by John Szwed
“It was slow, this attempt to climb clear”: Tan, February, 1953.
“I never felt inferior to anybody”: Confidential, October 1959.
“I’m not the suicide type”: Billie Holiday, “Heroin Saved My Life,” unedited draft for Confidential, 1959, H. Dennis Fairchild archive.
Dufty said that when he visited her room: Dufty in the BBC film Reputations.
this meant showing how the stigmatized women: Coretta Pittman, “Black Women and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 56–61; Glen Coulter, “Billie Holiday, The Art of Jazz,” Cambridge Review, 1957, p. 124; Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: Free Press, 2002); Kim L. Purnell, “Listening to Lady Day: An Exploration of the Creative (Re) Negotiation of Identity Revealed in the Life Narratives and Music Lyrics of Billie Holiday,” Communication Quarterly 50, nos. 3 and 4 (Summer/Fall 2002), pp. 444–66.
CHAPTER THREE: The Image: Film, Television, and Photography
The song’s opening lines: Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 530.
he asked her to play the role: Frank Brady, Citizen Welles (New York: Scribner, 1989), pp. 333–34.
It soon becomes a worldwide phenomenon: Elliot Paul, “It’s All True,” Lily Library, Indiana University Welles Mss. Collection, folder 13-26.
What might have been material for a conventional: Throughout the script there were hints of films and novels of the past and the future: E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and the films The Jazz Singer and Paris Blues.
“Today, I was at your studio and got an earful”: “The Memos Part IX: Dr. Bernstein to Orson Welles,” May 21, 2012, www.wellesnet.com/?p=1573.
Filming was halted abruptly: For a glimpse of what some of the film would have looked like, see the DVD It’s All True (Paramount Pictures, 1993).
plans for the film, now titled New Orleans: Sherrie Tucker, “‘But This Music Is Mine Already!’: White Woman as Jazz Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947),” in Nichole Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds., Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 235–66.
Jazz had somehow become a lady: Billie said that the director later remarked to her of the actress playing the opera singer, “You made her look like a hole in the screen.” Donald Clarke, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: Viking, 1994), p. 247.
Holiday arrived late, twelve days: Barney Bigard, With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
“I’m just not the maid type”: Murray Kempton, “Lady Day Had a Way with Words,” Newsday, July 10, 1994, p. A35.
Armstrong played in front of the Woody Herman band: Tucker, “‘But This Music Is Mine,’” pp. 235–66.
Biberman was replaced by Arthur Lubin: Elliott Paul quoted in an e-mail from Arnold Goldman to John Szwed; see also Tucker, “‘But This Music Is Mine,’” p. 255.
When New Orleans opened at the Winter Garden: Harrison Smith, “Lightning Strikes Twice,” Jazz Forum 5 (Autumn 1947), pp. 16–17.
“all that Uncle Tom stuff in it”: Early draft, Lady Sings the Blues, Robert O’Meally archive.
smiling and begowned, exchanged a few words: Leonard Feather, “Billie Holiday Tells a Million Televiewers About the Dope Leeches,” Melody Maker 29, no. 1050 (1953), pp. 10, 12.
The show aired: Nat Hentoff, “Giants at Play: It’s 50 Years Since CBS’s Pioneering ‘Sound of Jazz,’” Weekly Standard, December 10, 2007, p. 40.
The script for The Trial of Billie Holiday: The script included quotes from the court transcript used with permission of Holiday’s attorney, Jake Ehrlich, and the narcotics agent involved with the case. It was as close to film noir as it was a biopic. Ann Ronell, The Trial of Billie Holiday, 1957, Lester Cowan and Ann Ronell “Trial of Billie Holiday” Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Dufty wrote her of his good impression of Cowan: Letter to Lady and Louis from William Dufty, undated (c. December 1956), reprinted in Ken Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, p. 182.
United Artists advanced money for production: Thomas M. Pryor, “Cowan Lists Film on Billie Holiday,” New York Times, September 11, 1957.
