Billie Holiday (15 page)

S
ongs occur in work, love, death, war, recreation, and any number of other important social events and gatherings. As far as we can tell, they've been a part of every known culture since the beginning of time and would seem to be one of the few cultural universals. Their words and melodies, and the manner in which they're sung and performed, are cultural indicators, a summary of societal features. While tempo, volume, pitch, rhythm, timbre, breathing, and phrasing all occur in everyday speech, usually at a low level of awareness, they are emphasized in singing, which may give song the peculiar power it has to evoke memories and emotions even without words.

Song is effectively an extension and elaboration of speech, engaging the body and mind in a way that speech can never do. One of the distinctive features of song is the repetition of its messages again and again at different levels: the recurrence of words, the redundancy of melody, the fixity of rhythm, the persistence of musical forms, the reiteration of musical traits (such as phrasing and taking breaths)—none of which are acceptable in speech, except among children, the mad, and lovers.

In classical songs the emphasis is on the words, but in the best jazz singing it's primarily about the way they are performed. Billie Holiday said she sang like jazz musicians played, but, unlike jazz musicians, she didn't first voice the melody in its standard form and then vary it by improvisation. From the very first note she improvised, and she continued doing so throughout the entire song. In using her voice instrumentally,
she was faced with the problem of how to keep the words of songs from interfering with the effects she was aiming for with her singing. Gunther Schuller says that she “
instrumental[ized] the material at hand . . . by alchemizing words and music into a new alloy in which the parts were no longer separable.” Perhaps what is
so powerful and affecting in the best of Holiday's art is her ability to let us listen behind the words and to hear their nonverbal antecedents in the evolution of speech, whether in the form of cries, shouts, laughter, sighs, gasps, or emotional outbursts—in short, all the pain and the joy of being human.

The songs a singer chooses to sing are an element of her style, and one of the most important elements, since these choices help determine the musical and physical demands that will be placed on her voice, the roles she will play as a performer, the gestures she makes, whether the songs will have to be introduced or explained, and perhaps even the clothing required. Billie Holiday's repertoire was extraordinarily wide-ranging. A representative sample from her twenty-seven-year career might include “My Man,” a tune associated with Fanny Brice and the
Ziegfeld Follies
of the 1920s; songs by the Gershwins from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's 1937
Shall We Dance
; “Big Stuff,” written for her by Leonard Bernstein, to be heard at the beginning of his ballet
Fancy Free
; “Yesterdays,” from Jerome Kern's 1933 musical
Roberta
;
four of Bessie Smith's songs; three that were sung by Bing Crosby in the 1936 film
Pennies from Heaven
; Duke Ellington's “Solitude”; “Speak Low,” with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ogden Nash; “I Wished on the Moon,” with words by Dorothy Parker; “Gloomy Sunday,” a Hungarian song translated into English; and “Mandy Is Two,” a tune written by Johnny Mercer in praise of his young daughter.

Holiday's most often recorded songs in the studio and live are “Billie's Blues” (aka “I Love My Man”), “Them There Eyes,” “My Man,” “Lover, Come Back to Me,” “Fine and Mellow,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Strange Fruit,” “God Bless the Child,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Lover Man,” “No More,” “Don't Explain,” and “Willow, Weep for Me.” When asked what her favorites were among those she had recorded, Holiday
responded, at different times, “No More,” “Things Are Looking Up,” “Deep Song,” “Fine and Mellow,” and “Gloomy Sunday.”

A poem can be treated as a single piece of writing that stands on its own, and may be read without knowledge of who wrote it, where or when or why it was written, who published it, or who has read it previously. In contrast, the singer may not have written the lyric, and if she did, another person may have composed the melody. The melody may or may not have been written to fit the words. A particular singer's interpretation of the song may change its meaning (or even its words and melody) as originally written. There may be different takes from one recording session, or rerecordings at a later time. Musicians, arrangers, producers, recording engineers, and the studio location can also influence the creation of a recorded song. Songs are often written to fit a particular need—a show, a concert, a means of creating a singer's identity, and any number of other possibilities. To understand a particular singer's interpretation of a given song, we can ask about its origins, how and where it was presented, how she came to sing it, and what it meant to her, if not to the listener. In Billie Holiday's case, where there is such a diverse variety of songs in her repertoire, it helps to know more, and not assume more than we need to.

In those days 133rd Street was the real swing street, like 52nd Street later tried to be.

Billie Holiday

The idea of cabaret could mean different things in different parts of black America. In some cities, like Philadelphia, it involved the modest presentation of a singer or an exotic dancing group, a pianist or small band, or, in later years, a DJ. Such cabarets were presented only occasionally, were usually held above a bar or in an unrented building, and were advertised in the local neighborhood with handmade signs. During Prohibition, bootleg liquor was served, and after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment they
operated without a liquor license, the spirits having been bought at state liquor stores at full price and sold at even higher prices than those of local bars. The attraction was a community gathering in a relaxed atmosphere that avoided rougher crowds and the cold draft of a white nightclub or bar. In Harlem the impulse for cabarets was similar, but there it meant full-time clubs housed mostly in basements of brownstone residences that generally opened around midnight. The neighborhood also had a number of large nightclubs like Connie's Inn and the Cotton Club, which presented the stars of black entertainment and which were owned by whites and “catered to the white trade.”

