Photograph of Billie Holiday, March 1949, by Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust. Courtesy Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African-American Arts and Letters, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Discussed in this essay:
Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, by Paul Alexander. Knopf. 368 pages. $32.
Early on in Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:
Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and clubs and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever. But you can call the roll of the wonderful joints that thrived before repeal in 1933—they’re mostly memories now: Basement Brownies, the Yea Man, the Alhambra, Mexico, the Next, the Clam House, the Shim Sham, the Covan, the Morocco, the Spider Web.
Get a load of those names! So evocative of a vanished world of bathtub gin, sweat-soaked tuxedos, small clubs fogged with high-tar cigarette smoke. You can taste the sin and glamour on the tip of your dehydrated tongue. For Holiday this was recent history, to us as distant as chain mail and apothecaries. The world that shaped her may have ebbed to a soft faraway glow, but Billie still feels contemporary, a presence in the room.
Why do we honor her changeable shade? Lady Sings the Blues remains in print today, and the flood never abates: more documentaries, more biopics, more biographies. Just by being herself she undoes all manner of oppositional hinges. Angel of history and a woman wronged. Queen of elegance and jailed addict. Regal and haughty but never a diva. She was reportedly something of a tomboy as a child and then later “one of the boys” when on the road with various swing-era bands and orchestras: fighting, swearing, drinking, gambling. She took male and female lovers, guiltlessly, without ever making a fuss.
The Holiday who is now celebrated, if that is the word, the one played by Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), and spotlit by Paul Alexander’s new biography Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, is to a large extent ruined Billie, persecuted Billie, addicted Billie. A role model hymned for her feminine strength, but also someone who couldn’t see a bad choice without opening her fur-clad arms wide and inviting it home for supper. The Holiday of my opening quote—apprentice Billie, hedonistic Billie, carefree Billie—tends to be overshadowed. This is Billie before heroin (and the problems it caused), before her notorious anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” (and the problems its lyrics caused), before all the awful men (and the problems they caused). A cusp figure, discovering her voice and what it could do.
Between July 2, 1935, and February 10, 1942, Holiday, backed by Teddy Wilson and his band, logged twenty-one studio sessions, yielding around seventy imperishable songs. Together they are one of the cornerstones of modern popular music and (thanks to a purely serendipitous LP purchase) the first Holiday I ever heard. These are some of my favorite songs ever. I initially fell for the dark end of the catalogue (“Gloomy Sunday,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Solitude”), but whole other worlds soon opened up. If there are catchier, more weightless songs than “Them There Eyes” or “Me, Myself and I,” I don’t know them.
The typical Holiday–Wilson tempo is a kind of medium-pace chug—neither outright swing nor an invitation to the blues; an alloy in which are cast jazz smarts and a more accessible razzle-dazzle. Even when sad, the songs shine. There came a point in my nascent worship when I would read once again about unhappy Billie, then return to the Wilson cache and think: Hang on, this is some of the happiest music ever made! Her downbeat side has been too much stressed, maybe due to a general tendency among writers to valorize the darker byways of modernism. So much of her work is lively, gossamer, flirtatious. It speaks of budding desire rather than stifled longing.
Even her sadder songs have curls of last-minute deliverance. “Gloomy Sunday,” Holiday’s version of the infamous “suicide song,” features one of the most transcendent passages in popular music, the moment when she sings: “I wake and I find you asleep / in the deep of my heart, dear.” It’s hard to describe the way she sings this line, its rising arc and sheer weightlessness. Something like: “I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my h e a r t, dear.” It’s like someone slowly ascending a staircase from sleep back to waking, the final “dear” a long slow enveloping wave. Not that it isn’t a deeply unsettling lyric. The line “Little white flowers / will never awaken you” still seems to me one of the oddest I’ve ever heard, more apt for a gravestone legend than a wisp of popular song. A description of falling snow, maybe, or the snow-white slumber of morphine. (Both involve a phenomenology of melting.) When I first fell for this sepulchral track, I assumed the “little white flowers” were a funeral bouquet. But would such a somber scene really call for little white flowers? (Funeral . . . daisies?) It’s hard, too, not to recall the large white flowers Holiday habitually wore in her hair.
What makes Holiday’s delivery so inimitable? Her most characteristic tone is beguilingly indeterminate: a new kind of song pleasure, mixing distance and intimacy. And within this misting or slurring we might locate a kind of sub-rosa political meaning; a different sort of resistance. One way of hearing her: all the land and space and ease she was denied in life because of her color became in song a dream of leisure, movement, reflection—a place to be that is boundless, utopian, up in the air. This is not the stoicism of the blues or the expansive outreach of gospel; these songs speak more of individual succor, playfulness, abandon. And other qualities that are harder to name. What is the opposite of anxiety?
