[Dixielandjazz] FW: "With Billie" reviewed

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This one via another list.
I would be interested in another firsthand opinion.
A book about Billie which doesn't specifically mention her music worries me.
OK. I will probably buy it anyway, but...........?
Kind regards,
Bill. 
_____________________________________________________

Singing on Her Mind
Mick Brown salutes a glorious, vivid biography that pays tribute to
the extraordinary life of Billie Holiday

"With Billie" by Julia Blackburn. 354pp, Jonathan Cape, £17.99

London Telegraph, April 2, 2005
 
This is a book of two compelling stories. The first, often told, but
never more revealingly than here, is that of the ill-fated jazz
singer Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 at the age of 44, leaving
behind a body of work as great as that of any vocalist before or
since. The second concerns an unknown American writer named Linda
Kuehl, who in the 1970s set out to write Holiday's biography. In an
obsessive labour of love she managed to track down and interview
more than 150 people who had known Holiday, as well as collecting police
files, contracts, court transcripts and love letters, assembling an
unparalleled archive of the singer's short and troubled life. For
several years Kuehl struggled with her book, but she was unable to
progress beyond the first few chapters. Her publishers cancelled her
contract. In 1979, shortly after attending a Count Basie concert in
Washington, Kuehl wrote a suicide note and jumped out of the window
of her third-floor hotel room.

It is Kuehl's extraordinary archive that forms the basis of Julia
Blackburn's book. Cleverly -- and perhaps wisely given the
difficulties that Kuehl herself experienced with the material --
Blackburn eschews the conventional biographical approach of trying
to shoehorn her subject's life into a chronological or thematic order.
Instead, she artfully ushers her witnesses on to the page and lets
them talk: a colourful gallery of piano-players and
pimps, "sporting" men and high-living women, showbusiness hustlers and FBI
informers --
 
people with names such as Pony Kane, Memry Midgett and James "Stump
Daddy" Cross. All of them, by the time Kuehl found them in Harlem
walk-ups, corner bars and hotel rooms, had allowed their stories to
mellow like vintage port. The book, then, is necessarily hazy on the
factual detail of Holiday's life as a performer -- recording dates,
personnel and so on; but the substance and the spirit of her life
leaps vividly and gloriously off the page, a phantasmagoria of the
jazz life in all its tawdry and delicious joy and sadness, with
Holiday floating through it like a beautiful, damaged butterfly.

She was born in Baltimore. Her presumed, and absent, father was a
banjo-player; her mother cleaned houses, ran lodgings and was a
sometime prostitute. Holiday grew up being passed among friends and
relatives, in brothels and reformatory school, a girl who always
had "singing on her mind". When she was 13 she followed her mother
to New York, where she waited on tables, sang for tips and sold her
favours on the side. A big, handsome woman with skin like satin and
a formidable sense of style, she luxuriated in the company of
musicians and loved getting high.

The book is rich in detail about the milieu in which Holiday lived
and sang in these early years -- hole-in-the-wall reefer pads,
speakeasies and good-time houses, such as the Daisy Chain in
Harlem. "Fantastic!" remembers the vaudeville comic Pop Foster --
and you can see his eyes misting at the memory. "Everybody would get
buck-naked. Women going with women. Men going with men. Everyone was
doing everything, but you don't care, you just have a ball!"

Holiday was a regular visitor -- "just to look" -- and so was
Tallulah Bankhead. Holiday was Bankhead's close friend and probably
lover (but then who wasn't?), although Bankhead, shamefully,
disowned her in later life, when the actress was much given to complaining
that "Negroes aren't what they used to be" (in other words,
subservient).

A bountiful woman, Holiday was generous with her money and her
love. "She used to change boyfriends like you change your pants,"
according to Pop Foster. The musician Ben Webster put it more subtly
when he talked of her pleasure in "a little light housekeeping" --
the sweetest euphemism for putting it about you'll ever hear.

Her closest friend was the saxophonist Lester Young, who walked
through life like a dream and had his own language, which you
understood or you didn't. "Ding dong" was a form of greeting. "Bing
and Bob Crosby" were the police, and so was "Alice Blue Gown".
Whites were "greys", blacks were "Oxford greys", and women were different
sorts of hats, according to the way they fitted a man sexually. In
music the bass player was "the deep-sea diver" and the pianist's
hands were "the little people on the left and the little people on
the right". Holiday never did any housekeeping for Lester, but
according to the tap-dancer James "Stump Daddy" Cross, "he loved
Lady like he loved spring, summer, winter and fall and every day that
broke at dawn", and when he played behind her "she felt as if she
was in her mother's arms".

Holiday was tough. There are stories of her breaking bottles and
going for men who slighted her, but it was her misfortune to be
drawn to men who were tougher, crooks and managers who exploited and
abused her, like John Levy -- "a pimp, a hustling man and an evil-doer"
who "always looked as if he was on his way to a funeral" - and Louis
McKay, her husband and manager in her later years, who according to
one witness appeared to satisfy the disturbing masochism that
underpinned all Holiday's affairs: "...the real strong man she
always dreamed of... He could knock her unconscious with a single blow of
his fist."

By the early 1940s, Holiday had started using heroin, although it
seems addiction was a less dominant factor in her life than legend
suggests. The biggest trouble it seemed to cause her was the
attention of the law. She was imprisoned in 1947, at the height of
her fame, and was unable to perform in New York because of narcotics
violations. Hounded by the authorities, she led "a fugitive life",
criss-crossing America performing to fend off her mounting debts and
legal bills, her popularity waning, her treasured blue mink coat in
hock. Harassing Billie Holiday, it seems, was "good publicity" for
the FBI. And the sport continued right up to her death-bed in a New
York public hospital.

Julia Blackburn handles this material with great aplomb, an
unobtrusive observer skilfully framing and contextualising the
reminiscences of Holiday's contemporaries with her own digressions
about the social history of Baltimore and Harlem, Prohibition and
narcotics laws and the history of Holiday's signature song Strange
Fruit. She makes no attempt to critique or describe Holiday's music.
But no critic, one thinks, could provide a more vivid picture of
Holiday's artistry than Stump Daddy. "It was so pretty," he
remembers, "like she was sending out sparks. She never scrambled.
She never hurried... She starts pumping with her right elbow and she'd
tap with her left foot, like she was grinding it out and she has
those lights on her that go from magenta to pink to green. Going
off, she'd nod just to the side with a pretty smile and she walked off
regal! The other broads used to come to watch her, to try to steal
from her, but they could never get her thing. Oh, to see her eyes
when she sang You're My Thrill! Absolute heaven."

--- End forwarded message ---






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