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Rediscovered Talent
Billie Holiday: The Lady who Sang and Lived the Blues
By James Auburn
MusicBizAdvice.com profiles an artist from the past. Some you may have heard
of, some not, but we hope you'll take time to check out their
music...especially if it's something different than you usually listen to.
This month, we rediscover Billie Holiday.
Editor's Note: Many of the details of Billie Holiday's life are sketchy, and
there are several versions of some of the "facts" --even among music
historians. MusicBizAdvice.com's goal is always to give you the most
accurate information, but in Ms. Holiday's case, that proved to be no easy
task...possibly because her addictions may have altered her own version of
the truth, and also because as a woman of color in the pre-civil rights era,
no one bothered to find out the real story. That in itself makes her story
all the more compelling. As always, we welcome your
feedback.--RR
In the very-early-20th century, most jazz
and pop singers, whatever their merits, merely gave their audiences faithful
renditions of the hit songs they wanted to hear, perhaps showing off some
vocal chops at the appropriate moment. Only blues singers like Bessie Smith
or Ma Rainey valued emotional intensity in their writing and performances
and gave the impression that they lived what they were singing about.
It was Billie Holiday --volatile, constantly abandoned and betrayed, (almost
super-)naturally gifted possessor of a tattered soul --that gave jazz and
pop singing new depth. With no formal vocal training but a bluesy,
unpolished tone and unique sense of behind-the-beat timing and phrasing, she
made the listener believe that she lived every line she was singing.
Billie Holiday's voice was rather small and she didn't scat; most vocalists
aren't trying to learn her technique today. But anyone who hears any of her
best recordings, even if they knew little about her, can easily sense that
this was a human being who had traveled life on a dark, rough asphalt city
street, bare feet worn and bleeding. A brief essay such as this could never
relate all the sordid happenings that made Billie Holiday who she was as an
artist, or what an icon she became to tragic souls like herself.
Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan Gough on April 7, 1915 in
Philadelphia, PA--some accounts say Baltimore, MD. Her father, Clarence
Holiday, was a teenaged jazz guitarist who would later feature in Fletcher
Henderson's Orchestra in the late 1920's. He never married Billie's
13-year-old mother, Sadie Fagan--no role model herself--and abandoned his
new family early on. (Later, when her musical career was getting hot, Billie
would hire nearly every top guitarist in New York at one time or another,
except for the hapless Clarence; he died in 1937.)
Eleanora grew up basically alone and unloved, becoming a problem child, her
circumstances getting worse and worse. She was raped by a neighbor at age
10, then was sent to live in a Catholic home for wayward girls, where
reportedly she was once locked in a room all night with a corpse as
punishment for some misbehavior now lost to history.
Eleanora was released from the girls' home almost two years later and moved
to New York with her mother who would scrape out a living through whatever
domestic work she could find. Young Eleanora herself found work at a
successful brothel, scrubbing floors and running errands…at first. According
to many accounts, the 13-year-old was soon making much better money turning
tricks. A subsequent arrest for prostitution made her unemployed again, but
it was at that brothel that she first heard jazz, in the form of scratchy
recordings of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith played on the house record
player.
Around 1930, she began to pursue a slightly more respectable
vocation: singing. Using the stage name Billie Holiday--taken from silent
screen star Billie Dove--her professional career started in nondescript
Harlem clubs between 1930-1933. One legend, depicted by Diana Ross in the
film Lady Sings the Blues, has her auditioning to be a dancer at Pod
& Jerry's speakeasy in Harlem: Michael Brooks wrote that she "gave such an
execrable performance that the pianist, feeling sorry for her, asked her if
she could sing. Billie looked at him, puzzled. In her world, singing was as
natural as breathing, but she launched into a rendition of 'Trav'lin All
Alone', reduced the audience to tears, and was hired on the spot."
What is known for certain is that well-known jazz writer and producer John
Hammond gave Billie her first wide recognition; in awe after hearing Billie
at one of her many Harlem club dates in 1933, he wrote in his Melody
Maker column that the 18-year-old was one of the greatest singers he had
ever heard. Hammond took the youngster under his professional wing and
arranged many of her biggest career breaks.
Hammond's publicity landed Billie an opportunity recording a couple of sides
with Benny Goodman's band (he and Billie ended up dating for a
time). Wearing her trademark white gardenias in her hair--legend has it the
trademark began when she used a gardenia to cover a scalp burn sustained
from ironing her hair before a show--Billie Holiday continued to slowly
build her name performing in venues around Harlem, notably enthralling the
crowd at the legendary Apollo Theater. It would be nearly two years before
Billie would enter a recording studio again, when Hammond arranged for her
to record as the featured vocalist for Teddy Wilson's band. These sessions,
despite substandard material, are now regarded as early Billie Holiday
classics.
Holiday continued to perform higher-class gigs, getting teamed up with names
like Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, and Ella Fitzgerald...people who
are now known for having worked with her as much as the other way
around. However, she also encountered racist club owners, shady
businessmen, jealous bandmates, and musician-hostile conditions, testing her
already-low tolerance level just about everywhere she went. Life was
turning out as rough as usual for Billie before 1937, when Hammond arranged
to have her record with members of Count Basie's then-fledgling band--most
notably Lester "Prez" Young. Holiday and Young would eventually cement a
lifelong friendship that resulted in much of the best, most enduring music
from either of the two--widely considered some of the greatest jazz
recordings of all time. Lester Young and Billie Holiday even gave each
other their famous nicknames: "Prez" (short for "President") and "Lady Day".
