Billie Holiday (12 page)

If you find a tune and it's got something to do with you, you don't have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too. With me, it's got nothing to do with working or arranging or rehearsing. Give me a song I can feel, and it's never work. There are a few songs I feel so much I can't stand to sing them, but that's something else again.

To achieve this, a singer has to develop a dramatic sensibility that goes well beyond her own backstory to convey an interpretation exceeding a literal reading of the lyrics. How an audience receives such a performance is another matter—the way they understand the lyrics, how they are being interpreted, what emotions are evoked, and whether or not there is a relationship to her or their own biographies. A singer obviously cannot control all of those perceptions and emotions, and in Holiday's case there was a great variety of strong and deeply felt reactions to her performances:

—Composer Ned Rorem, a devoted follower of Billie's from his youth, was moved by the way she approached a song: She was a romantic, he said, and it came from the inside out. She was all content, not form. It was pure theater, not real life, for art is a concentration of life.
She made you accept her song on her premises, and then you got caught up in her content.

—
Linda Kuehl, Holiday's would-be first biographer, never saw her perform, but she had surrendered to Billie's singing, and as her research deepened she began to take it all personally, and bitterly came to think of her as a great singer who had abandoned her art for artifice.

—She was a great actress, said jazz critic Martin Williams, one who drew on her own feelings and presented them with an honest directness to a listener. She never fully became what she portrayed, though, but seemed to stand aside from it. “
A great actress but one who never had an act.”

—Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren saw Holiday at a South Side Chicago club performance in 1956, and Studs reported that “Billie's voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps 15, 20 patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang ‘Fine and Mellow,' you felt that way. And when she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me,' you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be.
In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.”

—Novelist Elizabeth Hardwick said that “you can listen to opera by yourself, but not certain kinds of jazz.
You had to have someone with you when you listened to Billie Holiday, for instance. Otherwise, you might kill yourself.”

—Billie could sing words and make them mean something else, according to bassist Charles Mingus, in the way she punctuated a song. She'd perform “Them There Eyes,” for example, as if she'd be asking a question. At other times it would be an exclamation. She
said the words differently with each interpretation.

—She sang like an instrument, a whole orchestra, according to Baron Timme Rosenkrantz, who first saw her after he arrived in New York from Denmark. “Sometimes there was the soft wail of a saxophone, then the piercing, sharply defined blast of a trumpet. Her voice crept under your skin and stayed there. I've never heard anyone else sing like Billie. Her phrasing was a heart-to-heart conversation with the world out there, so personal it gave one the feeling of being taken into strictest confidence
by someone who had such a desperate need to ‘tell it all,' that it seemed somehow sacred. . . . When she finished there was a small mound of money at her feet.
She didn't even glance at it.”

—Paul Bowles, novelist, composer, and student of North African music, wrote of Holiday's 1946 Town Hall concert that her voice was “like modern Greek song, Balkan song, conto jondo . . . Her vocalization is actually
nearer to North Africa than to West Africa.”

—Carl Van Vechten, photographer, novelist, and Harlem Renaissance promoter, saw her at Carnegie Hall in March 1948, just after she was released from a ten-month stay in a federal prison: “
She was nervous and perspiring freely, but her first tones were reassuring and rewarded with a whoop . . . [She sang] with that seesaw motion of the arms, fingers always turned in, that swanlike twitching of the thighs, that tortured posture of the head, those inquiring eyes, a little frightened at first and then, as applause increased, they became grateful. The voice was the same, in and out between tones, unbearably poignant, that blue voice.”
The next day, however, Van Vechten wrote to himself that her singing had very little variation, especially as she failed to sing the songs as written, sang off the beat, and most were sung in the same key. What's more, her body movements were all the same.

 • • • • • 

Billie Holiday has not always been well served by writers in their quest to examine the tragedy of her life and its reflection in her art. They assemble dossiers on the slings and arrows she suffered from the music business, Hollywood, nightclub owners, nuns, husbands, drug dealers, her father, police, prisons, doctors, and all of it is more or less true. They note the crack in her voice as a failure that signals pain, the changes in her photographed images as if they were something to be entered into evidence. Her hagiographers with diverse interests find points of identity in her suffering and match them to their own. Her stage imitators model themselves on her worst performances and stage them with embellished hurts and vulnerabilities.

The singers we see in performance are not the real persons. Like actors, singers create their identities as artists through words and music. Singers
act
as singers when they perform, but behave differently in daily life. Trying to have a unified onstage/offstage self like a Liberace, a Johnny Lydon, or a Miles Davis can be enormously stressful and even fraught with danger. The public face that must be maintained requires serious effort, and carries with it moral demands that are difficult to meet, whether it be a diva face, guitar face, or no face. The emotions that are expressed in performance need not be authentic, but only have to appear to be so, and can never be assessed via a backstage view of the performer. All we can know for certain is the performance itself.
We expect to see a performer maintain a consistent face or front in performance, and only when drugs, health issues, and personal problems make their way onto the stage and affect the performance are we forced to question the performer's identity. We should not be shocked, then, to learn that, whereas onstage Billie Holiday projected a ladylike distance and grace, offstage her manner was sometimes rough, profane, caustic, and vengeful; she could be violent with racists, call Marilyn Monroe a stupid bitch and throw her out of her dressing room, hang out in men's gay bars (often accompanied by friends who were “female impersonators”), carry a razor blade with her wherever she went, and become involved with men who beat her, robbed her, and drove away her friends. Nor should we be surprised that she could be witty, kind, and perceptive; she could charm intellectuals, artists, and wealthy patrons, help younger singers with their careers, buy drinks for fans who could scarcely afford to see her perform, and dream of a house in the country with a white picket fence, children, and a dog.

