by John Szwed
Blues lyrics and their melodic characteristics were sometimes embedded into otherwise ordinary pop songs in the section marked “tempo di blues.” What is equally confusing is that elements of many commercially written coon songs found their way into folk blues, as well as into bluegrass, for that matter. Things may or may not have been simpler when different genres of music were more segregated than they now are. Race records were made by black performers for black audiences, but radio leaked them to larger audiences, and jazz musicians always had blues in their repertoires. On the other hand, recordings by whites were distributed and played everywhere. African American women singers were always called blues singers, and their songs were written for them by black songwriters or were already known to them through black folk tradition. The women who sang torch songs were always white, and got their songs from white Tin Pan Alley writers.
There were some who resisted this regimentation. Libby Holman was a close observer of Bessie Smith’s, Ethel Waters’s, and Billie Holiday’s music, and at one point announced that she was giving up torch songs for blues and folk music because they were not self-pitying. It was an interesting distinction, but one that does not bear close scrutiny. Were all torch songs self-pitying, or did they also project a refusal to submit to the pop ethos of love? Could they not be thought of as weapons to be used against life, as Ned Rorem put it? Were the blues free of self-pity? Think of the number of blues songs that begin with lines such as, “Here I am sitting in this one-room country shack, a thousand miles from nowhere” or “Poor boy I’m a long way from home / I don’t have no happy home to go home to.”
Whatever it was that Holman heard in blues songs, it was clear that she wanted out of the torch role, and eventually went on the road with Josh White accompanying her on guitar. Billie Holiday, on the other hand, who had been familiar with the blues from childhood, discovered how to apply what she had learned from them to pop songs. Her large repertoire was almost exclusively Tin Pan Alley products, Broadway show tunes, or European cabaret songs, and it was she who broke the hold that whites had on torch songs. Many people in the forties and fifties didn’t even consider her a black singer.
“Love for Sale” is an interesting example of racial and musical casting at work. It would seem a perfect song for Holiday, one to which she could bring emotional experience and deep feeling. But she recorded Cole Porter’s song only once, late in life, and apparently never sang it in live performance. It was written for The New Yorkers, a 1930 Broadway revue, and was sung by a white singer, Kathryn Crawford. It was quickly banned from airplay on some radio stations, and a New York World critic called the song “filthy” and “in the worst possible taste.” A few weeks later Crawford was replaced by Elizabeth Welch, a singer whose racial identity was complex, but since she’d worked mostly in African American musical theater, audiences assumed she was black. The producers also changed the setting of the song from the popular midtown Manhattan restaurant Reuben’s to the Cotton Club in Harlem. After that, no one seemed to care how unsavory the Broadway song performance was, and Libby Holman had a hit recording with it.
In both torch songs and blues the singer is the one who expresses the narrative, a convention that sometimes leads audiences to assume the singer’s life is the source of the song. There is also the sheer exoticism of the two musical forms and their singers. To many listeners, these genres were inherently strange. The blues were completely alien to the European musical tradition, and while torch songs came from turn-of-the-century France and Germany, and later from Harlem, they were new to most Americans. Even stranger were the torch singers themselves, most of whom adopted the stage identities of urban sophisticates, former femmes fatales, prostitutes, or women who had wandered onto the stage from the French film serial Les Vampires. They had borrowed from well-traveled European cabaret and Parisian apache gang members’ street styling, and while their makeup, hand placed on hip, dangling cigarette, and head-cast-back stance were elements to which nightclub habitués might have been accustomed, it took their unexplained appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show of the 1950s to make them familiar to most Americans.
These were singers who also sought to assume a more complex and somewhat mysterious identity. Libby Holman’s performances in blackface did not prevent her from being celebrated by some in the black community for her sympathy to their cause. She sang at the Apollo, did NAACP benefits, told columnist Walter Winchell the blues were her passion, was described in reviews as “Creolesque” and “dusky,” and was oddly compared to Ethel Waters as a coon song singer (a type of music Waters seldom if ever performed). Fanny Brice was Jewish and started in blackface, but she developed several different stage identities and was especially known for introducing the hugely popular French song “My Man” to America, along with a pouting streetlight lean that marked her forever as something more than just a funny girl. Whether it was the song, the setting, or Brice’s fluid identity, many whites took the song to be a blues.
Helen Morgan was Irish American, or maybe Canadian (part of her mystery), and had her start singing ballads in French in Toronto, atop a grand piano. She was thought by some to be a mulatto—she was not, but the rumor won her the role of Julie LaVerne in the stage musical and film adaptations of Show Boat, as well as a song written for her by Noël Coward called “Half-Caste Woman.”