Her very first recordings were two songs she cut for Benny Goodman in 1933, and this is how she remembered it:
I got there and I was afraid to sing in the mic, because I never saw a microphone before, and I said, “Why do I have to sing in that thing? Why can’t I just sing like I do at the club?” I was scared to death of it.
“Scared” is a telling choice of word—as if the recording process involved something spooky, like a séance in which one contacts a secret self. The microphone makes voices disappear into the ether, as the gramophone steals them out of nowhere. Holiday was one of the first singers to realize the microphone might be used not just as a way to amplify live vocals, but as a friend to hush-now intimacy. Tiny vibrations that change everything. The singer now doesn’t have to pull out all the stops. The recording studio (like the analyst’s couch or the confessional) allows for a more subdued exchange.
Many of her songs evoke threshold times and marginal places. States of weariness or dissipation; the early hours when everyone else is home and safely asleep. “Will the dawn coming on / make it light?” Dusk, twilight, gloaming. Songs with hints of lullaby, prayer, 3 am whisper. A hazy shoreline between earned rest and sought ruin. Song as a different kind of time, as heroin became her own inconstant clock. A time of her own administration. Love, prejudice, payment, decent songs to sing—these are variable, like some half-diverting background noise you can tune in to or out of. This other time she can mete out grain by grain, and mostly judge just how much of it can be taken. She injects her sensibility like a narcotic into the flesh of the song, lowering our listening pulse. Song, like her drug of choice, has the ability to stretch or suspend everyday time. A holiday time, where you can’t tell if it’s early or late. Our usual sense of hours passing, subject to rules imposed by the profit motive, collapsed into a more liquid state: drowsy rather than wide awake and ready for work. (Mallarmé: “Empty hours, purely negative.”) Rather than showboating, she has this other way of singing: a way of not making clear what is going on. Absenting herself from anything like full exposure. Hiding out between the syllables.
What is the singer doing when they use the word “you”? “The very thought of you”; “You haunt me”; “You go to my head.” This pivotal and ambiguous “you” makes popular song possible—we can envision anyone or anything there. It needn’t be an individual lover, but some ideal other or spirit, or even the promise of song itself. When, in “All of Me,” Holiday sings the line “You took the part / that once was my heart,” I imagine a real beating organ, a song about love as addiction, the lure of oblivion, the complete takeover of body and soul. The abject tingle of both needing and resenting the proscribed substance or cruel, unavailable “you.” Loving the hold they have over you, if for no other reason than this: just like song, it may feel more intense than anything previously experienced.
In Lady Sings the Blues, an epiphany occurs in the lush domestic interior of a local brothel. The madame, Alice Dean, owns a Victrola, which instantly enchants the young Billie. Transported by a shellac 78 of “West End Blues” by Louis Armstrong, she shares her revelation:
It was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words. . . . Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba and the rest of it had plenty of meaning for me—just as much meaning as some of the other words that I didn’t always understand. But the meaning used to change, depending on how I felt.
Armstrong was both a jazz innovator and a popular artist. He was a talented improviser, but not in a way that draws attention to itself; his voice invites rapport, rather than awe. Come a little closer and I’ll tell you a secret! A voice forms out of the air—wraps you in its verve, its beneficence, its candor. A voice that doesn’t want anything from you, doesn’t have an agenda. Adult, but not gray or conniving or untrustworthy. Seduction through the ear: a world of revels and forgetting and joy. Communication in little burrs of sound: ba ba ba ba. A song shaped by combustible mood, rather than any sophisticated lyric. Everything is waiting here like a negative to be developed: The song’s “meaning used to change, depending on how I felt.” This is a way of talking to the world in which meaning is not fixed or constraining. Your life’s song is not written.
First she was Eleanora Fagan, then Billie Holiday, then, finally, resplendently, Lady Day—transforming from fallible flesh to a performed self before rising to some realm of sheer myth.
She was born in Philadelphia, in (of course) the early hours, on April 7, 1915. Her mother was an eighteen-year-old housekeeper named Sarah Julia Harris, and went by Sadie. Her registered father was Frank DeViese, a twenty-year-old waiter whom Sadie was seeing. The real father was Clarence Holiday, a sixteen-year-old musician with whom Sadie had had a brief but passionate affair. You will glean little of this from Holiday’s own melodramatic account in Lady Sings the Blues. She gives us an elaborate tale, like she took a disappointing résumé and rearranged it into an eye-catching collage. Her autobiography is many things at once. Written with the left-wing journalist William Dufty, it was Holiday’s attempt to counter the gaudy sensationalism of her life as portrayed by newspapers and magazines. A way to offset gossip about her drug habit, which had lost her the crucial cabaret card she needed to perform live in New York City. A telling of the beads of all her grievances. An autobiography in sound: “All night I’d lay awake listening to the pleasure boats going by.”
