Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

I remember one day many years ago now, a winter day for sure and so to add to the depression I was feeling over the latest serious quarrel I had had with my wife (soon to be my ex-wife but that is another story and don’t blame Billie for that) the chill and bluster had me down as well as I entered a bookstore in Harvard Square. I want to say that it was the old long gone Paperback Booksmith store but it might have been the Harvard Book Store up the street. In any case that is where I heard this low sad torchy female voice coming out of the sound system most of those places had to liven things up while you were browsing (or “cruising” as I found out later when somebody told bookstores were the “hot” spot if you were looking for a certain kind of woman (or man), needless to say my kind of woman, bookish, sassy and, well, a little neurotic).  Not placing the voice since my torch singers of choice were the likes of Bessie Smith or Peggy Lee I asked one of the clerks who was singing that song Night and Day with such feeling on the PA and she looked at me like I was some rube from the sticks when she said Billie Holiday (and she could have added stupid, which is what that look meant).      

Now that event was memorable for two things, listening to that song and a follow-up one, All of Me, almost immediately got me out of my funk and as is my wont that also was the start of my attempt to get every possible Billie Holiday album or tape (yeah, it’s been a while) I could get my hands on. So thereafter any time that I felt blue I would put on a Billie platter or tape and feel better.

In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer's torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs. That well-placed hush. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love, lost or both like no other. And if it was the dope, let me say this- a ‘normal’ nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope or no dope. Was she always at her best? Hell no, as a review of all her recorded material makes clear. Some recordings, for example, done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves on edge toward the end.

Here is the funny thing thought, the maybe the politically correct funny thing although those who insist on political correctness in everyday civil life should lay off harmless cultural preferences and personal choices. One time I was touting Billie’s virtues to a group of younger blacks who I was working with on some education project and the talk came around to music and I mentioned how Billie could sing my blues away when times were tough. A few of these young blacks when the heard me raving about Billie startled me when they wrote her off as an empty-headed junkie, a hophead, and so on. Some of their responses reflecting, I think, the influence of the movie version of her life (Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross) or some unsympathetic black history 'uplift' type views on her life that have written her off as an 'addled' doper. I came back on them though, startled them when I said the following, “if Billie needed a little junk to keep her spirits up I would have bought her whatever she needed just to hear her sing that low and sorrowful thing she did that chased my blues away.” Enough said.