FEATURE:
The Very Thought of You
PHOTO CREDIT: Rex
Billie: Shining a Spotlight on the Remarkable Billie Holiday
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WHEN we think of musicians…
IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Holiday with Louis Armstrong
who have lived a life worthy of a big screen portrayal, one cannot avoid Billie Holiday. There is a biopic in the works for next year but, on Friday (13th), a new documentary, Billie, was released. I shall come to that soon but, for many, Holiday is notable for a couple of tracks and that is about it. I don’t think many people realise just how complex her life was and what she had to endure – in terms of the abuse and racism she faced and, sadly, the addiction problems and controversy that would have been a natural reaction to such suffering and hardship. The fact her music is so transcendent and powerful, maybe, comes from a soul who had witnessed such horror and darkness, but I think Holiday was one of those naturally gifted singers who was able to access something no other artists could. I am looking forward to seeing what comes of a planned Billie Holiday biopic and whether it succeeds like the best biopics have – in terms of balancing reality and the true artist and also being accessible to everyone -, or if it will shy away from the harsher and more disturbing aspects of Holiday’s life. I will end with a playlist of her finest recordings, just to show what an extraordinary artist she was and, since her death in 1959, it is clear she changed the face of Jazz and left an enormous legacy.
I want to bring in an illuminating article from The Independent from last year, where Martin Chilton discussed Holiday’s unique spirit - in addition to the battles and bleak days she faced through her life:
“Holiday was a true one-off: a wild, outspoken and forceful woman, who also happened to be one of the greatest singers that ever lived. It makes it all the sadder that her final days were so painful and that she died such in such degrading circumstances in the early hours of 17 July 1959, at Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital. She had been under arrest in her hospital bed for the previous five weeks. She was weak, underweight, bed-ridden and trying to fight off heart and liver failure problems at a time when police found a small tinfoil envelope containing heroin in a different part of the room. It was widely suspected that the drugs had been planted. She was interrogated by narcotics detectives. Her books, flowers, radio and record player were confiscated. She was finger-printed without her consent.
Her childhood was often brutal. She was sexually abused by a neighbour and had a tough time at the Catholic reformatory in Baltimore (she was forced to spend a night in a locked room with a child’s corpse in a coffin as a penalty for misbehaving) and went on to earn a living in a series of menial jobs. She also claimed to have worked as a prostitute in a brothel in Baltimore. “I was turning tricks as a call girl, but I decided I wasn’t going to be anybody’s maid,” she said in her own – often unreliable – memoir Lady Sings the Blues.
Holiday said she had always wanted her voice to sound like a musical instrument and was pleased when trumpeter Miles Davis praised her style by saying, “Billie Holiday doesn’t need any real horns, she sounds like one anyway”. Some of her recordings with Teddy Wilson in the 1930s – including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown to You” – remain joyful masterpieces. “Billie Holiday is very rare,” said the late club owner and saxophonist Ronnie Scott, “she means every word she sings”.
She is responsible for some of the best jazz song recordings ever made. It says something about the brilliance she brought to so many songs that even experts are divided about her best work. Motown legend Berry Gordy believes it is “God Bless the Child”, a recording he said “spoke to me and in some ways changed my thought about life”. For poet Philip Larkin, it was her version of “These Foolish Things”.
She was often the victim of appalling violence. During their stormy affair, saxophone player Ben Webster assaulted her, leaving Holiday bruised and with a black eye – prompting Sadie to get “real mad”, in his words, and attack him with an umbrella. In 1949, her manager John Levy gave her a black eye and stole her $18,000 silver-blue mink coat. Her second husband Louis McKay, whom she wed in 1951, also gave her a shocking black eye”.
One feels immensely sorry for Holiday and what she endured through her short life but I think, strangely, she channelled a lot of that torment into her music; maybe the reason her songs are so resonant and real is because, unlike a lot of artists, that pain and struggle was real. Holiday isn’t an artist one should associate with melancholy and tragedy. Some of her most beautiful songs are those where she sings of love and affection; a woman who wanted stability and happiness in her life, you listen to songs like The Very Thought of You (written by Ray Noble in 1934), and that is as true to who Holiday was as a song like Strange Fruit. There were multiple sides to her and, if you can, try and catch the Billie documentary. It has already gained some really positive reviews. Here is what NME had to say:
“Cadillac riddled with bullet holes; an ounce of heroin stuffed into a dog collar. Billie, a new documentary about the late jazz great Billie Holiday, is filled with arresting details about one of the most original musicians of all time. And yet, as is the case with so many previous attempts to capture this mercurial talent, her inner-workings remain just out of reach, dancing in the shadows of a Harlem nightclub.
Holiday’s ascent – to the infamous Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village; recording the astonishing ‘Strange Fruit’; huge chart success in the 1940s – and heartbreaking decline, heroin addiction and tragic death at the age of 44 in 1959, is here told through the prism of Kuehl’s unpublished biography. The journalist, who died in 1979, spent eight years compiling hours of interviews with Holiday’s associates, from Basie and Hammond to her family and childhood friends. The latter remember a sweary kid who, says one, “lived fast”.
What drove Billie Holiday? She was raped as a child, says one friend, who suggests that this unspeakable trauma caused her self-destructiveness. It’s not a new revelation, but is freshly devastating in the context of a documentary that touches on what could have been – in later life, Holiday longed for domesticity and to provide a home for disadvantaged children. Instead, still in the grip of addiction, she died from heart failure with $750 to her name. Beyond the aforementioned theory, expressed only briefly, Billie never truly gets under its subject’s skin, leaving her motivation largely unexplored”.
Although it might sound like the documentary is hard-going and a tough watch, there is that positivity and the extraordinary music that she gave to the world. When they reviewed Billie, The Independent noted there is a brighter side:
“Amid it all though, Holiday’s perseverance and musical greatness shines through in the film. The final scene is footage from Holiday’s last ever TV appearance in March 1959, just four months before she died. Her physical frame is rather more diminished than before, but her vocal dexterity is typically brilliant.
“As well as the darkness of the story, I wanted people to have the pleasure of, effectively, an evening in the company of one of the greatest singers of all time,” says Erskine. “Which, to me, is a rare treat".
I shall leave things there because, whilst I have only scratched the surface of who Billie Holiday was, I would urge people to watch the documentary, listen to her music, and get a better impression of one of the most iconic artists who has ever lived. The legendary Billie Holiday left behind so much great music and was…
A truly staggering talent.