While we await the next sighting of Mr Fefferman, I thought you might enjoy this book commentary by his great, to the power of seven, grand nephew, Chaim "BoogyLips" Schvat. We expect to hear about the first of next month.......
With Billie
Julia Blackburn
Pantheon 2005
When she was born she was Eleanor Fagan and was also called Madge. In her lifetime of 44 years, she suffered through just about every humiliation a proud woman could endure. She had a history of physical and mental abuse. Her managers, husbands and boy friends brought the world of heroin to her and it devastated her body. The only thing she had was her singing. She took the name of Billie Holiday because she thought that a man named Clarence Holiday might have been her father. Her friend Lester Young called her Lady Day.
This biography is the work of two women entranced by Lady Day's singing. In the early 70's Linda Kuehl decided to write a book about Holiday and began a series of interviews with just about anyone having something to do with Fagan/Holiday and her family. She also collected memorabilia and tried to shape the book into something readable but her publisher gave it up in 1977. Two years later Kuehl was in Washington DC to interview Count Basie after a concert. She abruptly left the concert, went to her hotel room and jumped to her death from a third floor window. Twenty years later writer Julia Blackburn decided to finish Kuehl's project, wading through all the notes, documents, reportage to create 330 pages of conflicting versions of the events in Holiday's life. Particularly notable were interviews with some of the jazz musicians she set up "some light housekeeping" with. These interviews shows that she was a strong-minded lady but vulnerable to hustlers. The movie "The Lady Sings the Blues" covers the arc of her life but is influenced by her last husband who may have worked with the police to wear her down, because a dead Lady Day would generate more royalty money then a live one. Like Charlie Parker & Lester Young before her, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the New York City Police decided that Lady Day was an example of a drug abuser that needed to be watched and punished to convince the public their organizations were protecting its citizens. Even Joe Glaser her manager could not stop the harassment. Glaser also managed pot smoker Louis Armstrong who was never really bothered. Surely Glaser's mob affiliations could have given the lady some peace and dignity. Her last incarceration took place when she was hospitalized and someone planted some heroin under her pillow. She was moved to more public hospital and was under 24-hour surveillance. She never left.
The most direct influence musically was from Louis Armstrong. While her vocal range was limited and her voice deeper and deeper as the abuse she administered to herself continued, her enunciation was probably the strongest aspect of her singing. She influenced the best female singers, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn and many others who emulated them but most importantly she was Frank Sinatra's guide to singing and expressing feelings in a song. In 1939 she recorded "Strange Fruit" which was a departure from her usual material. "Strange Fruit" was about lynching and was one of the first harbingers of a change in the treatment of people of color. No one, not Woody Guthrie, Paul Robison or Leadbelly could depict the savagery of racism any better. After the record was introduced she was honored by surveillance by the FBI but no one can deny the words she spit out "pastoral scene of the gallant South..." was in stark contrast to the reverence of the good old days, down in Dixie. For that one song alone Billie Holiday deserved better.