It feels more like a conjuring of genies than a setting straight of the record. She ambles through the back alleys of her life like a disgruntled exile, her memory a labyrinth of wrong turns, distorting mirrors, genial monsters. What should also be kept in mind is the precarious nature of “facts” in Holiday’s own milieu. Many-versioned, ad hoc, nomadic: lives hard to pinpoint with given names, definite dates, official certification. She herself was variously: Eleanora, Elinore, Bill, Billie, Billy Halliday, and never legally changed her name to Billie Holiday. Facts were what cops and officials required, and had a malevolent power: they might catch you out, ensnare you, get you in a lot of trouble. The sites of memory are disputable.
What she’s doing in Lady Sings the Blues is improvising on her life in the same way she lent sparkle to tired Tin Pan Alley material. What is her song if not a personal reading of a series of set texts? (“Pennies from Heaven,” “When You’re Smiling,” “Jeepers Creepers.”) Her life is one more lyric open to interpretation: stressing some events, omitting others. The clue is right there in the title: sold as a brutally honest tell-all, the book is a crafty performance. (Even the title’s misleading: strictly speaking she was not a blues singer—on those occasions when she does brush against the blues, she does so lightly, like a dragonfly across a pond.) She supplies us with the requisite biographical outlines, the better to veil them. In this way, Lady Sings the Blues is a true modernist document, throwing the idea of absolute truth into fond disarray. Is it so fanciful to think of it, as I do, as kin to classics such as Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal? As an exercise, read the first few chapters and keep a running total of how many times she uses the word “white”: an associative thread with the logic of dream or poetry. Songwriters, agents, managers, prison matrons, nuns, saints, satins, dresses, spotlights, doorsteps, songs, drugs—all white. Its sudden compressions can be swooningly lyrical, for example this opening paragraph:
I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.
Here is a characteristic paradox: the more Lady Sings the Blues has been fact-checked and untangled and demystified, the more mythic power it seems to command and retain.
When I fell under Holiday’s spell in the early Eighties, there was surprisingly little to read about her, and what did exist was rather dry. More recent writers have used various approaches to get a cleaner fix on Holiday. Donald Clarke’s doorstop Wishing on the Moon (1994) is a solid, fog-clearing biography. My own favorite is John Szwed’s Billie Holiday (2015), which is demystifying in a good way—nimble, intelligent, elegantly written. Without resorting to the algebraic lingo of musicology, Szwed opens out Holiday’s song and shows how it casts its spell; the diplomatic feint of her vocals with various accompanists and assorted lyrics. Here he is on her version of “It’s Like Reaching for the Moon”: “Holiday sings it in a key high enough to make her figuratively look upward, and lets words like ‘stars’ fall while she extends the word ‘reach’ out into musical space.”
In Bitter Crop, Alexander has no pet theory or corrective agenda. The book’s fifteen chapters detail Holiday’s painful last year (June 1958 to July 1959), interspersed with flashbacks—breakthrough moments, key friendships, fateful decisions. I did worry that this structure might be a little gimmicky, but Alexander proves a safe pair of hands. Though we know how it will end, he offers a quietly gripping read. The Holiday revealed here is not so much heartbroken as sick at heart, testifying at one point to terrible enveloping loneliness. The clarinetist Tony Scott found her in a dressing room in May 1959 saying, over and over again, “I’m all alone. I got nobody. ”
It was alcohol that eventually killed her, at age forty-four. Doctors had warned her to stop drinking, but she turned to the bottle whenever she tried to abjure heroin. “Here is a strange / and bitter crop” is the last line of the song “Strange Fruit,” the last she ever sang on a TV show, and also, reportedly, the title she wanted for Lady Sings the Blues. Readers might get the reference to “Strange Fruit,” or think of “bitter crop” as the pain she harvested from her own life, but it strikes me there’s a third possible meaning—heroin. Alexander is good on the fraught recording of Lady in Satin, a work that still divides listeners. With its lush string arrangements by middle-of-the-road maestro Ray Ellis, some find it stagy and overstylized. (The album’s title always makes me think of the plush interior of an expensive coffin.) Then again, its slightly glazed and brittle quality is precisely the reason true believers like me love it so. It’s a torch song suite, not a jazz amble, so the slightly static overcomposed arrangements feel apt. At its best, the torch song (typically a melancholy ballad about lost or unrequited love) is both numb and pained, its singer having turned away from the gregarious urban crowd, like a Fifties recast of Dürer’s Melencolia I: solitary, paralyzed, neurasthenic. In the iterations of Holiday and her doting pupil Frank Sinatra, the torch song attains a kind of icy grandeur, displaying what Genet called “the stateliness of abjection.”