The block of 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues was the center of the uptown cabaret district. Places like the Nest, Tillie Fripp's restaurant, the Clam House, Mexico's, Basement Brownie's, and Pod's and Jerry's offered an after-hours and literally underground basis for an alternative and more inclusive culture of freedom than that of the respectability proposed by the black middle class. Cabarets were welcoming gathering places for women, gays, those at different economic levels, as well as the people who lived close to the color line on either side, or crossed it. These nightspots and the way of life they represented and encouraged have been described as the other side of the Harlem Renaissance, another kind of racial uplift. It's hard to imagine that
such small venues could have significant influence beyond their neighborhoods, but through novels, poetry, music, newspapers, recordings, and occasional radio broadcasts of floor shows they presented a new kind of social and cultural reality, one that offered a forum for idiosyncratic people of great artistic and intellectual abilities who might otherwise never have found an audience or been able to influence the larger society. The cabarets were also
points of attraction for white musicians, actors, literati, and high-society folk, many of whom became regulars and something more than mere slumming tourists and curiosity seekers. (Jazz trombonist Dickie Wells once said that the city could be divided into night people and day people. The difference between them was that the day people all wished they could be night people.) At the very least these white regulars could be a source of amusement (and money), and
for some they even represented a hopeful sign that whites might be learning something from their visits.

John Hammond Jr. was one of those regulars at the Harlem clubs and cabarets, often accompanied by his friends the Harlem painters Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Hammond was a New York blue blood whose mother was a Vanderbilt and whose father was a successful business executive and a descendant of Civil War general John Henry Hammond. John Junior was an early convert and true believer in African American music and saw in it the potential to break the hold that race had on American life. He had the sort of bona fides that almost no other whites could claim: He was a member of the board of the NAACP; as a journalist, he had written about the injustices visited on black Americans in the courts, in work, and in music; and he regularly made donations to organizations that worked for social change, as well as to artists and musicians in need. He was also a man known to annoy some with his imperious, proprietorial manner, a tendency to at times take more credit than was warranted, and to presume to offer advice when it was not asked for. At the same time, his wealth and social position were often unfairly used against him, even though he devoted his life to music and gave up many of the privileges he could have had given his heritage (beginning with his removal from the social register for marrying beneath his level). He was one of the most important figures in the development of American music and perhaps did more than any other white individual in bringing African American music and musicians before the public.

Hammond first heard Billie Holiday at Monette Moore's club, a short-lived but well-attended spot named for its owner, a popular singer who had performed downtown and uptown and who at that time was an understudy for Ethel Waters. Hammond had located most of the places that sponsored black entertainment in New York City in his quest to find the best jazz musicians and blues singers. But when he first saw Billie perform at Monette's, his whole horizon was widened: He declared her the best jazz singer he'd ever heard, raved about her to everyone he knew, hauled friends up to Harlem to hear her, and wrote about her in his column in the British music magazine
Melody Maker
.

The young Benny Goodman was one of those Hammond took to see Billie, and her first recording, “Your Mother's Son-in-Law,” was made under Goodman's name with Hammond's urging, and was produced by Hammond. Benny was still a freelance musician at the time, and it would be a few years before he led the swing band that made him famous. The recording session took place on November 27, 1933, only three days after Bessie Smith's final recordings, another session arranged by Hammond, in Smith's case to revive the career of his favorite blues singer. Billie was already nervous about working with a group of white musicians she didn't know and facing a microphone for the first time, when she learned that her session followed one with Ethel Waters held in the studio that same day, and that she was being backed by the same band that had played for Waters. She performed “Your Mother's Son-in-Law,” a novelty tune that was to appear shortly in
Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1934
, with a busy arrangement that was too fast and in a key that pitched her voice so high that it forced her to virtually shout over the band. Hammond continued to urge Benny to use her again, and she recorded with him almost a month later, this time on “Riffin' the Scotch,” another novelty, a song based on a sort of musical pun, with the name of the liquor worked against some bagpipe clichés and a story line of a woman who has gotten rid of one bad man only to wind up with another. Most listeners
don't take this recording seriously, as it sounds as if it was thrown together that day in the studio by session musicians Goodman, Dick McDonough, and Buck Washington, with words added by Johnny Mercer, and was something Billie had to make the best of to be able to move on to a recording career. Yet it does show her at only eighteen already using what would become her signature sense of independent rhythm to find her way around the rigidity of the band. She was a swing singer among mostly white musicians who were yet finding their way into this new style of black music.

In the depths of the Depression, the record business had shut down almost completely, so it was a year and a half before Hammond could find a way to get Billie back into the studio, and when he did it was with small bands under the leadership of pianist Teddy Wilson, another musician Hammond had been promoting. These recordings exist only
because Hammond convinced the Brunswick Record Company that the newly perfected jukeboxes then being installed in neighborhood bars and restaurants featured no pop music that blacks wanted to hear. To guarantee that the records paid for themselves and that the company made at least some money, he organized recording sessions that cost no more than two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars by using only six or seven musicians and a singer, working without the cost of arrangements and rehearsals. From 1935 to 1942 this small-group business plan would produce some of the finest music that jazz has ever offered.

While the recordings were made on the cheap, they were not jam sessions, if “jamming” meant musicians coming together to play something easy, or music that was somehow “natural” to them. The groups that Wilson put together were made up of some of the most accomplished jazz musicians of their time. The lineups varied from session to session, depending on who was in town, but the musicians all knew one another and shared a common musical vocabulary. Because all of them were already a part of an established musical tradition, they had a sense of form and procedure that allowed for the creation of “head” arrangements, something they could perform together without sheet music, advance preparation, or discussion.

Wilson described these musicians as being aware of the importance of these sessions: