Billie Holiday Class--5/25/99

Transition from James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues and other works read this quarter

Final image-- the cup of trembling; the cup of drunkenness

Narrator: In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand....after a while I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny...he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded...as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brothers head like the very cup of trembling
A vision--the vibration of music--bitter and sweet--above him; the brother; the spirit...
"Not about anything very new

the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard"

That same combination in Isaiah: 51:17--22

Awake awake stand up O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the lord the cup of his fury; thou has drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out. .. hear thou this thou afflicted and drunken but not with wine...
Thus saith...God...behold I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling...thou shalt no more drink it again...

Never new/ always be heard--voice of experience addressing youth

Song of the Ancient Bard--migrated from end of Blake's Innocence to Experience

Youth of delight come hither,
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason,
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze.
Tangled roots perplex her ways,
How many have fallen there!

Billie Holiday is another person with what Baldwin calls "new ways to make us listen" "to the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph" 862 -- Here's song that she wrote for a recording session in 1936, more or less on the Spur of the moment--Not Sonny's Blues but BILLIE's BLUES

Play* and show images**--gardenia girl

http://www.multimedia.calpoly.edu/libarts/smarx/courses/253/billie/billie.html
gardenia.jpg
billie.jpg

Quality of her voice: milk and scotch

creamy and raspy; sweet and bitter; music and words
Sonny's description of the voice of the singer in the street

"Her voice reminded me of what heroin feels like sometimes--when its in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And--and sure." 855

Billie Holiday, like Sonny and Charlie Parker and many of great jazz musicians of the thirties through the fifties was a heroin addict.
Late style--stoned style--worst or best?

Lolling, floating, stoned, drunk, falling and catching yourself, feeling strung out, depleted, drunk
slurring, and precise articulation
appealing and sarcastic; self assertive and self denigrating

Romanticism and intoxicating drugs

Rimbaud--Season in Hell
Coleridge, DeQuincey, Baudelaire
Blake: The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom
Keats

Emptied some dull opiate to the drains; the draft of vintage, far far away
Half in love with easeful death
Rich to die; cease upon the midnight with no pain while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/In such an ecstasy--the bird--Charlie Parker
Search for ecstasy--the perfect moment and also for medication from pain

Suffering and intoxication--intoxication gives relief of suffering and distraction and a false sense of power and control and it causes more suffering and confrontation and a sense of powerlessness and loss of control

Martyrdom--crucifxion; sacrifice; bitterness and beauty--called herself Theresa as a child--like the martyr St. Theresa

Song Analysis

I love my man...I'll quit my man STOP

First time:

Up on the "love"--light and heat--affirmative and joyful--smiling to audience
Way she says "maaaaan"--what does that mean?

second time wistful and regret
I'm gonna quit..."man" sounds disgusted
I'm a liar--Determination: I'm gonna quit...addiction

I've been your slave...before i'll be your dog I'll see you in your grave

Turning--addressing him now, with scorn and bitterness
Second time, the slave turns affectionate and sexy-- with cute fillip on "been your babe"
Sudden turn--Be your "dawg"--a real growl...death wish--I'll take so much and then turn on you.

My man wouldnt give me...put me outdoors...matchbox on my clothes?

He puts her outdoors--like daughters with King Lear
Addressing listener, each line begins with complaint and then drops to despair

I aint good lookin...and my hair aint curled 2:01

Ahhh--a moan and then just falling away on a beautiful curve of flight
Admission of weakness or vulnerability...assertion of strength:

But my mother she give me something....pregnant pause, suggested...its gonna carry me through this world--what is it?
My assets--as catalogued by various men to whom I appeal [starts at 2:40]

Some men like me cause I'm happy--cute but artificial--old whore?--phony nicey nicey
Snappy--she's quick and aggressive and short fused

Find the anecdote

Some call me honey? Total sweetness on that word. They're being sweet-- but its got sarcasm too, especially as leading into next line
Others think I got money

Her income and support of men

Some tell me Billie--baby you built for speed

Billehhh--way she pronounces her own name in their voice--hear admiration and disgust
Like a car--sexual power