When torch singers’ songs were laminated to their caustic, reckless, or shadowed lives, as was the case with Helen Morgan, Libby Holman, and Édith Piaf, their real or imagined identities were reinforced. A later group of jazz singers—the Boswell Sisters, Dinah Shore, Kay Starr, and Lee Wiley—were all nominally white but had mixed-race narratives (Creole, Native American, African American) affixed to them by the whispers of fans, the press, and sometimes by their own hints. It is at this strange crossroads where jazz, pop, blues, torch, and jazz identity transformations took place, and where songs were turned into lives, that Billie Holiday’s career as a singer was developed.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Singer I
Billie Holiday’s voice is odd, indelibly odd, and so easy to recognize, but so difficult to describe. In her early years some called it sad, olive-toned, whisky-hued, lazy, feline, smoky, unsentimental, weird. Her first record producer, John Hammond, said that there were many objections when he signed Bob Dylan, but nothing compared with what the music business had to say about Holiday’s singing on her early 1930s recordings that he produced—“scratchy,” “unmusical,” “where’s the melody?”
Her voice is so unique that some of her vocal techniques fall outside the standard techniques of musicology and beg for new terms to express them: falling behind the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes and then letting them fall. Even her pronunciation can be so unusual that common words would have to be respelled if they were transcribed phonetically. Composer and jazz historian Gunther Schuller flatly says that the Holiday style ultimately can’t be properly transcribed in written music:
[Holiday’s] art transcends the usual categorizations of style, content, and technique. Much of her singing goes beyond itself and becomes a humanistic document; it passed often into a realm that is not only beyond criticism but in the deepest sense inexplicable. We can, of course, describe and analyze the surface mechanics of her art: her style, her technique, her personal vocal attributes; and I suppose a poet could express the essence of her art or at least give us, by poetic analogy, his particular insight into it. But, as with all truly profound art, that which operates above, below, and all around its outer manifestations is what most touches us, and also remains ultimately mysterious.
There may be a certain investment in keeping one’s favorite music somewhat mysterious, but Schuller’s point is borne out by the inadequacy of many attempts to transcribe her recordings with musical notation.
Billie Holiday’s elusive style was not always well received. In the beginning, some habitués of Harlem cabarets thought that sh
e was too rough, too plain, too musically crude to be a singer. There were musicians who were not impressed by the twists she gave to popular songs. Teddy Wilson, an elegant pianist and the leader on some of her best 1930s recordings, thought she copied Louis Armstrong too closely. He preferred clear-voiced balladeers, singers with careful phrasing like Beverly White, an obscure performer who sometimes alternated with Billie in the same small clubs. Even years after she had been acclaimed as a great vocalist, Wilson remained unimpressed by her singing on the records that had helped to make him famous, and said he now preferred Barbra Streisand to Holiday. When Billie first went to Chicago to sing at the Grand Terrace Café, one of the most important jazz clubs in the country, she was told by the manager that she was “stinking up the place . . . you sing too slow . . . sounds like you’re asleep!” There was no question that she sang more slowly than most of the singers at the time, and it was sometimes said that it was because of her insecurity. But slow singing, like slow drumming, requires a higher level of skill in holding the time steady, and also exposes any of the singer’s pitch, breathing, or phrasing problems. At times, such as in the 1944 version of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” her tempos are so measured that it almost seems as if she is treating each word as a separate phrase.
Since her first recordings were intended for African American jukebox play, most people in the country did not hear them until years later. But the audience that was first exposed to her singing was slow to warm to her, and even at her peak in 1945, polls in the Negro press showed that Jo Stafford, a white singer with a silken voice, was more popular than Holiday. She never reached first place in the Down Beat poll, the leading magazine among jazz fans. In 1942 the winner was Helen Forrest, her co-singer with the Artie Shaw band; in 1943, Jo Stafford; and in 1944, Dinah Shore. On several occasions Billie said that Stafford was her own favorite singer.
Holiday and Stafford shared many musical characteristics: Billie’s vocal gestures were also understated; both singers improvised in a subtle and sophisticated manner; the vibrato that many singers count on to show emotion (or hide their problems with intonation) was used selectively by both of them in their cool, straight melody lines. But Holiday could adorn those lines with small but unforgettable turns, up-and-down movements, fades, and drop-offs. (Compare Stafford’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” with Holiday’s version of the song: Stafford’s is a perfect vocal performance, calm, reassuring, a prime example of what critic Will Friedwald calls Anglo-Saxon soul, but Holiday’s pulls the heart and ears in an unimaginably different direction, singing down, slower than expected, turning the song into what one might regard as a classic of chronic nostalgia.)
Holiday typically used vibrato to increase the emotional charge of a word or phrase, and perhaps, more often, to swing a single note, as Louis Armstrong did, setting it into motion by increasing the width of vibrato just before moving on to the next note or phrase. Billie was well aware of the importance of vibrato and once commented on it: “When I got into show business you had to have the shake. If you didn’t, you were dead . . . That big vibrato fits a few voices, but those that have it usually have it too much. I just don’t like it. You have to use it sparingly. You know, the hard thing is not to do that shake.”
