When Billie Holiday began recording in 1933, she brought a mellow voice filled with poetic intonations that achieved her own tone in the national soundtrack from the Great Depression through World War II. She recorded until the week before her death in 1959, but the voice that brought such magic to the swing orchestras of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, among others, coasted on its finest plateau in those decades when American life moved from the nightmare of wide spread poverty to the horrors of mass war. Her songs lent comfort, ease and joy to an era that closed with unparalleled relief and joyful resignation.
There isn’t a comparable voice in American music today, and that’s not to suggest she was supreme in an era that produced Ella Fitzgerald; rather in a culture of 24/7 information, when celebrities overpower news, there is no voice like Lady Day’s – no voice so soothing, bluesy or sweet. Do not try to sell me Madonna or Britney Spears, Norah Jones or Madeline Peyroux (who sounds so much like Lady Day). Back in the golden age of radio, Billie Holiday’s singing was eerie and haunting in “Strange Fruit,” a 1939 lamentation on lynching (then widespread in the South) that became a cult favorite in her nightclub and concert appearances – few radio stations would play it.
The flow and sparkle of her voice on gems like “Them There Eyes” and “Swing Brother Swing” carried contagions of dancing to help people through hard times, the lyrics nudging them to get up and move to the music, peel off their fears and do some serious getting down.
For all of the beauty she put into the world, her life was one rocky road. From a childhood riddled with neglect and abuse, she broke into the entertainment world by sheer force of talent, making it in Harlem, the midtown stages and out on the road. She found her stride in 1936, with Teddy Wilson’s band – but the rest, to reverse that tired phrase, was not exactly history.
Addicted to drugs and married to a musician who did time for pushing, Lady Day was on the edge even when things were flush. Still she had a sweetness, as when a group of musicians were grumbling about Louis Armstrong’s stage antics, calling them a disgrace, the actings out of an Uncle Tom; “Yeah,” she replied, “but Pops Toms from the heart.”
She had a cameo role with Armstrong in the 1947 film New Orleans, several cuts of which are featured on the ESP label’s new 5-CD set Billie Holiday, Rare Living Recordings 1934-1959. In the movie, Holiday played a maid working in an upper crust home who sings at night in Storyville with a band led by Armstrong. The CD includes soundtrack cuts from the film, the band playing, people in the club singing along glass breaks when NOPD barges in to shutter the joint and close down art.
An anthology of live recording gives the music as it was – spontaneous, raw, exciting and imperfect. In some of the later songs one hears a great talent struggling with the illness that stalked her. Listening to her delivery of “When Your Lover Has Gone” from a 1957 appearance on The Steve Allen Show heightens the appreciation for her resilience. The liner booklet includes an amazing 1949 letter from Tallulah Bankhead, “ashamed of my unpardonable delay in writing to thank you” to J. Edgar Hoover for his apparent sympathy in listening to her, by phone, about Lady Day’s addictions.
Bankhead tells the FBI director (whose indeterminate sexuality closeted a voyeur’s gluttonous obsession on the private lives of entertainers and political figures): “Her vital need is more medical than confinement in four walls.” (Add Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Hemingway and Martin Luther King Jr., to the list of people Hoover spied on in that pre-Patriot Act era.)
The quality of recordings in this bonaza set plants a realization of how much the studio mix is worth. Still, listening to her many sides with the likes of Ellington, Basie and a version of “Lover Come Back” with Stan Getz on tenor sax, adds up to hours of pleasure.
“Getz later stated how he marveled how strong she was, as a person, who had suffered the abuses of life,” writes Michael D. Anderson, who produced and assembled the box, researched and wrote the liner notes. Getz, he concludes, “found her to be sweet and gentle.”
