Culture & Civilization

The Two
Billie Holidays
Greatness before described her as “the most impor- and alcohol shattered her voice and
tant influence on American popu- laid waste to her health, and she
hard living—and lar singing in the last 20 years.” died in a New York hospital room at
politics—took But Holiday is no longer as in- the age of 44, under arrest yet again
fluential as she was in her lifetime. for possession of narcotics.
their toll Her deceptively simple-sounding It is this cautionary tale that Holi-
style bears little resemblance to day herself told in her ghostwritten
By Terry Teachout the elaborate improvisational tech- memoir, Lady Sings the Blues (1956,

B
niques used by 21st-century vocal- written with William Duffy), and
ILLIE Holiday is, after ists, who are inclined as a group to that is writ still larger in the slick,
Louis Armstrong and emulate the more explicitly jazzy heavily fictionalized film version of
Duke Ellington, the Ella Fitzgerald. Nor is the literature Holiday’s story in which Diana Ross,
most admired artist in on Holiday comparable in qual- of all people, played her on screen.
the history of jazz. ity to the music that it celebrates. The book itself was hugely contro-
Largely unschooled (comic books Indeed, much of it is an unsavory versial in 1956, discussing as it did
were her leisure-time reading of blend of speculation and gush. matters of sex and drugs that many
choice) and musically illiterate, she The truth about Holiday needs of the singer’s Eisenhower-era read-
nonetheless made so deep an im- no embellishment to be compel- ers found unimaginable and pre-
pression on her contemporaries ling. She grew up in the ghettoes of ferred not to believe; they assumed
that Frank Sinatra, writing in Ebo- Baltimore and New York, dropping she had exaggerated in order to sell
ny shortly before her death in 1958, out of school at 11 to work as a pros- more copies. In fact, the stories that
titute. Like Louis Armstrong, whose she told were mostly true, as John
Terry Teachout is Com- singing inspired her to become a Szwed explains in Billie Holiday: The
mentary’s critic-at-large and jazz musician, she used her innate Musician and the Myth,* a mono-
the drama critic of the Wall Street talent to pull herself out of the gut- graph that is, in his words, “not . . . a
Journal. Satchmo at the Waldorf, ter—but lacked the self-discipline to biography in the strictest sense,
his Trst play, will be produced stay out of it. Holiday started using but rather a meditation on [Holi-
this season in Chicago, Colorado heroin in 1941, around the same day’s] art and its relation to her life.”
Springs, San Francisco, and West time that she began to be known to
Palm Beach. the public at large. Over time drugs * Viking, 240 pages

66 September 2015

Culture & Civ.indd 66 8/11/15 4:43 PM

 A former academic and jazz mu- heard her. “There was something
sician, Szwed succeeds in cutting
through the thick haze of gossip that
continues to surround his subject.
Among other things, he establishes
i Szwed
does not
quite succeed
about her—not just the torchy qual-
ity of her voice—that made you want
to try to help her,” the lyricist (and
singer) Johnny Mercer recalled. She
the essential factuality of Lady Sings could make even the most trivial Tin
the Blues, in the process filling in in answering Pan Alley ditties seem meaningful,
certain of the gaps on which Holi-
day’s cautious publishers insisted.
a critical and when she performed the work
of such first-class songwriters as
But Szwed’s main purpose is to move question: Why Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, she
the spotlight away from her life
and direct it toward her art, which
does Holiday brought their immaculately crafted
lyrics to vivid life without falling
he does with admirable efficiency. remain as victim to the temptation to over-
Still, he does not quite succeed in
answering a question that is central central to dramatize them.
Yet for all the distinctiveness of
to understanding her: Why does American her performing persona, Holiday’s
Holiday remain to this day as central
to American culture as any popular culture as any appeal was rooted no less deeply
in her natural musicality. Unlike
singer other than Sinatra himself?
Is it because of the sheer sordidness
popular singer Louis Armstrong, she shunned the
“scat” singing that would be ad-
of her story, which is vastly more other than opted by such later jazz vocalists as
dramatic than the comparatively
uneventful life of a less interesting
Sinatra himself? Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé. In most
other ways, though, she followed
personality like Fitzgerald? Or does his example faithfully. She phrased
Holiday’s singing constitute in and with extreme rhythmic freedom,
of itself a sufficient claim on the at- assuring musicians that her voice lagging far behind the beat in a way
tention of posterity? was a “mess.” that occasionally disoriented her
Holiday started singing in public accompanists, and decorated the

