Critical Mass

Happy 100th, Lady Day

Her life was short, but Holiday’s voice still ripples through the music world

billie holiday art by john deering
billie holiday art by john deering

Billie Holiday didn't think much of her voice.

John Szwed, in his recently published critical study Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (Viking, $28.95), says there is a tape of Holiday joking around with musicians during rehearsal, expounding on many topics, including her own gift.

"It's not legit," she says. "I do not got a legitimate voice. This voice of mine is a mess, a cat got to know what he's doing when he plays with me."

And it is a strange voice, one that lends itself to mimicry, mockery and loving tribute -- you've heard David Sedaris singing the Oscar Mayer jingle as her? (For such things, Google was made.)

Her voice is all fractured time and gliding despair, a conduit less of language than emotion. There is a raw and visceral oiliness, an otherworldliness that insinuates itself in the listener's breast. You feel it as an ache, a blooming of sweet pain. It throbs and seeps.

Had she survived the heroin, cirrhosis and heart disease, she would have been 100 years old last month, and so we have been provided all sorts of commemorative products, including Universal's digital release of 17 of her albums recorded between 1939 and 1959 and fine tribute albums by jazz singers Jose James and Cassandra Wilson. The former, Yesterday I Had the Blues (Blue Note), is a stylistically faithful collection of nine well-known Holiday songs -- including "God Bless the Child," "Strange Fruit" and "Lover Man" -- tastefully touched up with some piano digressions by Jason Moran.

More ambitious (and less even) is Wilson's Coming Forth By Day (Sony Legacy), which re-imagines Holiday's music as big, modern blues-rock production numbers driven by the rhythm section from Nick Cave's Bad Seeds and textured with orchestral strings. Wilson attacks the material with a confidence that, for the most part, pays off (though her take on "Strange Fruit" feels busy and overproduced). On the album's only original song, the album's closer, "Last Song (For Lester)," Wilson channels Holiday delivering the eulogy for her lover, Lester Young, she was denied in life. (Holiday flew from Europe to attend Young's funeral but was denied the opportunity to sing by his family.)

While both of the tribute albums are interesting in their own right, one might assume the best way to approach Holiday is directly, through the music she made. But as Szwed suggests, that's not always easy, for Holiday is the American Edith Piaf. Her consummate tragedy -- horrific life and early death -- occludes her great talent, which was arguably not born of natural gifts. Plenty of beauty queens have equipment comparable to Holiday's. Her particular genius lay in her intuition and intelligence, the way she put her real but modest faculties to use. In a way Holiday, who made a virtue of her limitations, serves as a template for a lot of great vocal actors who came after her.

She is an artist best heard in echoes, in the recordings of singers she influenced, which includes practically everyone who laid down tracks after 1940. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Janis Joplin, even Bob Dylan borrowed much from her. You hear her influence in Randy Newman and Lucinda Williams. It might suffice for casual fans to know their heroes loved and honored her, for any attempt at excavating Holiday carries some risk. There are so many unworthy "greatest hits" compilations and uneven live sets on the market that disappointment seems an inevitable consequence of any hunt for treasure.

If you're starting from scratch you can do much worse than the recently released The Centennial Collection (Sony Legacy), a one-disc, 20-track compilation that draws on sides recorded for the Brunswick, Vocalion, OKeh, Commodore and Decca labels between 1937 and 1945. It includes the original (and, in most cases, best) performances of Holiday's best-known songs including "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)," "The Very Thought of You," "Them There Eyes," "God Bless the Child," "Gloomy Sunday" and "Strange Fruit."

If you can find it, there's also the more comprehensive four-CD boxed set Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles (Sony Legacy, $49.98). It is a distillation of the out-of-print Grammy Award-winning 10-disc collection Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944) released in 2001. (This set contains only music she recorded for Columbia, which means "Strange Fruit" and "Stormy Weather" aren't included.)

Still, these sets capture Holiday's first decade as a recording artist, starting with her stint as a singer for Teddy Wilson's orchestra and winding up with her as a great jazz diva recording under her own name. They capture the rise of Lady Day. You probably know all about her fall.

UNRELIABLE BIOGRAPHIES

"Mom and pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16 and I was 3."

Those breezy lines, attributed to Holiday and published in the fanciful memoir Lady Sings the Blues (which was made into a 1972 Diana Ross film that recklessly glamorized her life), were actually written by socialite journalist William Dufty, Holiday's ghost writer. They are not true. Holiday's parents never married.

And Holiday wasn't born until after she started singing in clubs, an occupation she took up only because they didn't need her waiting tables.

The woman who would become Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Harris (later to be known as Eleanora Fagan) in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915.

