LADY LIVES THE BLUES
A new documentary offers an unvarnished portrait of the legendary Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday’s life story is as poignant as the melodies she performed. ‘The whole basis of my singing is feeling,’ she once wrote. ‘Unless I feel something, I can’t sing.’ Afflicted by sexual abuse as a child, heroin addiction during her twenties and racial prejudice throughout her life, the legendary jazz singer died in 1959 at the age of 44, under hospital arrest and with only $750 to her name.
While many of Holiday’s struggles were concealed from public view, a new documentary, Billie, airs previously unseen interviews with those closest to her, from family members and school friends to her former lovers. We also hear from some of her contemporaries, including Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett, who share intimate anecdotes about the singer; while additional testimonies are made by her lawyers, pushers and the narcotics agents who pursued her. All of these conversations were taped in the
Seventies by the journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who had been working on a comprehensive biography of Holiday until her own untimely death in 1978.
The documentary will also showcase newly restored footage of the singer’s performances and recordings of classics such as ‘God Bless the Child’, the title for which was inspired by her mother; ‘My Man’, whose lyrics reflect her tumultuous romance with her manager John Levy; and the protest song ‘Strange Fruit’, a graphic evocation of America’s racist lynchings that often incited riots when she sang it in New York nightclubs. One critic described the latter as ‘by far the most effective cry Miss Holiday’s race has uttered against the injustice of a Christian country’, and indeed, in the first six months of 2020, her powerful rendition was streamed more than two million times, its vivid lyrics speaking pertinently to the killing of George Floyd and the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The actress and singer Sylvia Syms said: ‘You could see a whole world in Holiday’s face – all of the beauty and all of the misery’, and the same can be heard in her heart-rending vocals. Though her songs are reflective of a life of extreme hardship, they also carry the weight of a strong-willed woman who, in her own words, tried ‘to live 100 days in one day’. Singing was Holiday’s greatest weapon in the battles of her short life, enabling her to rise above them to change the face of jazz music for ever.
‘Billie’ is available online now and will be aired on the BBC during the festive period.