We all know the lady sang the blues. And by numerous accounts, Billie Holiday lived them, too: raped as a girl, a prostitute by age 14, an addict most of her adult life.
If we are to believe her many biographers, the artist, to paraphrase author Zora Neale Hurston, seemed to believe that nature had given her a “lowdown dirty deal” and her “feelings were all hurt about it.”
So all of that pain, all of that bitterness and sorrow dammed up in Holiday’s soul came through whenever she stepped before a microphone to sing. A profound sense of longing crystallized in her voice. Billie Holiday was a tragic beauty, a victim.
So the legend goes.
But there was much more to the woman born Eleanora Fagan, more complexities to the legend whose image graces T-shirts and postcards today.
The best way to get to know Lady Day – the mythical genius who was raised in Baltimore – is to listen closely to her music. In stores this week – Thursday would have been the singer’s 90th birthday – is perhaps the most expansive retrospective of her work.
The Ultimate Collection is a beautifully packaged, multimedia set with 42 songs that cover Holiday’s 20-year recording career with various record labels. In addition to two CDs of nicely remastered music, there’s a DVD featuring film clips from the 1930s and ’40s, and TV performances from the ’50s. The DVD also includes a timeline and several audio interviews, including a revelatory one Mike Wallace conducted with Holiday in 1956.
“My whole mission on the Billie set was to elevate her as a great artist, not a victim,” said producer Toby Byron, whose company, Multiprises, oversaw the release of The Ultimate Collection. “I’m so tired of that. The reason she lives on is because the music is so great, not because she was a drug addict.”
During her lifetime and certainly after her death in 1959, Holiday’s genius was largely obscured by personal chaos. In the ’40s, her arrests for heroin and opium possession drew big headlines, while her recordings received little serious critical attention.
In 1956, Holiday published “Lady Sings the Blues,” a mostly fabricated autobiography that did little to change her self-destructive image. Sixteen years later in 1972, Diana Ross garnered an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the gifted artist in the movie named after the book. The film misconstrued Holiday’s life even more and further perpetuated the many myths about her.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, wrote a probing analysis of Holiday’s legend in the 2001 book “If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.”
“A lot of those myths about Billie Holiday are long-standing myths about black women, period,” Griffin said. “Those myths are that black women artists are not smart, that their emotions rule over intellect, that they only sing from their heart, that they’re not skilled musicians.
“There would be no Norah Jones if there was no Billie Holiday. Second only to Louis Armstrong, she had the most profound influence on American popular music.”
Hers was a small, coronet-like voice with a limited range. But with it, Holiday revolutionized pop and jazz singing. She was the first popular vocalist to benefit from the technology of the microphone, which enabled her to perfect her hushed, quiet tone.
She sang behind the beat, a technique later picked up by Frank Sinatra, who adored Holiday.
She suspended time with her innate improvisational talent, a skill that influenced Miles Davis’ moody style on the trumpet.
“Her sense of rhythm was dead on,” said author and music critic Ashley Kahn, who wrote the liner notes for The Ultimate Collection. “Part of the reason why she sounds so modern is that so many singers still use her techniques to convey emotion and intimacy.”
Although Holiday wrestled with drug abuse and no-good men, she conveyed much more than despair in her music. She also could be sensual, flirty or wise.
Contrary to some of the myths, Holiday’s life was quite extraordinary: A black woman born into crippling poverty in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, she rose to international fame as a vocalist, revolutionizing the art of singing along the way.
“She had a beautiful life relative to what people went through then,” Kahn said. “A lot of brothers and sisters went through hell and didn’t sign a contract to sing about it on stage at Carnegie Hall.”
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