More than that, it would lead to millions: Letter from Lester Cowan to Billie Holiday, undated, from the Lester Cowan and Ann Ronell “Trial of Billie Holiday” Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Asked if he had discussed the casting: Pryor, “Cowan Lists Film on Billie Holiday.”
“If they change that there’s no story”: Pepper, “Banned Billie OK for Park?”; unidentified clipping, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University–Newark.
Cowan had also considered Lana: Max E. Youngstein (United Artists) to Lester Cowan, February 17, 1958, Lester Cowan and Ann Ronell “Trial of Billie Holiday” Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Cross said that Gardner had tried to get Billie: Julia Blackburn, With Billie (New York: Pantheon, 2005), p. 148.
“My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me”: James Baldwin, “The Devil Finds Work,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), p. 622.
Cowan’s film failed to go into production: Hollywood Reporter, September 21, 1959, and November 1, 1960.
This time it was announced that the movie: Ibid.
Moreau was the only person who could play Billie: Letter from William Dufty to Ann Ronell, July 29, 1965, Lester Cowan and Ann Ronell “Trial of Billie Holiday” Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Dandridge was playing a Holiday-inspired: “Blues for the Junkman” was also known as Murder Men in an expanded theatrical version in an episode of a noirish NBC-TV film series called Cain’s Hundred, February 20, 1962, season 1, episode 21.
Camera Three: Camera Three, CBS-TV, September 9, 1962, season 7, episode 41.
Anticipating that Louis McKay would contest: Baltimore Afro-American, September 4, 1971, p. 10; Hollie I. West, “Movies on Billie Holiday,” Washington Post, July 30, 1971.
Dufty later dismissed the film: “Dufty’s Dirty Truth,” East West Journal, March 1973, p. 4.
“I wanted to make a piece of entertainment”: J. Randi Tarraborelli, Diana Ross: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Citadel, 2007), p. 248.
“Why should we be saddled with it just because we’re black?”: Ibid., pp. 249–50.
there were inauthenticities in the film: Though Ross said she did not try to sound like Holiday, she did admit that she tried to imagine what drugs were doing to her voice at various points in her life so as to know how to interpret them. Diana Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow: Memoirs (London: Headline, 1994), p. 197.
“Let’s face it, you’re not my husband”: Andrusier Autographs, http://www.andrusierautographs.com/product/holiday-billie-1915-1959-3/.
re-create Holiday’s bedroom and dressing room: Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow, p. 201.
images suggest that he might be looking back to the exoticism: Franco Minganti, “Qualcosa sulle immagini in movimento,” in Giorgio Rimondi, ed., Lady Day, Lady Night: Interpretare Billie Holiday (Milan: Greco and Greco, 2003), pp. 57–72.
Van Vechten later wrote: Carl Van Vechten, “Portraits of the Artists,” Esquire 58, no. 6 (1962), p. 256; “The Reminiscences of Carl Van Vechten,” Columbia Center for Oral History Collection, May 14, 1960, p. 232.
“Life Goes to a Party” features: “Jam Session at Mili Studio,” Life, October 11, 1943, pp. 117–25; http://billieholiday.info/index.php?Magazine#i55d7654; W. Royal Stokes and Don Peterson, Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); “Charl
es Peterson Goes to a Party (1939),” Jazz Lives, December 12, 2009, http://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/charles-peterson-goes-to-a-party-1939/; Ernie Anderson, “Billie Holiday,” Storyville, March 1993, pp. 95–103.
CHAPTER FOUR: The Prehistory of a Singer
In the 1850s Walt Whitman: J. K. Kinnard, “Who Are Our National Poets?,” Knickerbocker Magazine, October 1945; Walt Whitman, An American Primer, new edition (San Francisco: City Lights, 1970 [1904]).
And second, they were able to use the microphone: Henry Pleasants, The Great American Popular Singers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).
Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun: Guy Walters, “Hitler’s Mistress: Extraordinary Lost Pictures of Eva Braun at Play,” Daily Mail, October 14, 2014, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364687/Hitlers-mistress-Eva-Brauns-rare-pictures-party-mode-dressed-Al-Jolson.html.