When Billie praised Stafford by saying that she also sang like a horn, she seems to have had a different and more modest sense of what hornlike singing could be, and at the same time she calls our attention again to how vague and confusing musical labels can be. Stafford’s lustrous voice, her carefully controlled approach in live performance, fine diction, minimalist musical gestures, and faultless pitch and technique were admired by many singers. (Frank Sinatra, who sang with Stafford in the Pied Pipers, once said she could hold a note for sixteen bars.)
Stafford is not usually considered a jazz singer because her hits were typically pop oriented, but she did record a number of jazz albums, such as Swingin’ Down Broadway (1958) and Jo+Jazz (1960), the latter backed by Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Ben Webster, musicians from Duke Ellington’s band who also accompanied Billie on records in the thirties and forties. Stafford also recorded more blues than Holiday (including Ballad of the Blues, a 1959 concept album), found her way into bebop scatting on a couple of recordings, and wasn’t averse to altering conventional harmonies or dropping a flatted fifth here and there, especially at the end of a tune.
• • • • •
Though music journalists and critics were generally among Holiday’s biggest fans, some had doubts about her. In 1942 Roger Pryor Dodge wrote in the magazine Jazz that she could have been a good blues singer if “hot and sweet” singing had not replaced the blues. After her death he was even more damning: “The changes in blues intonation, through the unhealthy influence of Billy Eckstine and Billy Holiday, resulted in a whining intimacy, a merging of blues with the torch song.” Their kind of singing, he added, was similar to what beboppers such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie were playing at slow tempos, a music that he regretted to have to call decadent.
Holiday herself insisted that she wasn’t a good singer, and her accompanists testified to her surprising sense of insecurity. In a 1956 interview Mike Wallace asked her about the performers, actors, and singers she said she most admired—Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore, and Helen Forrest—and what she had in common with them:
BH:Why, they’re actresses, they’re artists. I look at them, like, Wow.
MW:And you don’t consider yourself in the same league?
BH:No, my God, no!
MW:Why not? You’ve worked as hard. You’ve thought as much about it. You’ve developed a style and technique, just as much as they have done. You’ve pleased just as many people, so why aren’t you just as much of an artiste as any one of them?
BH:Maybe I am in my little way . . . but my God, they make me cry, they make me happy. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that to people, not really.
Not many singers could, in fact, make listeners cry. Abbey Lincoln said that people sobbed every time Billy Eckstine sang “Sophisticated Lady,” Duke Ellington’s sad story of an elegant woman who hid the pain of a lost great love affair behind “smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow.” And despite Billie’s demurrals, Frank Schiffman, owner of the Apollo Theater, said that he saw young girls weep whenever she was onstage.
A home recording exists of Billie at a rehearsal talking to musicians between songs, joking, laughing, remarking on any number of subjects, including her own singing: “I’m telling you, me and my old voice, it just go up a little bit and come down a little bit. It’s not legit. 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.”
Untrained, with no ambition to be a vocalist, she insisted that she had literally stumbled into singing. At fifteen, desperate to help her mother find money for the rent before they were put out onto the streets of Harlem, she auditioned as a dancer at a tiny nightclub, only to fail, but then at the last moment was offered a chance to sing. She was an instant success, with a cabaret audience weeping at the passion in her song and throwing money at her. It was a standard show business success story told by so many, but where others had stressed how hard it had been for them to get a break, Billie claimed hers was an accident.
• • • • •
Holiday began her singing career before microphones were widely used, as they were not considered necessary in small bars and cabarets. She related to her audience in a direct and personal manner, holding eye contact, moving from table to table, adjusting her performance in accord with how she was being received. After the microphone became more widely available in 1933, some singers, Holiday among them, were afraid to sing into them for fear their voices would be distorted or too loud. But as the technology improved and its potential was understood, audiences were introduced to a quieter, more intimate use of the microphone—intimate in that it enabled singers to create the illusion that they were clos
er, singing to each member of the audience even outside the nightclub setting. When the mic was used for radio broadcasts or for making recordings, listeners at home could experience that intimacy, a completely new musical experience. Some singers took this as a cue to whisper words, in an attempt to create a false intimacy. But Holiday found that the level of her everyday speaking voice was where she wanted to be.
The microphone had begun to function like a close-up lens in motion pictures, focusing and amplifying emotions and small vocal gestures, making histrionics, high volume, and grand stagecraft unnecessary. With a microphone, a singer could join the new naturalistic stage methods that were developed following the Russian director Stanislavsky’s plea that actors cease portraying emotions to the audience and instead begin communicating with them directly; that the performance was not in the words that were spoken or sung, but in the character that was developed, and character began with basics such as breathing. The mic could set the singer free, and audiences became used to closer and more revealing looks at actors and singers on film and the bandstand.
Singers quickly learned that with amplification they could phrase conversationally, closely, at moderate volume, emphasizing words and syllables as well as melody. They could stretch vowels or deemphasize consonants, and allow musical phrases to extend beyond their normal length. Holiday, along with Frank Sinatra, was one of the first to use a microphone creatively.