Put that all together makes me everything a good man need

Total assertion at the end--her claim for a Good Man--as opposed to her man.
What's problem? All depend on men's response to her. No self respect--and total self assertion: everything a good man need

Reputation and Biography

The legend; the icon

...named herself Billie Holiday...named Lady Day by Lester Young...named Lady by her fans
Her most recent and scholarly biographer, Donald Clarke: "Billie Holiday has been described as the most influential singer of the century. She fascinates not only for her genius but through the perception of her as tragically self-destructive, an icon of pain and suffering. She was a drug addict, an alcoholic and had a predilection for exploitative, violent men. Throughout her short life she veered between fierce independence and pathetic reliance, falling in and out of love recklessly, cultivating a staggering promiscuity. The recollections of those who knew her well agree that she was adored, had a genius for friendship and affection and was intoxicatingly charismatic"
Her style

Holiday's vocal style is considered to be one of the most vivid musical
manifestations of personality ever achieved. With no technical training, she
created beautiful and sophisticated musical effects, her diction being
unique and her phrasing inimitable.
She often stated, only half ironically, that her succession of failed relationships and drug abuse provided her with the emotional energy necessary for her stunning performances.

Leonard Feather--Lady Day Had A Right To Sing The Blues

Eleanora Fagan McKay born on April 7, 1915. Grandaughter of Irish Slaveholder
Pop was Clarence Holiday, a guitarist who played in the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter and Don Redman. The Holiday marriage was short-lived. Raised by her mother, Billie (who took the name from her favorite silentmovie star, Billie Dove) got as far as the fifth grade in school, picked up nickels scrubbing the doorsteps of white families, and ran errands for prostitutes in a whorehouse. "I'm not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse," she said in her book. "But... if I'd heard Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith at a Girl Scout jamboree, I'd have loved it just the same."
After her release, whe went with her mother to New York. "Mom got me a room in a beautiful apartment belonging to a lady named Florence Williams." What Mom failed to observe was that Florence was one of the biggest madams in Harlem. Billie said that within days she had her chance to become a strictly $20 call girl - "and I took it."
Arrested again, she was sent to Welfare Island for four months, then wandered through Harlem looking for a job. At one club, Pod's and jerry's, she auditioned as a dancer, failed, and was asked whether she could sing. She sang "Travelin' All Alone," was hired, and soon found herself earning a salary.
In 1933, at the Log Cabin, celebrities began to patronize the room: Paul Muni, John Hammond, Red Norvo, Mildred Bailey. Hammond brought Benny Goodman, who hired her to sing on two numbers on a record date. After the Log Cabin came the Hotcha and Dickie Wells' club and even the Apollo, for a munificent $50 a week.
John Hammond eventually found her regular recording work as the vocalist with Teddy Wilson and his various recording groups. A year after that series, she also began recording regularly under her own imprimatur... "Summertime" (then a new song, too, since "Porgy and Bess" only had recently closed on Broadway).</P>
The golden years for Lady Day began with her long tenure at Cafe Society, the Greenwich Village club where both the show and the audience were integrated, a rarity then.
We opened in Stockholm in January, 1954...In place of the ghetto theaters and sleazy dressing rooms that had marked too much of her life at home, Billie soon found herself besieged by autograph hunters, by fans bringing her bouquets on stage and treating her in a manner so deferential that she reacted accordingly. Her morale was never better
There was another arrest in 1956. Louis McKay, whom she had married around this time, moved to California
In a gruesome finale, she was arrested on her death bed for possession; police were posted outside her room. On admission to the hospital, she had some money strapped to her leg and almost nothing in her back account.
She died of cirrhosis of the liver plus secondary infections plus malnutrition plus withdrawel from heroin

Alcohol did her more damage than heroin
Arrested in her hospital bed for possession of heroin
Big public furor and debate--

Songs

Dont Explain* play through

background

Jimmie Monroe...was the most beautiful man I'd laid eyes on since Buck Clayton...
things had happened to me that no amount of time could change or heal. I had gone to jail when I was ten because a forty year old man had tried to rape me. (Lady 103) ...Getting booked and busted again didnt hlep either....