One of the often overlooked facets of her life is her Catholicism. Nine-year-old Billie attended the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The requiem mass at her funeral was conducted by Father Joseph Troy, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle at Columbus and Sixtieth. “There was a halo of white gardenias in her hair,” Alexander writes. In Bitter Crop we also find this passage about her schooling: “Each day, she was required to . . . sing from the Liber Usualis, a book of Gregorian chants widely used in Catholic congregations.” These chants originated with French Benedictine monks who, Alexander notes, updated them “in such a way that, as one choirmaster wrote, ‘the rhythm of material becomes a thing of the spirit.’ ” Could there be a better definition of the alchemy of jazz, and of her song in particular? Louis Armstrong and Gregorian chant were the first two styles she imbibed: one in a house of ill repute, the other in a place of worship. It was her destiny—you might say—to fuse sacred and profane, and live inside the penumbra of their difference.
Do we sense here something like the outline of a secular Passion, or the stations of the Via Dolorosa? From innocence to experience to triumph, and finally an agonizing martyrdom. On her deathbed, still the torture didn’t relent. Alexander gives an exact and painful account of her final days:
Her hospital room was raided and she was interrogated, without being allowed to have an attorney present, by first two, then three, police detectives, who threatened to haul her to the Women’s House of Detention—even though she was bedridden—unless she confessed and named her supplier.
This is where it all ends: a white cell-like room, her ailing body surveilled by mean-spirited lawmen. Her last year may have ended in ignominy, yet a scarcely conceivable afterlife of love and appreciation awaited her, had she but known it.
Sometimes I think of a wider circle around Holiday, far from music stands and tour buses and stashed hypodermics: a group portrait featuring kindred spirits such as Orson Welles (he and Billie had a brief affair), Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath. Bruised and garrulous American phantoms who attract outsized biographical attention. Unreliable witnesses to their own lives. Bad parents of their own extended childhoods, struggling with the second, or third, act of untidy lives. (Honorary godparents: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.) The hungers of their bodies cast in thrillingly shallow headlines. Gay, straight, bisexual, or something else. Lonely drinkers, silky self-servers, soiled magicians. Sick, addicted, dying young. American to the core but reminiscent of long-ago European saints: self-scourging, infected, suffering, yet suffused with an unlikely bliss. Self-destruction as a form of mass entertainment.
Other, roughly contemporary, members of this awkward squad might include some of my own household gods: Jane Bowles, Libby Holman, Jean Rhys, Dolly Wilde. With these provisos: First, Holiday wasn’t white, and didn’t have any cushioning money behind her. Second, she was legally hounded and served prison time for real, as opposed to being symbolically martyred. As a woman of color, half in the public glare, half in the shadow world of jazz and narcotics, she experienced both acclaim and disdain. Just to be called Lady was no small or inconsequential thing. To be black and glamorous on her own terms was both classy and a class victory. As the saxophonist Dexter Gordon put it: “Although regal, but not ‘pale,’ Lady to me was a queen.” Some of the racism from the other side was obvious. Colonel George White, of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics: “She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns—she was the big lady wherever she went.” Occasionally there was a more subtle racism even among her supporters, celebrating her as a “raw talent” rather than a thoughtful artist with exquisite poise, control, and intuition.
Holiday was one of the first black women to inhabit the new postwar world of PR and exposé, album sleeves and magazine shoots. So many different images! There’s a 1952 photograph by Roy DeCarava where she looks like a weekend teenager in a casual top, glowing with the anticipation of breezy pleasures ahead. It’s a rare portrait of a smiley, unposed, off-duty Billie. There are portraits from her final years where she looks unrecognizably reduced. There are beautiful black-and-white portrait shots. On the jacket of Bitter Crop she floats in darkness—it could equally be a death mask of a transport of bliss—and each chapter is prefaced by a photograph: with Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Lester Young; with her sometime lover Tallulah Bankhead. A child, aged two. A prison mug shot. At the microphone. In her coffin.
She’s in profile on the cover of the current British edition of Lady Sings the Blues, at a Paris airport: lipstick, fur, poised cigarette. A tiny African mask dangles from her ear, and behind her you can just make out the nose cone of a jet. She’s staring out at the horizon, her expression unreadable. The longer you look at them, the stranger all these images seem. Which is one of the challenges of writing about Holiday: each facet could fill its own book of reflections; each tiny detail invites amplification. As if she finally makes singers of us all, inspired to reinterpret her life’s singular melody.
