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Still singing the Blues: Billie Holiday 100 years on

In 1959, the year of her death, Eleanora Fagan, better known as Billie Holiday and later “Lady Day”, performed in New York for the final time. Years of alcoholism and drug use had whittled her powerful voice down to a fragile rasp. Even her spoken voice sounded close to breaking point as she introduced ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone’. Holiday was dead a few short months later. However, her distinctive voice and the much mythologised tragedy of her life continue to haunt the music world. What is it about Billie Holiday that has extended her popularity far beyond the realm of jazz and blues fans, and kept her a household name a full century after her birth?

The facts of Holiday’s early life, roughly outlined in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, have been thrown into doubt by a new biography published this year, John Szwed’s Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth. Holiday’s ghost-written memoir famously begins, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.” Szwed’s meticulously researched and fascinating account begins with some abrupt fact-checking, “When Billie was born her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married and had never lived together in a little house with a picket fence on Durham Street in Baltimore.” In fact, questions of veracity haunted Lady Sings the Blues from its publication in 1956. When asked by journalists to verify some of the book’s claims, Holiday retorted that she had never read it.

Certainly, Holiday was a keen creator of her own mythology. She was only too aware that part of her appeal lay in the audience’s belief that the raw emotion of her voice betrayed harsh personal experience. Factual discrepancies aside, it remains true that Billie Holiday’s brief life was a difficult one, marked by the triple obstacles of poverty, racism and sexism. Her childhood and early teens were darkened with the trauma of neglect, attempted rape, prostitution and periods of incarceration. Yet to reduce Holiday’s talent to the sadness of her life is to do her an injustice. As Miles Davis – an avowed fan of Holiday along with virtually all jazz musicians of his generation – once observed, “I didn’t wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues, there’s more to it than that.” Holiday was and remains more than a tragic victim; her mastery of the blues was the result of experience and raw talent.

Holiday began performing in small clubs and bars in downtown New York in her late teens. Lacking any kind of musical training, she worked off an intuitive grasp of cadence and narrative. What she lacked in range, she made up for in tone; few other voices could imbue the notes of ‘No More’ with such a bittersweet concoction of relief and regret, or convey the mingled weariness and tentative hope of ‘Pennies from Heaven’. The originality of her phrasing and her tendency to linger slightly behind the beat often revealed an edge of sadness to apparently simple melodies. A song like ‘All of Me’ has a cheerful melodic swing when sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan; only Billie Holiday’s slower, tougher rendition can draw out the profound sense of loss in its lyrics. Along with Frank Sinatra, the popularisation of the microphone allowed Holiday to cultivate an understated, intimate quality to her live performances; unlike her hero, Bessie Smith, she did not have to belt just to be heard. Her sinewy strength and melodic vulnerability became a beacon for depressionera audiences, and later the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Among the songs for which Holiday is best known is the protest song, ‘Strange Fruit’, a powerful account of racist violence inspired by the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher living in New York came across Laurence Beitler’s iconic photograph of the lynching and was moved to compose a poem which he named, ‘Bitter Fruit’. Holiday was introduced to the song in 1939 and began incorporating it into her set at the Café Society in Greenwich Village, at that time one of the few racially integrated venues in New York. Even among a comparatively friendly crowd, presenting such a raw and honest account of racist brutality was a courageous act. After her first performance of ‘Strange Fruit’, Holiday recalled in her autobiography, “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.” For the musicians, activists and would-be activists who encountered Holiday’s sparse and potent rendition, ‘Strange Fruit’ was more than a song; it was a battle cry. Jazz critic Leonard Feather called it “the first unmated cry against racism”, while Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, observed that ‘Strange Fruit’ put the elements of protest and resistance back at the centre of contemporary black musical culture.”

56 years after Holiday’s death, fans and critics are still grappling with her legacy. Szwed’s book, less a biography of Holiday than, as he puts it, “a meditation on her art”, moves the centre of discussion away from the details of her life and places a welcome emphasis on her craft as a musician and her legacy. He makes the case for Holiday to be considered “as a literary figure, along with Zora Neale Hurston”, a rare public voice of the private lives of AfricanAmerican women in pre-Civil Rights Era America. Echoes of Holiday’s unique sound can be heard in everyone from Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan, to Erykah Badu, Norah Jones and Amy Winehouse. But Szwed wisely locates her legacy not within the limits of the music world. Her influence stretches into the work of writers such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange and Audre Lorde. Listening to her music today, Billie Holiday’s idiosyncratic and inimitable voice bears the mark of a true storyteller, one whose bittersweet narratives continue to connect her to new generations of music fans.

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