Lady's autobiography said that she had been sent to the Good Shepherd Home was because she had been raped; we know that she was initially sent there because she wasn't attending school, but British journalist Stuart Nicholson has discovered that the story about the rape is true. Early on 26 December 1926 Sadie and Wee Wee came home from a night out to find a Wilbert Rich having sexual intercourse with Eleanora. Later that day she was examined by doctors, Rich was arrested and Eleanora was sent back to the Good Shepherd Home as a 'State Witness', and no doubt also (as Nicholson points out in his book Billie Holiday) because the quality of her 'care and guardianship' was once more in question. She was held there until 27 February 1927, and apparently baptised again; meanwhile, on 18 January, Rich was found guilty of 'Rape -- Carnal Knowledge of 14-16 year old' (although Eleanora was only eleven) and received a custodial sentence of three months.</

I couldnt stand any man who didint know about the things hat had happened to me when I was a kid. And I was leery of any man who could throw those things back at me in a quarrel...Maybe that's why I was attracted to Jimmy...He had a little past of his own...
The taste the class and the gloss were what Mom saw...That's why thy warned me to take it easy, that he would never marry me. The first thing I did after Jimmy and I eloped ...in Septmeber 1941 was to go home to Mom and throw the marriage license at her. ...
I guess I alwyas knew what I was letting myself in for when he married me. I knew this beautful white english girl was still in town. He didnt admit of couirse, But I knew. One night he came in with lipstick on his collar. (104) ...He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining...I could stand anything but that. lying to me was worse than anything he could have with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. "Take a bath, man," I said, "dont explain."
[compare Baldwin on music--pain to beauty] ...that night stuck in my crop...the words "dont explain, dont explain," kept going through my damn head. I had to get it out of my system some way, I guess. The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases to myself. Suddenly I had a whole song. I went downtown one night and sat down with Arthur Herzog; he played the tune over on the piano, wrote down the words, changing two or three phrases, softening it up just a little (105)
It was after her marriage to Monroe, she wrote, that the involvement with hard drugs began: first opium, then heroin. [Feather]

song analysis

Carnegie Hall Nov 1956 Kenny burrell guitar, Chico Hamiliton drums, Carl Drinkard piano
a--[anticipate]

Hush now

like a child--offer him comfort
maintain silence--touching, kissing, feeling presence of other person being back

dont explain

--its ok
--her comfort in presence of his intent to explain

I know you raised cain

--little boy
trivializing, reducing the hurt done to her

I'm glad You're back dont explain

this time darker--doesnt want to hear it --downturn at end

quiet, dont explain

luxuriating again in the peace of reunion

you mixed with some dame

less innocent but still trivializing the crime

skip that lipstick

getting ironic and dense: skip that...lipstick--she notices concrete and shocking evidence and skips over it herself--skip the explanation of that lipstick--but still points it out

dont explain--piano arpeggios suggesting a flurry of released feelings

b reflective stanza 14:02

you know that I love you and what love endures
all my thoughts are of you for I'm so completely yours
cry to hear folks chatter and I know you cheat
but right and wrong dont matter
when you're with me sweet

a 1447 [1:57]

Hush now dont explain--tender
You're my joy and pain--celebration

He's more attractive, she's more emotionally attached BECAUSE of betrayal...leads to admission

My life's yours love--proclamation; admission of defeat
Dont explain--turn to abrupt and angry

God Bless the Child

what's suggested by the title--God Bless the child= Innocence; that's got his own=Experience; Blakean sarcastic progression*
Song Analysis

Them that's got shall have, them that's not shall lose

[Mat 13:10] Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables? [Mat 13:11] And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.
[Mat 13:12] For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has
not, even what he has will be taken away.
[Mat 13:13] This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do
not hear, nor do they understand.

So the Bible says and it still is news

Contrast of "the bible says" sung sweetly, and "still is news" sung drab
Ironic Biblical reference--goes together with ironic vision of the family
Song of Experience--relate to Blake: parents and children--mocking the Bible
Billy's experience in Catholic school--quote from autobiography and my other references

Momma may have and Poppa may have, but God bless the child

cozy familiarity of Momma and Poppa: child abandonment; her background; relation with mother Sadie

strong get smart while the weak ones fade
empty pockets dont ever make the grade
god bless...

