Billie Holiday (26 page)

“When I got into show business”
: Quoted in O'Meally,
Lady Day
, p. 42.

especially at the end of a tune
: Stafford also sang Hank Williams tunes and country songs (some of which were hits), released folk song and gospel albums, recorded comedy music albums with her husband Paul Weston (under the adopted personae of “Jonathan and Darlene Edwards”) that made fun of lounge singers, and even recorded “I'll Take Tallulah.”

Dodge wrote in the magazine
Jazz
: Roger Pryor Dodge,
Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 299.

Their kind of singing
: Ibid., p. 274.

BH
: Why, they're actresses, they're artists
: Billie Holiday interviewed by Mike Wallace on
Night Beat
, DuMont Television, November 7, 1956. Despite some writers' assumption that there was tension between Holiday and Helen Forrest during the period in which they both were singers with the Artie Shaw band, each later spoke well of the other.

Schiffman, owner of the Apollo
: Abbey Lincoln at the Jazz Seminar, Columbia University, Frank Schiffman interviewed on “Lady Day: Billie Holiday,” May 1967, Pacifica Radio, KPFA.

“I'm telling you, me and my old voice”
:
The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve
,
1945–1959
, Verve Records 517 658-2, 1993, disk 4, track 32.

“If you find a tune”
: Holiday and Dufty,
Lady Sings the Blues
, pp. 43–44.

She made you accept her song
: Kuehl notes, Rutgers University–Newark.

Linda Kuehl, Holiday's would-be first biographer
: Ibid.

“A great actress but one who never had an act”
: Martin Williams,
The Jazz Tradition
, second revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 86.

“In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own”
: Studs Terkel, “Afterword,” in Nelson Algren,
The Man with the Golden Arm
, fiftieth-anniversary edition (New York: Seven Stories, 1999).

“You had to have someone with you when you listened to Billie”
: Darryl Pinckney, “Dancing Miss,”
New York Review of Books,
March 4, 1976.

said the words differently with each interpretation
: Kuehl notes, Rutgers University–Newark.

“
She didn't even glance at it”
Timme Rosenkrantz and Inez Cavanaugh, liner notes to
Billie Holiday's Greatest Hits
, Columbia CL-2666, 1967.

“
nearer to North Africa than to West Africa”
: “Billie Holiday: Singer Presents a Concert in Town Hall,”
New York Herald Tribune
, February 17, 1946.

“
She was nervous and perspiring freely”
: Vail
, Lady Day's Diary
, p. 105.

The next day, however, Van Vechten wrote to himself
: Quoted in Stuart Nicholson,
Billie Holiday
(London: Indigo, 2000), p. 166.

The singers we see in performance are not the real persons
: Simon Frith,
Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 215.

We expect to see a performer maintain a consistent face
: Paul Auslander, “Musical Personae,”
Drama Review
50, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 101–19.

speaking critically of singers who imitated other singers
: Leonard Feather, “Lady Day Has Her Say,”
Metronome
, February 1950, p. 16.

“
the first time I ever heard anybody sing”
: Holiday and Dufty,
Lady Sings the Blues
, pp. 9–10.

the use of vocalese
: “Vocalese” is not to be confused with “vocalise,” singing with one single vowel so as to eliminate words altogether.

While music of verse may already be present in the lyrics
: Kenneth Burke, “On Musicality in Verse: As Illustrated by Some Lines of Coleridge,”
Poetry
, October 1940, pp. 31–40. My thanks to Susan Stewart for help in understanding Holiday's use of written lyrics.

CHAPTER
SIX
:
The Singer II

“
A lot of singers try to sing like Billie”
: Quoted in John Chilton,
Billie's Blues
(New York: Stein and Day, 1975), p. 229.

“
She could just tear you up”
: Quoted in O'Meally,
Lady Day
, p. 52.

Compare Holiday's “lagging” vocal
: Holiday's “St. Louis Blues” was recorded on October 15, 1940; Bessie Smith's was recorded January 14, 1925.

bridge, or middle section, of “Foolin' Myself”
: Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra (with Billie Holiday), “Foolin' Myself,” 1937.

When she reaches the next two lines
: Holiday is fond of this form of stress, the spondee, which in poetic terms is a foot of two syllables, both of which are stressed. (A foot in poetry is something like a measure in music, a grouping of rhythm and sounds.)

“
She sometimes sang entire vocals outside the beat”
: Whitney Balliett, “Jazz: Teddy Wilson,”
New Yorker
, July 19, 1982, p. 67.

“The first night she handed me some tattered lead sheets”
: Artie Shaw,
The Street That Never Slept
(New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1971), pp. 303–4.

“
two beat systems functioning simultaneously”
: Hao Huang and Rachel V. Huang, “Billie Holiday and Tempo Rubato: Understanding Rhythmic Expressivity,”
Annual Review of Jazz Studies
7 (1994–1995), pp. 188–89.

“two parallel strands organizing the passage of time”
: This may be what musician and film director Mike Figgis meant when he said that he learned to listen to Billie Holiday's vocal lines along with Lester Young's tenor saxophone commentary and phrasing when they were playing with a drummer “who was profound
because
you couldn't hear him.” Ibid., p. 193.

