Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John Szwed

Author:John Szwed [Szwed, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

The Four Billies

Most fans and writers agree that in her twenty-six years as a singer on record, Holiday had three distinct stylistic periods. But her last two recorded albums are different enough that they would seem to constitute a fourth. From 1933 to 1942 she recorded for Columbia-affiliated companies, where she was promoted by John Hammond Jr. He took the risky path of casting her as a jazz musician, surrounding her with first-rate players in jam session–like settings, often without arrangements, in which she took her brief vocal solos in line with the instrumental soloists.

When she moved to Commodore Records in 1942, a small jazz company founded by producer Milt Gabler and Jack Crystal (the father of Billy Crystal), she continued her trajectory as a straight jazz singer. But once she agreed to record “Strange Fruit,” the first openly political song sung by an African American singer on a pop recording, she announced herself as something more than an entertainer. After Gabler became a producer for Decca Records and signed Billie with them, she began to record more show tunes, and took on torch songs with greater emotional content and fuller musical settings. Meanwhile, as swing moved beyond black communities and was on its way to becoming a national craze driven by white teenagers (John Hammond called it “the Children’s crusade”), she faced the choice of becoming commercial or remaining on the edges of pop music.

On “Lover Man,” a song written for her, she was accompanied by strings, a more audacious move than it might seem, as very few pop song singers had ever been given such plush surroundings and certainly no jazz singers (or jazz musicians). It helped her expand her pop audience, though some of her jazz fans felt left behind. The cruel joke was that just as she began exploring a new approach to song, she was also drifting into drugs and heavy alcohol use.

In Holiday’s third period, the 1950s, jazz itself was very different from when she’d made her earlier records. The conventions of swing were becoming exhausted, and jazz had become self-consciously revolutionary and culturally important in ways never anticipated. Her 1930s records were starting to seem quaint in the wake of bebop singers like Sarah Vaughan, who were threatening to replace her, except that Holiday, older and developing a different character, had begun to replace herself.

In the last decade of her life, her voice beginning to coarsen and her range narrowing, she crossed over to Norman Granz’s Clef and, later, Verve Records, the premier sources of mainstream jazz in the 1950s. She and Granz began reexamining her repertoire in a new light that would give her the courage to rerecord them. Unlike older black singers, she had never been completely relegated to “race” records, those intended exclusively for an African American audience. Being marketed to a national audience was an enormous advantage to her, but it also meant that she would have to avoid current pop songs that were sometimes ill-suited to her, and

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