B
ORN Eleanora Fagan in 1915, soon after she moved to Harlem in melodies of the songs that she sang
Holiday was the illegitimate 1929. John Hammond, jazz’s first with (in Szwed’s words) “small but
daughter of a jazz guitarist important record producer, saw unforgettable turns, up-and-down
who neither lived with nor sup- her perform in a club in 1933 and movements, fades, and drop-offs”
ported her mother, a maid and part- was staggered: “She was not a blues that were all the more effective for
time prostitute. Predictably enough, singer, but sang popular songs in a their subtlety.
she grew up to be a strong-willed manner that made them completely In addition to ornamenting mel-
woman crippled by a chronic sense her own.” He claimed that she “sings odies, Holiday paraphrased them in
of inadequacy. Not only did she fol- as well as anybody I ever heard” in a an improvisational manner directly
low in her mother’s footsteps by be- column for Melody Maker, the Brit- modeled on that of Armstrong. To
coming a prostitute, but in later life ish jazz magazine. Seven months hear her sing such now-familiar bal-
she was irresistibly drawn to flashy, later, Hammond cut two 78 sides in lads as Kern’s “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat
violent men who, like the pimps she which she sang with a combo led by Man” or the Gershwins’ “They Can’t
had known in her childhood, lived Benny Goodman, then signed her to Take That Away from Me” is to grasp
off her earnings. Her sense of self- a recording contract in 1935. at once the nature of her method:
esteem was so poor that she actually Holiday initially recorded not as a She freely altered the songs she
doubted the quality of her singing, soloist but as a “sideman” on a series sang, often to accommodate the
of combo recordings led by Teddy limitations of her untrained voice,
* Digitally remastered versions of the Wilson, one of the top jazz pianists whose effective range was barely
issued takes of these recordings are col- of the ’30s.* Nevertheless, she had more than an octave. Sometimes
lected on Lady Day: The Master Takes and
Singles (Sony, four CDs). Billie Holiday: already become a fully formed art- she stuck fairly close to the tune, but
The Ultimate Collection (Hip-O, two CDs ist. Her small, slightly raspy voice just as often she was more venture-
+ one DVD) is a well-chosen selection of sounded at once disillusioned and some, at times radically so.
Holiday’s later recordings, accompanied
by a bonus DVD containing most of her hopeful, with a touch of vulnerabil- Nowhere is Holiday’s musical
film and TV appearances. ity that was remarked on by all who approach more successful than in “I

Commentary 67

Culture & Civ.indd 67 8/11/15 4:43 PM

 Must Have That Man,” a little-known isn’t true / He beats me, too / What youth. Asked in 1958 if she was in
1928 show tune by Jimmy McHugh can I do?”), all sung at the languor- decline, Miles Davis replied, “I’d
and Dorothy Fields that she record- ous, heroin-throttled crawl that Hol- rather hear her now. She’s become
ed when she was 21. Accompanied iday increasingly preferred. Many much more mature.” But many
by a Wilson-led all-star band whose were recorded with studio orches- other listeners believe that she was
other members include Benny Good- tras augmented by string sections, never the same after 1939—and not
man and Lester Young, Count Basie’s an innovation that dismayed jazz merely because of the steady dete-
incomparable tenor saxophone solo- purists. Pop-music fans found her rioration of her voice.
ist and Holiday’s favorite musical new style more accessible, though, John Hammond was one of
partner, she sings just one chorus and in 1947 she co-starred with Louis them. He regarded her post-1939
of the cunningly rhymed song (“I Armstrong in New Orleans, a Hol- singing as “mannered,” and his ex-
need that person / Much worse’n just lywood film about the history of jazz planation of what happened to her
bad / I’m half alive and it’s drivin’ that might well have put her on the is worthy of closer examination:
me mad”). On paper the lyric is path to pop-culture celebrity. But she
little more than clever, but Holiday’s was arrested on a narcotics charge She was still marvelously musi-
plaintive voice transforms it into an that same year, the first in a series cal, but she had gotten self-con-
unforgettably intimate confession of of brushes with the law that instead scious. I felt that the beginning
unrequited love. turned her into a figure of scandal. of the end for Billie was “Strange
In 1952 Holiday started working Fruit” when she had become the

I
F HOLIDAY had died in 1937, with the record producer Norman darling of the left-wing intellec-
the year in which she recorded Granz, who teamed her with jazz tuals. I think she began taking
“I Must Have That Man,” she combos similar to the ones with herself very seriously and think-
would still be remembered as a which she had worked in the ’30s. ing of herself as very important.
great singer. But she went on per- While her voice had been coarsened
forming for two more decades, and by years of drug and alcohol abuse, Hammond, himself a lifelong left-
in 1939 she embarked on a long- the best of these performances are winger but one who steered clear of
term residency at Café Society, a quite listenable, and it is only upon Stalinism, here puts his finger on
New York cabaret, in the course of direct comparison with her pre- an important aspect of Holiday’s
which she changed her style delib- war 78s (in particular her original later critical réclame: Café Society,
erately and dramatically. recordings of songs like “I Wished where she reinvented herself as a
It was at Café Society that Holiday on the Moon” and “What a Little politically conscious torch singer,
started adding songs to her reper- Moonlight Can Do” that she later was a magnet for leftists, many of
toire that were different in character remade for Granz) that the decay is them of the hardest possible kind.
from the show tunes and movie songs immediately apparent. Abel Meeropol, who wrote “Strange
that she, Wilson, and Hammond had By the end of the ’50s, though, Fruit” under the pseudonym “Lewis
previously favored. The first and best Holiday’s vocal decline was impos- Allan,” was a Communist who is best
known of them, “Strange Fruit,” is a sible to ignore. Witness Lady in known by his own name for having
minor-key setting of a poem about Satin, a 1958 album of ballads on adopted the children of Ethel and
a lynching. Sung at a paralytically which she is backed by a large stu- Julius Rosenberg after their parents
slow tempo, it is full of melodramatic dio orchestra. While her versions were executed for espionage and
couplets whose sincerity cannot dis- of such pitch-black torch songs as treason in 1953.
guise their staginess: “Pastoral scene “I’m a Fool to Want You” still have It was because of “Strange Fruit”
of the gallant South, / The bulging considerable emotional impact, the that Holiday was embraced by
eyes and the twisted mouth.” But youthful saltiness of her timbre other Communists and fellow trav-
Holiday embraced the song, record- has turned to grit and gravel. The elers more interested in her utility
ing it for Commodore in 1939 when results are harrowing, a kind of as a political symbol than in her
Columbia, her regular label, refused sandpaper for the soul. artistry. But Hammond was right
to do so. to suggest that her artistry was

H
“Strange Fruit” would be fol- OLIDAY’S later record- also compromised by the song’s
lowed by equally doleful songs ings have always been success. From 1939 on, she resorted
such as “Gloomy Sunday,” “God controversial. Some be- with fast-growing frequency to a
Bless the Child,” and the quasi- lieve them to be more impres- lugubrious self-dramatization and
autobiographical “My Man” (“He sive than the performances of her exaggeration that are nowhere to

68 Culture & Civilization : September 2015

Culture & Civ.indd 68 8/11/15 4:43 PM

 be found in her earlier work, and are also, I suspect, confusing Holi- malcy. “Oh, to have a job you liked, a
once her voice disintegrated, she day’s life with her art, treating her mate you trusted, a child to love you,
became a pure mannerist, reduced as a martyr figure instead of seeing a purpose in life,” she laments. When
to the hollow shell of a style. her for what she was: a greatly beautiful, alluring Annagret, one of
Even at the end of her life, Holi- gifted artist who lacked the strength the squat’s resident Germans, urges
day was still capable of singing with of character that kept Louis Arm- her to apply for an internship at the
moving expressivity. But those who strong, who came from a similar Sunlight Project—a Wikileaks-esque
believe her later work to be superior background, from succumbing to organization run by a former East
to the recordings of her youth make a similar fate. To romanticize self- German named Andreas Wolf—Pip
the mistake of assuming that the destructive behavior is always a figures she has little to lose. Besides,
unselfconscious simplicity of “I Must mistake, even when it is the behav- Annagret says, the Sunlight Project
Have That Man” was somehow less ior of a great artist—and it is an can probably find her father.
“mature” than the inflated pseudo- even bigger mistake to take such In a devil-may-care moment, Pip
profundity of “Strange Fruit.” They behavior as a sign of greatness.q shoots Andreas a flippant email. To
her astonishment, he immediately

Bad Sexpectations
writes back.
“In terms of universal admira-
tion,” Andreas Wolf “was right up
there with Aung San Suu Kyi and
Bruce Springsteen.” After the Cold
Purity: A Novel Above all, the modern blockbuster War, Wolf worked to expose the
By Jonathan Franzen must be big. At 563 pages, Jonathan Stasi’s secret archives; since then he
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages Franzen’s Purity is practically a has broadened his scope “to social
featherweight compared with The injustice and toxic secrets world-
Reviewed by Fernanda Moore GoldTnch or Death and Mr. Pick- wide.” He’s handsome, unmarried,

C
wick, which clock in at 775 and 816 a “militant” feminist, a visionary.
HARLES Dickens is pages respectively. Yet Franzen’s fifth Back and forth the emails go, and
having a moment. In novel—his first since 2010’s Free- Pip is soon in over her head. “Maybe
the wake of his 200th dom—manages, somehow, to feel we should tell each other some little
birthday in 2012, a slew longer than both. It is also a calamity. thing we’re ashamed of. I’ll go first.
of high-profile novels Our heroine’s name, which makes My real name is Purity,” she writes.
(including Donna Tartt’s The Gold- Franzen’s effort to invoke The Inimi- “The secret of your name is safe
Tnch, Stephen Jarvis’s Death and Mr. table even more obvious, is Pip. She’s with me,” Wolf replies. “If I told
Pickwick, and Tom Rachman’s The 23 and has no great expectations, you, when I was seven years old my
Rise and Fall of Great Powers, to with a dead-end telemarketing job, mother showed me her genitals,
name three I’ve reviewed in these six figures of student debt, and a what would you do with that infor-
pages) have aimed to imitate “The depressed, pain-in-the-neck mother mation?”
Inimitable,” as Dickens called him- she tries vainly to placate. (She has The reader recoils, but Pip is
self. Minimalism, it seems, is dead: A never met her father, about whom unfazed. “I would say holy shit and
proper 21st-century blockbuster her mother refuses to talk.) Pip lives keep it to myself,” she writes, and
must teem with orphans, con-artists, in a filthy Oakland squat shared with a sinking feeling, we realize
sidekicks, villains, mysterious bene- by a passel of grubby, unreliable Andreas has got her. Shared secrets
factors, long-lost parents, and plucky types: transient Occupy members, a are a deadly currency in Purity,
heroes and heroines who triumph by schizophrenic genius, a pair of Ger- binding confessor to confidant in
the end. Its plot must be labyrin- man peace activists, a disabled man codependence and shame. In the
thine, full of reversals, reunions, and named Ramón, and a dumpster-div- emails that follow, Andreas grooms
game-changing reveals. Its setting ing married couple who alternately Pip like a pro, tilting their cor-
must be chaotic and picturesque. fight (“I’ll take my chances with respondence toward heavy topics
moral vanity when the alternative (fear, fame, secrecy, power) before
Fernanda Moore last reviewed is signing on with a divine plan that finishing with a chilling medita-
Nell Zink’s Mislaid. Her short Tction immiserates four billion people!”) tion on predators and prey.
has appeared in Commentary and fornicate behind closed doors. “I have often wondered what the
as well. Deep down, Pip hungers for nor- prey is feeling when it is captured,”

Commentary 69

Culture & Civ.indd 69 8/11/15 4:43 PM

Copyright of Commentary is the property of American Jewish Committee and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.