People are talking about this new Billie Holiday. We do not mean another jazz great because there could only be one Miss Holiday. The buzz is about this new biofilm of Billie and it carries the title The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
In the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues, which starred Diana Ross and was directed by Sidney J. Furie, the narrative centered on Billie dominated by the drug addiction and the bad decisions she made.
Vincent Canby of the New York Times says of the film: “How is it possible for a movie that is otherwise so dreadful to contain such a singularly attractive performance in the title role?”
How dreadful the depiction of the life of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, inventors of jazz singing is foretold by its poster: an elegantly gloved hand raised to an insouciant toast, a handcuff dangling from the elegant pose.
Now comes this film where Billie Holiday’s life is told from the point of view of a drug war racialized. And it has to be a state against an artist. Based on the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari and directed by Lee Daniels, the film stars Andra Day in the title role.
The poster screams politics. Above the face of Day, the face half covered by a microphone, is the line: Her voice will not be silenced.
Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman noted Andra Day’s performance with these words: “In this sprawling, lacerating, but at times emotionally wayward biopic set during the last decade of Holiday’s life, Day gives Billie a voice of pearly splendor that, over time, turns raspy and hard….”
The fact is the presence of these so-called jazz divas in the period of racial unrest has always posed a question about their personality, genius and vocal style.
A brilliant documentary from the BBC available on YouTube talks about Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Nina Simone and, surprisingly but with due respect to her name, Peggy Lee. The latter is the sole white singer in this royal parade.
Jazz luminaries from Annie Ross (who knew Billie Holiday up close) and Madeline Peyroux, whose sound seems a tribute to Holiday, and instrumentalists speak of this generation of singers beyond compare. They are attractive, the narrator says, because we may never see their likes again anytime now nor in the future.
Billie, Ella, Sarah, Nina—they were “creatures of troubled times.”
The breathtaking footages showing them singing drives home the point how each one of them is different from the other. While they may have had influences, when we listen to them, we hear the singular style each had forged. Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would always be quoted saying she always wanted to sound like Connee Boswell, but Ella, for fans and enthusiasts, became ELLA—the voice a velvet splendor, the rhythm as organic as the heartbeat.
(As a footnote, Connee Boswell was a white crooner whose version of “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” has inspired disparate singers from Leslie Cheung to Marianne Faithful to adapt her old arrangement.)
Billie Holiday, in her biography, recited her influences from the big sound of Bessie Smith to that of Louie Armstrong.
This is where the documentary veers and become more than a memory of clubs or speakeasies. All these jazz divas or royalties were born in the crucial times of racial segregation and where White America constantly reminded the non-blacks of their rightful position in the supposedly supreme “white” society.
They may have been royalties—Sarah, Ella, Billie—but each time they ventured into the real world, they were reminded that the world was divided into areas where one was designated for “Colored.” Onstage, they were luminous, an extension of Hollywood glamor; offstage, they were viewed as descended from slaves.
The case of Billie Holiday has baffled fans. Could we separate the singer from her life? There were critics who went as far as to say that the quirkily unique inflection of Billie Holiday was no more a work of art than it was a result of drug use—that a voice, which reeked of long nights of whisky, was not a mere modifier but an admission about how alcohol can produce a vocal style. The hurt and rasp in Billie Holiday’s voice was also seen a result of her own sad, bad life.
What about Ella’s voice? She is all cotton, suede and a wisp of smoke. Did she have an easy life that could correlate her jazz with said happiness?
It appears that all black singers, the documentary claims, got it bad and, as the song goes, it ain’t good. This makes the profile of Ella even more daunting. She had a tough life.
Her world was the blues, and yet she came out with a singing that even up to now has become the model for While Woman singing. All sheen and all glam. Except when she scatted and came up with all the guttural sounds to match the trombone and clarinet that we became aware of a gift that was not upper-class but who gives a damn.
Nina Simone gave a damn. She has a song called “Mississippi Goddamn,” and some lines go: “I can’t stand the pressure much longer/Somebody say a prayer/Alabama’s gotten me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”
Nina sings of segregation, of children in jail. This jazz does not sing but rants!
Which brings us back to the United States against Billie Holiday.
In literature and in documentaries, it is revealed that it was not just her drug use that troubled the government but her song “Strange Fruit,” which goes: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees/Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulgin’ eyes and the twisted mouth/Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh/Then the sudden smell of burnin’ flesh….”
Think of Billie Holiday—ethereal, sad, sensual in her silvery gown, the magnolia fresh on her hair—moaning in deep despair, singing of lynching.
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