Wishing on the Moon

In my post on great artists born 100 years ago, I wrote that I would get to each one in turn. I start with Billie Holiday, who was the first born of the seven, on April 7th of 1915. She was born in poverty and obscurity, but would become one of the great artists of the century. As Donald Clarke writes in his comprehensive if idiosyncratic biography, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday: "Billie was the first singer who was herself a great jazz musician, as opposed to a musician who also sang. She was singing some of the newer American popular songs the way deserved to be interpreted, and she was discovered just as the Swing Era was coming together."

In the saddest tradition of jazz, though, Holiday died young, after years of abuse from drugs and alcohol. She had bad relationships with men: "She had continued her pattern of choosing a man each time who was worse than the last one." But over fifty years after her death she is still an icon, still sells records, and still inspires though who weren't even born before she died.

She was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, but grew up in Baltimore. She was born to teenage and unmarried parents. Her father, Clarence, had the name Holiday, which she took when she broke into show business. But before that she had a spotty childhood, being raped and spending time in a Catholic home for girls and most likely prostituting herself.

After moving to Harlem with her mother, she got jobs singing in nightclubs, and then started recording in 1935. One musician said of her: "One thing attracted me to Billie so much was that she never sang on the beat with the music, she always slurred behind the music, the music was ahead of her at all times, but she sang behind the music."

She toured with both Count Basie's band and Artie Shaw's, and endured a lot of racism. In 1940, she introduced a new song into her act:

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

It was "Strange Fruit" a poem written by Abel Meeropol, which protested lynching of African Americans. Clarke reports on listeners being devastated, completely silent, the first time they heard her sing it. She would close her show for years with it.

Eventually the Swing Era and declined, and Holiday became famous for other reasons: "Now Lady was a famous junkie, and she knew that people who came ostensibly to hear her sing were coming, some of them, just to gawp. Yet it was a role she chose willingly. she had been on the wrong side of the fence all her life, and that was where she felt she belonged, or where she felt the most comfortable."

Holiday (her nickname of Lady was bestowed upon her by her great friend, the saxophonist Lester Young, whom she called "Prez") was arrested a few times for possession, and on her deathbed, succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver, the police tried to bring her in. She died in 1959 at the age of 44.

Clarke's book is a soup to nuts biography, just what I was looking for. He covers all bases: not only her life, but a pretty good explanation of the music to a layman like me. At times the details of recordings can be overwhelming, including the song titles and the musicians who played on them, but it's valuable to the right person.

He is also unstinting about her personal life. She was married three times, as mentioned to men who weren't much good for her, including her last, Louis McKay, who stole most of her money. But she was generous and funny (and swore profusely), loved children, though never had any of her own, and was both cordial and bitter to rivals (she loved Lena Horne, but didn't have much nice to say about Dinah Washington).

She also had quite the sex life, which Clarke chronicles without being too nosy. It's fairly accepted that she had relationships with women, including actress Tallulah Bankhead, and she talked frankly about her sexual desires in a time when that just wasn't done.  Clarke writes: "Billie tried, and mostly failed, to find love through sex. She had no conventional hangups, but she also had no childhood to speak of, either; she gave love freely, but could not accept it. Her vulnerability was there, everyone knew, but so deep that no one could reach it, for she was afraid to reveal it. As the years went by, she began to make terrible, destructive relationships, each man apparently worse than the last."

Clarke has a somewhat odd writing style; at times it seemed like it was translated from another language. He also doesn't hide his personal feelings, and inserts himself into the book, which takes away from it. At one point he refers to rock music as "hack work," well, the love of jazz and rock are not mutually exclusive, Donald.

But I felt as I knew the woman after reading the book. There are some scintillating chapters, such as the opening of Cafe Society, the first integrated club in New York City, or Holiday's last TV appearance, with Lester Young. Watch her smile and nod her head as he plays. Young died only a few months before she did.

Next up: Orson Welles.