Barbarian at the Turntable

Billie Holiday, Lady Day’s, birthday is coming up—April 7th.

I was never a fan and that’s something I’m sorta embarrassed about. Warum? It seems that all my jazz head friends revere her. She was totes IT. Not caring for her vocal stylings makes me an utter Philistine, right?

Maybe so, maybe so.

I certainly respect and appreciate that she was a groundbreaking artist and performer—that, in a time when most women (certainly poor women and most especially black women) were treated as chattel, she went her own way and shone bright.

Count Basie had gotten used to Holiday's heavy involvement in the band. He said, "When she rehearsed with the band, it was really just a matter of getting her tunes like she wanted them, because she knew how she wanted to sound and you couldn't tell her what to do."

Yes! She wasn’t gonna be little ladied into being just a pretty girl singer front for the band. Holiday was an artist.

She went beyond her record label and made Abel Meeropol’s powerful poem, Strange Fruit a hit, a standard.

New York lawmakers didn't like "Strange Fruit." In 1940, Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the American Communist Party had paid him to write the song.

 ‘the fuck? A poem about the monstrous insanity of the Southern lynchings and the McCarthy happy government wants to know if the commies paid him to write it?

In the 1930s, when Holiday was working with Columbia Records, she was first introduced to the poem “Strange Fruit,” an emotional piece about the lynching of a black man. Though Columbia would not allow her to record the piece due to subject matter, Holiday went on to record the song with an alternate label, Commodore, and the song eventually became one of Holiday’s classics.

She was a hip trailblazer. Holiday was making a difference.

In November 1938 Holiday was asked to use the service elevator at the Lincoln Hotel, instead of the passenger elevator, because white patrons of the hotels complained. This may have been the last straw for her. She left the band (Artie Shaw’s) shortly after. Holiday spoke about the incident weeks later, saying "I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room as did other members of the band ... [and] I was made to leave and enter through the kitchen."

And still she was treated like a third class being.

I think the only recordings I ever heard of hers were from late in her career, after age, drugs and drink had begun to degrade her pipes. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been a fan or perhaps it’s because I was never a jazz lover. OK, gotta clarify, I’ve never been big on jazz vocalists. Ella, Etta, Mel and Peggy didn’t light my Bic either. I'm def down with the no singer stylings of Miles, Ornette Colman and Evelyn Glennie though.

Back in my hearing days the singers I favored were the rock and rollers—Rod (circa 1968), Grace (1967), Eddie and Chrissie.

Given Billie Holiday’s pioneering, strength and artistry, I feel I should have loved her work. Maybe this is like Picasso’s Guernica. I get the significance. I appreciate the wild, raw creativity. I understand the powerfully potent statement but *shrugs* it's never hit me where I live like Klimt’s Medicine does.

Art does not exist to confirm your understanding of the world.
This flashed by on my Twitter feed last night. Is that Voltaire or an original?