“By ‘coon songs’ are meant up-to-date songs”: Quoted in Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (New York: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 103.
revision and sly appropriation of coon songs: Billie Holiday’s mentor Shelton Brooks’s composition “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” was a revisiting of the coon song, and when it was recorded in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band it became one of the first jazz songs.
New York Times in 1895 reported: Quoted in Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, eds., Ragged But Right (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), p. 17.
review of Irwin in Courted into Court: Ibid.
away from the Follies and on her own: Pamela Brown Levitt, “First of the Red Hot Mamas: ‘Coon Shouting’ and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl,” American Jewish History 87, no. 4 (1999), pp. 253–90.
But when a white performer revealed her skin: Abbott and Seroff, Ragged But Right, pp. 20–21.
When she sang “Backwater Blues”: Sterling Brown, “Ma Rainey,” The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
her repertoire openly echoed that of Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters: Peter Antelyes, “Red Hot Mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the Ethnic Maternal Voice in American Popular Song,” in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, eds., Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 212–29; Susan Ecker and Lloyd Ecker, liner notes to Sophie Tucker: Origins of the Red Hot Mama, 1910–1922, Archeophone CD 5010, 2009.
they might be called flappers: Fanny Brice mocks the flapper style at the end of a 1930s clip of the song “When a Woman Loves a Man,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTT2t8w8vw4.
Sophie Tucker once paid Waters to teach her: Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 135.
Most French singers of these songs were older: Wolfgang Rutkowski, “Cabaret Songs,” Popular Music and Society 25, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall 2001), pp. 45–71.
singers of torch songs have been called many things: Stacy Holman Jones, Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2007), p. 24.
Blues lyrics and their melodic characteristics: Michael Taft, Talkin’ to Myself: Blues Lyrics, 1921–1942 (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. xvi.
no one seemed to care how unsavory: David Yaffe, Fascinatin’ Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 155–57; Will Friedwald, A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz Singers (New York: Pantheon, 2010), p. 575.
Helen Morgan was Irish American: I am indebted to the fine article by John Moore, “‘The Hieroglyphics of Love’: The Torch Singers and Interpretation,” Popular Music 8, no. 1 (1989).
CHAPTER FIVE: The Singer I
[Holiday’s] art transcends the usual categorizations: Schuller, The Swing Era, p. 528.
years after she had been acclaimed as a great vocalist: Teddy Wilson interview, September 2, 1979, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project, Reel 3.
Stafford was her own favorite singer: Dan Burley, “Song Stylist Jo Stafford Favorite with Harlemites,” New York Amsterdam News, March 17, 1945, p. A1. Stafford was the most popular singer among black listeners in 1945, leading even Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald.
Compare Stafford’s “I’ll Be Seeing You”: Adone Brandalise, “La voce come sguardo,” in Rimondi, ed., Lady Day, Lady Night, pp. 73–78.
“When I got into show business”: Quoted in O’Meally, Lady Day, p. 42.
especially at the end of a tune: Stafford also sang Hank Williams tunes and country songs (some of which were hits), released folk song and gospel albums, recorded comedy music albums with her husband Paul Weston (under the adopted personae of “Jonathan and Darlene Edwards”) that made fun of lounge singers, and even recorded “I’ll Take Tallulah.”
Dodge wrote in the magazine Jazz: Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 299.
Their kind of singing: Ibid., p. 274.
BH: Why, they’re actresses, they’re artists: Billie Holiday interviewed by Mike Wallace on Night Beat, DuMont Television, November 7, 1956. Despite some writers’ assumption that there was tension between Holiday and Helen Forrest during the period in which they both were singers with the Artie Shaw band, each later spoke well of the other.
Schiffman, owner of the Apollo: Abbey Lincoln at the Jazz Seminar, Columbia University, Frank Schiffman interviewed on “Lady Day: Billie Holiday,” May 1967, Pacifica Radio, KPFA.