Holiday would then join Basie's band, and despite being in a hot touring
musical outfit, Billie made very little money for her performances and did
not receive royalties for her recordings. The harsh realities of life for
touring black female singers were not improving a bit, nor did they when she
joined Artie Shaw on the road the next year, becoming one of the first black
singers to tour with a white band. Billie was not one to suffer deliberate
career slights and racial indignities gracefully, and both gigs ended
painfully for her...though she would remain amicable friends with both Count
Basie and Artie Shaw, who at the time were essentially powerless to stop the
cruel--if standard for the time--treatment Billie received from others.
Billie went back to freelancing for a while before Hammond came to her
rescue again in 1939 and booked her as the headline act at Cafe Society, a
hip counterculture hangout he and some other investors had just
established. While she was there, a song written by a schoolteacher named
Lewis Allen made its way to her for consideration. After some
hesitancy--the song's subject matter and imagery were more than a little
intense-- she added it to her repertoire and soon recorded it for Commodore
Records.
The song was "Strange Fruit", a graphic, yet almost dispassionate,
description of the horror of lynching, and to this day is one of the most
chilling listening experiences many listeners could have. It put Billie
Holiday on the map, to say the least, becoming a huge hit among white
liberal intellectuals while incensing a lot of other folks, stirring up much
publicity and controversy, and bringing Billie great fame and a decent
financial windfall. It also encouraged publishers to send better material
her way, and made Billie Holiday a lead personality--the focal point--for
the first time, pushing her sidemen into more of a supporting role.
In 1941 she married Jimmy Monroe, the brother of one of her former
employers, and they moved to Los Angeles, where Billie got a regular singing
engagement at another club, coincidentally called "Café Society". The place
closed down within a few weeks, Monroe elected to stay in L.A. "to pursue
business deals", and Billie moved back to the East Coast, penniless. The
only upside to that failed relationship--one of many for Billie--is that it
allowed her to give jazz history another indispensably classic song:
One night, Monroe came home with lipstick on his collar. As Billie later
recalled, "I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it and he started explaining and
explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than
anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that.
'Take a bath, man,' I said, 'don't explain.'
The words 'don't explain, don't explain,' kept going through my damn head. I
had to get it out of my system some way, I guess. The more I thought about
it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases
to myself. Suddenly I had a whole song. I went downtown one night and sat
down with Arthur Herzog; he played the tune over on the piano, wrote down
the words, changing two or three phrases, softening it up just a little."
"Don't Explain" became one of Billie Holiday's signature tunes, and is a
standard for the sultriest of singers today. It was also during this period
she wrote and recorded "God Bless The Child", yet another song ingrained
into American music history.
In 1944, she signed with Decca Records and cut many lovely, if less
jazz-oriented, recordings with strings--the hallmark of a top "respectable"
singer back then--and top session musicians and arrangers. Among many
others, these sessions produced "Lover Man", Billie's biggest hit.
But good fortunes, as always, were fleeting: Billie's second husband, a
trumpeter named Joe Guy, was depleting her savings with a series of
half-baked schemes, as well drawing Billie into his heavy drug use. By 1947
she was so hooked on heroin her manager threatened to drop her if she didn't
check into a clinic to dry out. She did, but her career and professional
life remained as harrowing as ever and she inevitably relapsed and got even
worse. She was arrested on narcotics charges several times and testified to
spending $500 a week on smack, but somehow managed get herself together
enough to continue singing in high-profile venues (except for those in New
York, where she was now banned from performing). Hard living had run her
voice through the wringer, but the sheer emotional intensity she conveyed
was still enough to captivate any audience.
In 1954 Billie had a successful tour of Europe, where she was treated with a
brilliant artist's proper respect, but when she got back to the States she
was soon arrested in Philadelphia and ordered to leave the city or go to
jail. She went back to New York and re-entered rehab; her treatment for
heroin addiction was successful, but as a side effect, her alcoholism
reportedly increased to "at least two or three bottles of gin or vodka a
day".
Billie returned to Europe to perform in 1958, but her deteriorating
condition was obvious to all. That year, she also recorded the Lady In
Satin album with Ray Ellis' Orchestra. Her voice is nearly gone on the
recording, but again, her incomparable emotional capabilities are more than
enough to carry her and the album.
Billie's health continued to decline, and the death of her good friend
Lester Young in March of 1959 probably destroyed any of her remaining
spirit. In May of that year, Billie collapsed in her apartment and was
taken to a Harlem hospital, where she was treated for malnutrition and liver
and heart failure. On July 12th, Billie was arrested--in her hospital
bed--on narcotics charges after a police raid on her hospital room turned up
a stash of heroin, speculated to have been placed there by someone other
than Billie.
Five days later, on July 17th, 1959, Billie Holiday died of cirrhosis of the
liver, with not much to her name but 70 cents in her bank account and
$750--an advance from negotiations to write her life story--reportedly taped
to her leg.
Immediately after her death, her record sales skyrocketed, and as Michael
Brooks wrote, "the people who ignored and reviled her in life now flocked
around her symbolic corpse the way ghouls do after a road accident". Today,
at least, Billie Holiday is given her just due: she's revered by many but
taken for granted by most, in American culture as well as music history, as
someone who most of us know is an icon but don't know exactly why,
ironically giving her nearly as much disrespect as she received in life,
putting her up on some impossibly high pedestal and leaving her there to be
ignored. Glib though it is to say, although her treatment by others was
typical for her era, no self-destructive-rock-star story could compare to
the life struggled through by Billie Holiday.
Discography
James Auburn is a
keyboardist, musical director, arranger, educator, and all-around
audiophile. He's also the co-founder of the Boston Hip Hop Alliance.
Rediscovered Talent
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