In Holiday's lifetime, those who had seen her perform live were a very small number compared with those who knew her only from the radio, television, or recordings. Even then, people who heard her in a small Harlem cabaret would have had a completely different impression from those who had seen her in Carnegie Hall, just as would those who heard only “Strange Fruit” but not a playful number like “I've Got My
Love to Keep Me Warm.” Her audiences were part of her performances and helped shape her performing identity. This is not to say that she had no aspirations or control over how she was received, for she surely had specific intentions for how she wanted to present herself—that much is clear from her autobiography. Mediation and mutual reception is the nature of performance, and part of the construction of a performer. If she were alive today, it would not be much different, for performers of note are now surrounded by even more artificial performance spaces—lip-synching, guest appearances that demand a certain persona, reality shows that are scripted and rehearsed, a press that follows them relentlessly, and the lonely bloggers' deep well of imagination.

Today all that we know of her is determined by what we hear in her music—the way it was shaped by recording companies, mixed, edited, packaged, and sold—and by the reviews of and writing about her by those who never actually saw her perform. But audiences still have a role to play in determining how she is perceived, depending on how and where they encounter her voice—in a chic coffeehouse or restaurant, in an ad for an expensive auto, on a movie soundtrack, or heard completely alone through earbuds.

Bessie and Louis

Billie often said that her models were Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. More precisely, she said that she wanted to achieve the
style
of Louis Armstrong and the
feeling
of Bessie Smith, style perhaps meaning the way Armstrong sang, his technique, and feeling being the emotions awakened by Smith's singing. Once, when she was
speaking critically of singers who imitated other singers, she remarked, “Sure, I copied Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong—but not note for note; they
inspired
me.” “Inspired” was an apt description for how she approached Armstrong and Smith as models for reimagining songs. Bessie Smith and Armstrong were quintessential blues singers who had fully developed their styles before the microphone was invented, and both possessed
distinctive voices that could cut through the noisiest crowds. To succeed with her voice, sensibilities, and aspirations, Billie would have to adapt and revise what they had shown her.

Both Smith and Holiday were contraltos, the lowest-pitched voice type of female singers, and both had a narrow range—Billie's was little more than an octave, Bessie's even less—but Smith had a big and powerful voice. Her singing was anything but subtle. Whether she was singing about death, love, pain, ghosts, sex, or money, her point was made quickly and bluntly. Often from the first line of a song it was clear where she was going: “Looka here, daddy, I wanna tell you, please get outa my sight”; “Lovin' is the thing I crave”; “Gee, it's hard to love someone when that someone doesn't love you.” Her voice was matched by an imposing physical presence that drew the crowds to the tents and theaters where she performed even after she grew older and her record sales slowed. She paused or took breaths in unusual places, and used a variety of vocal effects—hums, growls, moans, rising and falling volume, and powerfully accented notes. Her voice could be teasing or mournful, but also threatening. When she sang the blues, the repeated lines were always sung differently.

Billie sometimes said it was Bessie's volume she admired. But Holiday rarely employed bursts of volume or emphatically accented notes. Instead she varied volume on single notes, compressed or simplified a song's melody, and seemed focused on nuance. (Compare Holiday's and Smith's recordings of “St. Louis Blues” or “Gimme a Pigfoot.”) Billie was not a blues singer, as she always insisted, and in fact recorded only a handful of songs that could strictly be called blues. It was not unusual for an African American singer of that period to choose not to sing blues; Ella Fitzgerald, for example, had no particularly strong feeling for that form. Still, Holiday had some of the rougher vernacular vocal characteristics that made for a good blues singer, and those helped carry her past the swing era into bebop and beyond, when crooners and sweet-toned singers faded. She also could bring a blues sensibility to whatever she was singing, especially when she bent or lightly changed notes to
increase their intensity or the expressivity of the music. (Contrast Holiday's “Stormy Weather” to Fitzgerald's recording of the same song.)

A more important difference between Holiday and Smith derived from the difference in their ages. Bessie Smith sang a number of traditional songs and folk or quasi-folk songs attributed to particular composers, and at least until nearly the end of her career, most of them were African Americans. Holiday's career began with the rise of Tin Pan Alley's corporate songwriters, and most of the composers of her songs were white. This doesn't mean that either artist could not change what she was singing to suit herself, but each began with fundamentally different material and also reached different audiences.

 • • • • • 

Billie was perhaps closer to Louis Armstrong in style, as she suggested, but more to his style of singing than to that of his trumpet playing. Both had immediately recognizable voices, and like Armstrong she sang jazz songs and Broadway and movie music favorites as well as Tin Pan Alley pop tunes, and felt free to shift the phrasing of a song and create suspensions of rhythm not expected by typical fans of those songs. (Compare Holiday's “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues” and “Pennies from Heaven” to Armstrong's versions of those to hear what she borrowed from Armstrong's singing.) Neither Armstrong nor Holiday sang bel canto: no “beautiful” singing, no theatrical flourishes, and no grand endings. (Armstrong's trumpet playing was another story, however.)

Billie recalls her impressions on first hearing Armstrong's “West End Blues”:

It was
the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words. I didn't know he was singing whatever came into his head when he forgot the lyrics. 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. Sometimes the record
would make me so sad I'd cry up a storm. Other times the same damn record would make me so happy . . .