine (2001). If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-684-86808-3.
• Holiday, Billie; Dufty, William (1957). Lady Sings the Blues. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-14-006762-0.
• Ingham, Chris (2000). Billie Holiday. Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane Publishing. ISBN 1-56649-170-3.
• James, Burnett (1984). Billie Holiday. Gloucestershire, England: Spellmount Publishers. ISBN 0-946771-05-7.
• Kaplan, Samuel W. (February 2002). "Strange Fruit". Humanity & Society. Volume 26, No. 1. pp. 77–83.
• Katz, Joel (2002). California Newsreel: Strange Fruit.
• Millar, Jack (1994). Fine and Mellow: A Discography of Billie Holiday. London: Billie Holiday Circle. ISBN 1-899161-00-7.
• Nicholson, Stuart (1995). Billie Holiday. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-303-5.
• O'Meally, Robert (1991). Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80959-0. OCLC 45009756.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Billie Holiday

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Billie Holiday.

• Official Billie Holiday at Sony BMG
• Biography and song samples at PBS
• "Twelve Essential Billie Holiday Recordings" by Stuart Nicholson, Jazz.com
• A Short History of Billie Holiday
• Billie Holiday at the Internet Movie Database
• Billie Holiday at the Internet Broadway Database
• Billie Holiday at the Playbill Vault