“What Is This Thing Called Love?”
: Ibid., p. 184.

instrumental jazz is a speech-inflected music
: LeRoi Jones,
Blues People
(New York: Morrow, 1963); Sidney Finkelstein, “Inner and Outer Jazz,”
Jazz Review
2, no. 8 (September 1959), 19–22.

interview she did with talk show host Tex McCrary
: Holiday had taken McCrary's request for “her songs” literally and recited three she had written. When the host asked her if she didn't know any happy songs, she replied, with a laugh, “I know some happy songs, but I don't write them.”
The Tex and Jinx Show
, WNBC Radio, November 8, 1956.

performances “live phrase to phrase”
: Chilton,
Billie's Blues,
p. 232.

singing in Chicago and Frank Sinatra was there
: Earl Wilson,
New York Post
, May 26, 1944, quoted in Vail
, Lady Day's Diary
, p. 70.

developed a kind of speech-song
: Hao Huang and Rachel Huang, “She Sang as She Spoke: Billie Holiday and Aspects of Speech Intonation and Diction,”
Jazz Perspectives
7, no. 3 (December 2013), pp. 287–302.

Piaf, for example, sometimes stops singing
: Rutkowski, “Cabaret Songs.” Another Euro speech-song form occurs in early-twentieth-century works by Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who called on singers of their vocal works to deliver some lines in
Sprechstimme
, a form of spoken singing with relative pitch. But there seems to be no relation between this modern classical practice and either the Euro cabaret style or Holiday's style.

tempting to look for the source of Holiday's style
: Ashton Stevens, music critic for the
Chicago Defender
, raved about Ethel Waters's performance in
Plantation Days
in 1924 by comparing her singing favorably to Yvette Guilbert.

Jefferson suggests that this emotional distance
: Ken Burns's
Jazz
Transcripts, www-tc.pbs.org/jazz/about/pdfs/Jefferson.pdf.

“Lester sings with his horn”
: Holiday and Dufty,
Lady Sings the Blues
, p. 66.

Gordon sometimes spoke a few lines of a song
: Hear Dexter Gordon,
Live at Carnegie Hall
, Columbia/Legacy 65312 CD.

Holiday and Young each chose to avoid
: See the comparison of Holiday and Young's improvisations on “These Foolish Things” in André Hodier,
Toward Jazz
(New York: Grove, 1962), pp. 191–95.

Holiday's and Young's shared musical affinity
: Will Friedwald,
A Bibliographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers
(New York: Pantheon, 2010), p. 224.

recording and alternate take of “Me, Myself, and I”
: This is not the song of the same name recorded by Beyoncé in 2003.

a fully improvised, freshly created solo
: Among other examples of the same musical relationship are “I'll Never Be the Same” (1937), “Time on My Hands” (1940), “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (1937), and “He's Funny That Way” (1937).

“the only ones who can take a solo”
: Feather, “Lady Day Has Her Say.” My discussion of obbligato and Billie Holiday is indebted to an invaluable tutorial with Loren Schoenberg.

Hurston heard in preachers' prayers
: “Spiritual and Neo-Spiritual,” in Cheryl A. Wall, ed.,
Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 862.

Hurston goes on to say
: Ibid. Buck Clayton, the elegant trumpet player who also accompanied Holiday on many of these early recordings, seemed to have a different view of the obbligatos they played: not as an essential part of the music, but as a decorative option, and used only to fill in the blanks: “When she would record I would watch her mouth and when I saw that she was going to take a breath or something I knew it was time for me to play between her expressions. It's what we call ‘filling up the windows.'” Yet the recordings show that he, too, improvised distinct, related lines at the same time as she sang, and seldom if ever played only between her phrases.

Compare the versions of “All of Me”
: Cynthia Folio and Robert W. Weisberg, “Billie Holiday's Art of Paraphrase: A Study in Consistency,” in
New Musicology
(Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology)
(Poznan, Poland: Poznan Press, 2006), pp. 247–75; Huang and Huang, “She Sang as She Spoke”; Robert Toft, “Lady Day the Torch Singer: The Vocal Persona of a ‘Woman Unlucky in Love,'” in
12th Biennial IASPN International Conference, Montreal 2003 Proceedings,
International Association for the Study of
Popular Music, pp. 916–22, www.sibetrans.com//files/17/58/92/f175892/public/docs/Actas_IASPM_Montreal.pdf.

CHAPTER
SEVEN
:
The Songs I

“instrumental[ized] the material at hand”
: Schuller,
The Swing Era
, p. 116.

so powerful and affecting in the best of Holiday's art
: Ronald Schleifer
, Modernism and Popular Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 164–69.

“In those days 133rd Street”
: Holiday and Dufty,
Lady Sings the Blues
, p. 37.

such small venues could have significant influence
: Shane Vogel,
The Scene of Harlem Cabaret
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

points of attraction for white musicians
: Rudolph Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,”
American Mercury
, August 1927, pp. 393–97.

don't take this recording seriously
: Kate Daubney, “Songbird or Subversive? Instrumental Vocalization Technique in the Songs of Billie Holiday,”
Journal of Gender Studies
11, no. 1 (2002), pp. 22–23.

“The Teddy Wilson small group sessions”
: Teddy Wilson,
Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz
(London: Cassell, 1996), p. 24.

“Good” jazz songs do not always make for great jazz
: John Szwed, “Doctor Jazz,” liner notes to
Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax
, Rounder Records 11661-1888-2 BK01, 2005, p. 19.

Holiday sings it in a key high enough
: Schuller,
The Swing Era
, p. 538.

version of “Porgy” she sang was extracted from the opera's duet
: Steven Lasker, liner notes to
Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Recordings
, MCA D2-601, 1991.

“I just made some records for Decca”
: Interview on the
Curfew Club
radio program, recorded in late December 1948 and broadcast on January 8, 1949, on
Billie Holiday at Stratford '57
, Baldwin Street Music BJH 308, 1999, track 16.