Billie Holiday --Portrait of a lady Apr 14th 2005 From The Economist print edition
Chamberl...@epamail.epa.gov
with stark simplicity: “Lady Day at forty-four/Couldn't make it
anymore.” Since then, a host of biographers have tried to make sense of
the turbulent, troubled life of a great jazz artist who seemed bent on
self-destruction—from drugs, abusive partners, her own wilfulness. But
the mystery of her personality remains. As one of her accompanists put
it, “Lady could look like any of her pictures and on every one she
looked different.”
The great virtue of Julia Blackburn's biography is her acceptance of
that multiplicity. Beginning with an invaluable trove of interviews with
people who had known the singer at every stage of her life, Ms Blackburn
quickly gave up the idea of imposing any strict order. Instead she has
created a documentary, “in which people are free to tell their own
stories about Billie, and it doesn't matter if the stories don't fit
together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a
completely different woman.”
Though this might seem a recipe for chaos, Ms Blackburn has produced a
marvellous web of characters and tales, full of vigour and colour, in
which Billie Holiday emerges in all her independent, awkward, variegated
glory. Born to a pair of unmarried teenagers, she was brought up amid
pimps, hustlers and casual prostitution. Sent to reform school and later
raped by a neighbour, she grew tough but resilient; her passion for
singing appeared by her early teens. A friend said, “She'd sing like it
hurt her, like it did her good to sing.”
Honest and uncompromising, by turns shy and vivacious—“like sunshine,”
someone put it—all those qualities came through in her performances. As
musicians marvelled at her talent—“you could go anywhere and she'd be
there, man. Perfect time and perfect diction”—audiences responded to her
sincerity. By the late 1930s she was a star.
But Ms Blackburn's informants agree that around 1942 something changed.
Whereas, like most musicians, Billie Holiday had partaken
enthusiastically of gin and marijuana, she began to switch to heroin and
cocaine, habits that coincided with a taste for abusive men. Though she
never apologised for her dangerous predilections, her life became
increasingly harrowing, with a spell in prison, the constant threat of
arrest, and declining vocal powers, attended by a sequence of sleazy,
violent partners.
Her friends struggled to make sense of this debacle, suggesting a
masochism in Lady Day's nature at war with her fundamental pride and
decency. For her part, Ms Blackburn's editorial commentary highlights
the racist attitudes and practices which black Americans routinely
suffered, and which certainly played a part in Billie Holiday's tragic
denouement.
Despite the travails of her last years, the singer still somehow refuses
to appear a victim. Looking back, she insisted that everything she did
was “my own damn business”, and that mysterious, perverse blend of
character and genius produced the peerless body of work thankfully
preserved in her recordings. Though finally it is in her art that we can
most truly be “with Billie”, Ms Blackburn's portrait of a unique artist
is moving, revealing and quite unforgettable.
By Julia Blackburn.
Pantheon; 368 pages; $25.
Jonathan Cape; £17.99
[���ðy»"�������ü0��ÊZq��® ÿn[��ù ·!���ÿ �Š{^��œ{øm���þX���çzÛ)i���¸?j·!����¹nz��þ f�J�œx² M! W�������Þv�ڵç[ȿҡ�ÿ"w��Ûi���à 岇��Ê&N����ìr�›y��˜ Ô /��ǧu�ޙ��Â+a¶ ¦zË �å
I@R Ô /˶���Ëlz��–+-��ÊZq�è