That she was born in Philadelphia was something of an accident. Her mother, Sadie Harris, had come to the city from her native Baltimore after learning she was pregnant; her train fare was paid by a white family who hired her as a domestic servant. When her pregnancy became obvious, the family fired her. She took a job scrubbing floors at Philadelphia General Hospital in exchange for lodging and, when the time came, the delivery of her baby.

The man listed as Eleanora's father on her birth certificate was Frank DeViese, a 20-year-old friend of Sadie's who worked at a nearby restaurant. While he was not actually the baby's biological father, he was present, at 2:30 a.m., when the baby was born.

Not long after the birth, the child was sent to live with Sadie's half-sister Eva Miller and her husband, Robert, in Baltimore. But the young couple soon found the baby too much of a burden, and so Eleanora spent most of the first 18 months of her life with Robert's mother, Martha.

Eleanora's biological father, Clarence Holliday, was a 16-year-old grocery deliveryman and aspiring banjo and guitar player who lived with his parents. In 1917 he joined the U.S. Army, in the process dropping the second "l" in his last name and moving his birth year back three years, from 1898 to 1895. He deserted before his regiment was sent to Europe. His deceptive enlistment papers may have made it hard for the Army to track him down. Less than a year later (August 1918), Clarence was drafted into the Army, where he became a bugler. Days after his company arrived in France, the war ended.

In later years, Clarence would make the unlikely claim that he had been exposed to poison gas at the tail end of the war, a myth his daughter would embellish, insisting that her father's early death in 1939 was directly attributable to that gas attack.

Though Eleanora's father had no contact beyond the occasional visit with her and her mother during the first seven years of her life (in 1922, Clarence married Helen Boudin and moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia and out of her life forever) and even denied having a daughter whenever it seemed inconvenient, Eleanora idolized him -- she took his name and, after her mother died, insisted that Sadie be referred to as his widow.

When Eleanora was 9, the courts sent her to a Catholic school for wayward girls, where some biographers have speculated that she was sexually victimized by older girls. Sadie may have worked in brothels, and she took "transportation jobs" as a servant for wealthy travelers. The girl was returned to her mother, who farmed her out to whoever would take her for a week or a month. Sadie married, but the marriage fell apart. After that, Sadie moved to New York.

We don't know exactly when Eleanora followed -- it was sometime between 1925 and 1929. Sadie was working in Florence Williams' Harlem brothel, and by the time she was 14 Eleanora was turning $5 tricks.

We can speculate about Billie Holiday's yearning for something like a respectable childhood, but we only know it must have been difficult. In light of her domestic reality, Dufty's glib summary -- "Mom and pop were just a couple of kids" -- takes on something of the offhand terror of Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse.

BILLIE

Like most American icons, Holiday invented herself. She got busted for prostitution and started singing in clubs for tips; she called herself "Billie" after the actress Billie Dove and Holiday after Clarence (who'd eventually gain some notice as the rhythm guitarist for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, Benny Carter, Bob Howard and Don Redman). She attracted the attention of John Hammond, a 22-year-old rich kid who turned out to have exquisite taste; Holiday was his first big discovery. He went on to sign Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughn to Columbia contracts.

We know she had abusive relationships -- that Louis McKay was not the romantic lead portrayed by Billy Dee Williams in Lady Sings the Blues. We know that she died at 44 from cirrhosis of the liver, with less than a dollar in her checking account.

"I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or 10 years," Dufty wrote for her in Lady Sings the Blues. "If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music."

What Holiday did for vocalists was tantamount to what Louis Armstrong did for instrumentalists: She emancipated the melody from strict time, giving herself license to slur and slide and invest the words of the song with as much emotion and significance as the notes.

She always acknowledged her debt to "pop's feeling," and she achieved something like it through phrasing and tonality, by singing for sound and sense. She was never merely a vocalist, but more an instrumental soloist able to retain the color and connotation of the lyrics, adding a layer of dramatic interpretation to the performance.

Holiday's singing could be likened to playing chess in three dimensions: It was intuitive and free as a Lester Young sax solo; it satisfied the algebraic formulas set out by the musicians playing with her; and it followed the logic of conversation. Any cat who played with her indeed had to know what he was doing.

She had forerunners, but singers like Bessie Smith and Bing Crosby were not working in the same musical context. Smith was a powerful blues shouter, locked into the 12-bar format, and though Holiday cited her as an influence, their styles were poles apart. What Holiday took from Bessie was an understanding of the emotional power of the lyric. What she took from Crosby was the crooner's light, swinging intimacy.

What made her great was her smoky, sensuous innovation, her understanding of how to imbue a song with yearning and hurt, with hope and resignation. She made her slim, spare voice into a line as confident, proud and indelible as those of Edgar Degas or Wallace Stevens. She transcended her material, turned performance into art.

How is still a mystery that argues for her genius.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 05/03/2015

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