“I’m telling you, me and my old voice”: The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945–1959, Verve Records 517 658-2, 1993, disk 4, track 32.
“If you find a tune”: Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 43–44.
She made you accept her song: Kuehl notes, Rutgers University–Newark.
Linda Kuehl, Holiday’s would-be first biographer: Ibid.
“A great actress but one who never had an act”: Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, second revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 86.
“In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own”: Studs Terkel, “Afterword,” in Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm, fiftieth-anniversary edition (New York: Seven Stories, 1999).
“You had to have someone with you when you listened to Billie”: Darryl Pinckney, “Dancing Miss,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976.
said the words differently with each interpretation: Kuehl notes, Rutgers University–Newark.
“She didn’t even glance at it” Timme Rosenkrantz and Inez Cavanaugh, liner notes to Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits, Columbia CL-2666, 1967.
“nearer to North Africa than to West Africa”: “Billie Holiday: Singer Presents a Concert in Town Hall,” New York Herald Tribune, February 17, 1946.
“She was nervous and perspiring freely”: Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, p. 105.
The next day, however, Van Vechten wrote to himself: Quoted in Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (London: Indigo, 2000), p. 166.
The singers we see in performance are not the real persons: Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 215.
We expect to see a performer maintain a consistent face: Paul Auslander, “Musical Personae,” Drama Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 101–19.
speaking critically of singers who imitated other singers: Leonard Feather, “Lady Day Has Her Say,” Metronome, February 1950, p. 16.
“the first time I ever heard anybody sing”: Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 9–10.
the use of vocalese: “Vocalese” is not to be confused with “vocalise,” singing with one single vowel so as to eliminate words altogether.
While music of verse may already be present in the lyrics: Kenneth Burke, “On Musicality in Verse: As Illustrated by Some Lines of Coleridge,” Poetry, October 1940, pp. 31–40. My thanks to Susan Stewart for help in understanding Holiday’s use of writ
ten lyrics.
CHAPTER SIX: The Singer II
“A lot of singers try to sing like Billie”: Quoted in John Chilton, Billie’s Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), p. 229.
“She could just tear you up”: Quoted in O’Meally, Lady Day, p. 52.
Compare Holiday’s “lagging” vocal: Holiday’s “St. Louis Blues” was recorded on October 15, 1940; Bessie Smith’s was recorded January 14, 1925.
bridge, or middle section, of “Foolin’ Myself”: Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra (with Billie Holiday), “Foolin’ Myself,” 1937.
When she reaches the next two lines: Holiday is fond of this form of stress, the spondee, which in poetic terms is a foot of two syllables, both of which are stressed. (A foot in poetry is something like a measure in music, a grouping of rhythm and sounds.)
“She sometimes sang entire vocals outside the beat”: Whitney Balliett, “Jazz: Teddy Wilson,” New Yorker, July 19, 1982, p. 67.
“The first night she handed me some tattered lead sheets”: Artie Shaw, The Street That Never Slept (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1971), pp. 303–4.
“two beat systems functioning simultaneously”: Hao Huang and Rachel V. Huang, “Billie Holiday and Tempo Rubato: Understanding Rhythmic Expressivity,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7 (1994–1995), pp. 188–89.
“two parallel strands organizing the passage of time”: This may be what musician and film director Mike Figgis meant when he said that he learned to listen to Billie Holiday’s vocal lines along with Lester Young’s tenor saxophone commentary and phrasing when they were playing with a drummer “who was profound because you couldn’t hear him.” Ibid., p. 193.
“What Is This Thing Called Love?”: Ibid., p. 184.
instrumental jazz is a speech-inflected music: LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963); Sidney Finkelstein, “Inner and Outer Jazz,” Jazz Review 2, no. 8 (September 1959), 19–22.
interview she did with talk show host Tex McCrary: Holiday had taken McCrary’s request for “her songs” literally and recited three she had written. When the host asked her if she didn’t know any happy songs, she replied, with a laugh, “I know some happy songs, but I don’t write them.” The Tex and Jinx Show, WNBC Radio, November 8, 1956.