Money you've got lots of friends

pronunciation: munayy--yummy
irony--money and friends
lots and friends are so sweet and friendly sounding

They're crowdin round your door--more unctuous friendliness
But when you've gone and spending ends they dont come no more

Rich relations [sweet] give a crust of bread and such
You can help yourself but dont take too much
Momma may...

repeat b and a
end

Forceful exultant celebration of of "he's got his own"--looking out for #1--sarcastic cynicism

Background

[Lady 89]

I needed some money one night and I knew Mom was sure to have some. So I walked into the restaurant like a stockholder and asked. Mom turned me donw flat...We exchanged a few words. Then I said, "God bless the child that's got his own," and walkled out. I stayed sore for three weeks. I thought about it and (89) thought about it. One day a whole ddamn song fell into place in lmy head. Then I rushed downt to the village that night and met Arthur Herzog. He sat down at a piano and picked it out, phrase by phrase, as I sang to him...We changed th lyrics in a couple of spots, but not much...

Clarke--quoting Arthur Herzog

"I said to billie I want you to give me an old fashioned Southern expression that we can turn into a song...she scratched her head and came up with nothing....we turned to conversation about her mother, Sadie and about how she was opening up an after-hours illicit joint and wanted money from Billie and how B didnt want to give it to her, didnt have it and in a moment of exasperation she said "God bless the child" and I said Billie what does that mean. She said You know that's what we used to say--your mothers got money, your father's got money, your sister's got money, your cousin's got money, but if you havent got it yourself, God belss the child htat's got his own." And I said "this is it , Billie" and the song took twenty minutes to do as it stands today...I wrote the words and the music and Danny took it down...I said 'Billie I'll give you half the song if you make the record' She uttered the words and I picked it up. She has never written a line of words or music." 191

Strange Fruit

Song Analysis

trumpet solo
Southern trees bear Stange Fruit 32:35

sultry for southern trees, wierd demented intervals up and down

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

create horror show suspense--what is it?

Black bodies swingin in the southern breeze

horrible answer to question--irony of swet wouthern breeze

Strange Fruit hangin from the poplar trees

poplar trees--pretty phrase; sarcastic intonation

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

Irony--song of experience--pastoral of innocence; gallant genteel

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

vivid detail of horror

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

sickening sweetness; dizzy with nausea
she reports closing the set with this song and running into bathroom to throw up

then the sudden smell of burning flesh

contrasting smell and tone of tenderness by contrast

Here's a fruit for the crows to pluck

develops metaphor of fruit hanging on trees further--after disgusting smell, we get to eating it
torture involved: hanging, burning and eating

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

pastoral nature participating in the orgy of torment; the bodies degraded and tormented further after death
this was the practise of lynching

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

more evil reversals--sun rot, tree drop--angry sounds of words

Here's a strange and bitter crop

conclusion--the crop; the harvest; the winepress
call of woe--unresolved cadence

Background

Lady Sings

84: It was during my stint at Cafe Society [Cafe Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub outside Harlem, a place catering to progressive types with open minds] that a song was born that became my personal protest "srange Fruit" The germ of the song was in a poem written by Lewis Allen...it seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop...he suggested that Sonny White and I turn it into music. So the three of us got together and did the job in about three weks...I also got a wonderfu assist from Danny Mendelsohn, another writer who had done arrangments for me
I wa scared people would hate it. The first time I sang it I thought it wa a mistake and I had been right being scared. There wasnt even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping.
I've had alot of wierd experiences as a result of that song....One night in LA a bitch stood right up in the club where I was singing and said "Billie why dont you sing that sexy song youre so famous for? You know the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees' (84)
But another time on 52nd st. I finished a set with "Strange Fruit" and headed as usual for the bathroom. I always do. When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick. It talkes all the strength out of me. This woman came in and found me all broken up from crying. I had come off th floor running, hot and cold, miserable and happy. .."Myu God," she said "I never heard anything so beautiful in my life. You can still hear a poinj drop out there."...Just a few months ago in a club in Miami....I was in the angriest and trongest voice I had been in for months. ..when I said "for the sun to rot...for the wind to suck" I pounced on those worlds like they had never been hit before."

