What a singular voice. What a tortured life, as well. Billie Holiday’s voice grew smokier and more coarse over the years as a result of drug and alcohol addictions. The accumulated toll of racism, sexism, and abusive men must have contributed to her deterioration, too, though some critics contend she never sounded better in the decade leading to her death in 1959 at age 44.
It’s that more weathered voice that we hear on the 1985 Verve collection, “The Billie Holiday Songbook," the next in my "Vinyl Variations" exploration of old record albums in our collection. The album presents 14 tunes that Lady Day performed in the 1950s in New York and LA studios and live at Carnegie Hall.
It’s difficult to discuss Holiday’s music and not start with Strange Fruit. This record features a 1956 recording of a horrifying, searing song about human beings hanging their fellow human beings from trees. She originally performed the song that some believe kicked-off the modern civil rights era at Greenwich Village’s Cafe Society in 1939. Imagine being in the room that night? The song only got recorded because Commodore Records stepped in when Columbia Records cowardly refused to produce a song about one of this country’s ugliest of ugly truths. One shudders to think of how the racist whack jobs today would fight to prevent people from hearing such a deeply disturbing truth. And yes, speaking truth to such bloody, tortured power found Holiday monitored (or worse) by federal agents for the rest of her short life.
Holiday was controlled by the big-music system from the late 1930s through the ‘40s. By the ‘50s, however, Verve gave her substantial creative control. She picked the songs she wanted to sing and the musicians she wanted to accompany her. This delivered the likes of Kenny Burrell on guitar, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, and Chico Hamilton on drums on many of this album’s offerings.
A 1956 rendition of God Bless the Child launches side two of the record. She first recorded the tune in 1950, having written in anger after she got into a terrible fight with her mother. Until we learned better, many of us as kids thought it was an original Blood, Sweat & Tears song, featured as it was on their eponymous 1969 album.
The nicest surprise in this collection is the 1954 LA recording of Stormy Blues with a brilliant Willie Smith alto sax riff at the start. Holiday didn’t like being labeled solely a blues singer. She was so much more than that. The inclusion on this record of Stormy Blues and a 1956 version of Billie’s Blues, however, are superb and nicely fit the album’s gestalt.
Lady Sings the Blues is on the album, too, which is also the title of Lady Day’s 1956 autobiography. Too bad the song was subsequently victimized by the lousy 1972 movie of the same name starring Diana Ross.
Holiday influenced Sinatra’s phrasing. They both stretched and accented certain words and, as Miles once said, sang behind the beat. Sinatra absolutely adored Holiday. I recall from James Kaplan’s 2015 Sinatra biography, “The Chairman” that Ol’ Blue Eyes would sneak booze into Holiday’s hospital room as she lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver. That was so Sinatra. That was so Holiday, too.
Image courtesy of discogs.com