On Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday’s memoir Lady Sing the Blues packs in a lot of suffering, steel, and joi de vivre for a volume of under 200 pages. I learned a lot.
Firstly, I learned that all men are best referred to as ‘cats’. Secondly, that all women are either ‘dames’ or ‘broads’ (you know who’s who). Thirdly, that all money is ‘loot’ and fourth, that all inconveniences that fall in the range from genocide to toothache are best described as ‘a drag’.
Consider the sentence ‘Benny (Goodman) was a nice cat, never a drag.’ Compare it with its equivalent, ‘Benny was a nice guy, never a pain.’ The objective superiority of the former sentence is plain for all to see. And how much can anyone fret about their finances if they’re ruminating on the timeless question of how the might get some loot?
Sure coronavirus is a drag, but you’re a smart broad. You’ll get through, you’ve got a nice cat at your side, and enough loot to feed yourself.
See. SEE?
Further to this education, I learned that Billie Holiday was a woman who went through some shit.
She was born, in 1915, to a thirteen-year-old girl. Or, as she put it, ‘(My mother) loved me when I was just a swift kick in the ribs.’ In the first decade and a half of her life she experienced more trauma than most undergo in a lifetime, ranging from the outrageous to the grinding to the plain ghoulish. But when Holiday looks back on her life, she is sanguine, never numbed.
She observes, after one particularly shocking episode, ‘A bitch can turn twenty-five hundred tricks a day and she still don’t want nobody to rape her. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman. And here it was happening to me when I was ten.’
Billie found jazz on the gramophone players of the parlours in local brothels, starting to sing in nightclubs when she was still in her mid-teens, because she could get more loot that way than via prostitution, which she was forced into as a child. I know suffering doesn’t necessarily create wisdom, but Holiday’s formative experiences seem to have taught her a lot of shit that the rest of the culture took many decades to figure out. And perhaps it too was that suffering that gave her a voice. Certainly, it gave her something to say.
I remember the first time I heard her voice, raised on a diet of Adele and Duffy, still toying with the smokier tones of Amy Winehouse as a gateway drug. I didn’t understand her voice at all, because it wasn’t pretty and because I hadn’t lived. I’ve still only lived a hundredth of what she went through, but there’s just enough grit in my soul these days that her shrapnel-silk tones make sense. She writes:
‘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... 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.’
She’s talking, in the latter case, about her signature song, Strange Fruit, which she composed as a melody for Lewis Allan’s poem. Apart from maybe James Baldwin’s ‘Going To Meet The Man’, I doubt there is a more devastating depiction of the ‘pastoral scene of the gallant South’ in all of art. Billie wrung that melody from her guts, after her own father was murdered. It is what she’s best known for, and rightly so.
Yet the Billie I fell in love with, the author of this book, was a woman - a dame - with a mighty sense of humour to match her mighty suffering. Sitting alone with my book and pencil, passages like this one (describing her tour with Count Basie) made me giggle helplessly:
‘Living on the road with a band, nobody had time to sleep alone, let alone with somebody. At night... we’d pull into a town, pay two to four bucks for a room, shave and take a long look at the bed, go play the gig, come back and look at the bed again, and then get on the bus.’
The root of that humour is, the root of that capacity to express suffering, is that which the greatest artists possess: a steady eye. Billie perceived things back in the 1950s that it took the rest of the world much more experience, much more suffering, and a failed war on drugs to realise:
‘People on drugs are sick people. So now we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were criminals, telling doctors they can’t help them, prosecuting them because they had some stuff without paying the tax, and sending them to jail.
Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.’
Billie Holiday was a heroin addict and an alcoholic, as well she might have been, given the amount of trauma that was rattling around her body. The riches of show business gave her enough money to support her habit, but the mechanisms of Jim Crow America served to reiterate and reinscribe the structural racism that plagued her circumstances from birth. But she knew that she wasn’t just broken, she was also beautiful, and her sense of self was iron-clad:
‘Everybody’s got to be different. You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.’
You had to know who you were, if you were a black jazz artist of the classic age. One thing that struck me, reading this book, was what a spoiled little brat Ryan Gosling’s character was in La La Land - furious that people weren’t appreciating his artistry to an extent that he deemed correct. Billie writes of the jazz greats playing broken instruments, humiliated by Jim Crow laws that saw them subjugated by those who claimed to love their music, of the great Art Tatum playing intermission piano. The best they could hope for was a steady gig, and the appreciation of their peers. And maybe some free whisky.
But what a peer group they were.
I’m going to leave you with a few more scraps of Billie wisdom. She died at 44, and hers wasn’t an easy life. But she learned a lot.
‘I found out the main difference between uptown and downtown was people are more for real up there. They got to be, I guess. Uptown a whore was a whore; a pimp was a pimp; a thief was a thief... a mother-hugger was a mother-hugger.
Downtown was different, more complicated. A whore was sometimes a socialite, a pimp could be a man about town, a thief could be an executive... a mother-hugger was somebody who wasn’t adjusted and had problems.’
And
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar can for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.’
And
‘You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave...’
And last of all, maybe the thing that helped her to survive all that she lived through.
‘I’ve got enough of that Fagan Irish in me to believe that if the curtains are washed, company never comes. If you expect nothing but trouble, maybe a few happy days will turn up. If you expect happy days, look out.’
What a dame.