Article in Vanity Fair 1998--David Margolik--mostly from Clarke

The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called "Strange Fruit" "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." Jazz musicians still speak of it with a mixture of awe and fear - "When Holiday recorded it, it was more than revolutionary," said the drummer Max Roach. "It's like rubbing people's noses in their own shit," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years.
A few years back a British music publication, Q Magazine, named "Strange Fruit" one of 10 songs that actually changed the world. And like any revolutionary act, it encountered great resistance. Columbia, the company that produced Holiday's records, refused to touch it; even progressive radio stations would not play it.
I wrote "Strange Fruit" because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it.
Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan), 1971 ...recalled things very differently. An English teacher at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 27 years, Meeropol had led two other, parallel lives. One was as a political activist: he and his wife were closet Communists, donating a percentage of their earnings to the party. ...The other was as a poet and songwriter. He wrote incessantly poems, ballads, musicals, plays, usually using the nom de plume "Lewis Allan,"
Lynchings - in which blacks were murdered with unspeakable brutality, often in a carnival-like atmosphere, then hanged from trees for all to see-were rampant in the South during Reconstruction and beyond, but had grown relatively rare by the late 1930s. (As the recent murder of a black man in Jasper, Texas, attests, they never completely stopped.) The N.A.A.C.P, until as late as 1941, had routinely attempted to push Congress - always to no avail - to enact federal antilynching legislation. Somewhere around 1935, Meeropol, in his early 30s at the time, saw a photograph of a particularly ghastly lynching. "It ... haunted me for days," he later recalled. He wrote a poem about it, one which first saw print ..in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union publication. Meeropol set the poem to music, and in the late 1930s the song was regularly performed in left-wing circles-by the Teachers' Union chorus, by a black singer named Laura Duncan (at Madison Square Garden), by a quartet of black singers at a fund-raiser for the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. As it happened, the co-producer of that show, Robert Gordon, was also directing the first-floor show at the new Cafe Society, which had opened in late December 1938. The featured attraction: Billie Holiday.
One day in early 1939, Meeropol - who had never met Holiday before and knew nothing about her father-sat down at Café Society's piano and played her the song. Neither Tin Pan Alley nor jazz, it was closer to the political theater songs of Marc Blitzstein and other leftist composers.
Meeropol later said that when Holiday introduced the song "she gave a startling, most dramatic, and effective interpretation ... which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere.... Billie Holiday's styling of the song was incomparable and fulfilled the bitterness and shocking quality I had hoped the song would have."
More often than not, though, people began requesting the song, and it became part of Holiday's routine, even though it made her sick to perform it. "I have to sing it," she once said. "'Fruit' goes a long way in telling how they mistreat Negroes down South."
Soon, Café Society began advertising not just Holiday - referred to in press accounts as the "buxom, colored songstress" or the "sepian songstress"-but the song itself. HAVE YOU HEARD? "STRANGE FRUIT GROWING ON SOUTHERN TREES" SUNG BY BILLIE HOLIDAY, an advertisement in The New Yorker asked in March 1939
But Columbia records, apparently fearful of antagonizing southern customers, wanted no part of recording the song. So Holiday persuaded Milt Gabler, an entrepreneur who'd started Commodore Records, a small company run out of a music store on West 52nd Street, to do it instead.</P>
Bob Golden of Carlin America, the longtime publishers of "Strange Fruit," the Meeropols, father and sons, eventually earned more than $300,000 from it >
Albert Murray, the eminent historian of the blues, calls "Strange Fruit" a "do good" hit, one that resonated far more with white liberals than with blacks. But Holiday sang the song for black audiences, including several performances at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Jack Schiffman, whose family ran the Apollo, says his father did not want Holiday to do so, fearing disturbances. But in his memoirs Schiffman described what happened when she did. "When she wrenched the final words from her lips, there was not a soul in that audience, black or white, who did not feel half strangled," he wrote. "A moment of oppressively heavy silence followed, and then a kind of rustling sound I had never heard before. It was the sound of almost two thousand people sighing."