I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed.
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Nothing you hear from here on in is definitely true.
For example, I’ll tell you that my introduction to Billie Holiday came via Alex Gopher’s The Child, which spliced her voice in wondrous loops over a dreamy downtempo beat. But I can’t say for sure that’s accurate.
I know I had a Billie Holiday compilation around this time so it’s possible that I had heard her songs before the Alex Gopher track came out. Actually, I’m not certain that album was mine. It may have belonged to my flat-mate and if so, Barney – I still have your Billie Holiday CD.
In this story, some things are true, some are legend and some are somewhere in-between.
The one truth about Billie Holiday is that she’s essentially unknowable. Her own autobiography is full of fabrications and ghostwritten by someone with potentially dubious motives. One of the many biographies about her is dedicated to uncovering these inaccuracies.
Another biography is an oral history based on interviews with people who knew her. But most of them are extremely unreliable witnesses what with them being junkies, wife-beaters, mafioso and record execs. A documentary about her is called The Many Faces of Billie Holiday but none are particularly well illuminated.
Remember: nothing I tell you is definitely true.
The child
After years of singing in Harlem nightclubs and recording for Colombia and Decca, Holiday finally had money after a childhood of unimaginable poverty. She gave some cash to her mother to help her open and run a restaurant called Mom Holiday’s. But when Billie found herself running short of funds, Mom Holiday refused to return the favour.
That’s when a furious Holiday spat out a caustic supplication that was the culmination of a lifetime of conflict with her mother Sadie Fagan, whose surname proved an accurate portend of Dickensian destitution and depravity.
Billie’s father was a musician named Clarence Holliday who left the family when she was a baby, though she’d later adapt his name for her stage persona. She was born Eleanora Fagan though Clarence isn’t the named father on her birth certificate and no-one has a good explanation how or why Frank DeViese’s name ended up there. I told you reliable facts would be hard to come by.
After Holliday skipped out, Sadie went to work on the railroads leaving Eleanora in the care of her half-sister in Baltimore who regularly beat the girl or sent her to live with other, equally brutal relatives. As Eleanora didn’t attend school very often, she was charged with truancy by a juvenile court and sent to a Catholic reform school at the age of nine, which was probably not the place to bring much-needed benevolence to young Eleanora’s life.
Eventually Sadie got her daughter out of reform school but that didn’t improve matters. At 11, Eleanora dropped out of school to work at her mother’s restaurant and a neighbour attempted to rape her. At 12, she was running errands for the brothel where Sadie now worked. By 13, Holiday herself was forced into prostitution. When the brothel was raided by police, she was sent to prison followed by a stint in a workhouse.
“God bless the child that’s got his own” feels like a too-mild retort to that catastrophic childhood, but Holiday’s dyspeptic prayer became so lodged in her brain, she brought it to a songwriter named Arthur Herzog. Together the pair turned it into one of her signature songs – one of the few she wrote herself. Though being the Billie Holiday story, Herzog disputes this fact, claiming the one-liner and a minor key change were her only input.
The musician
Herzog was being petty. No matter who wrote them, Billie Holiday became an essential element of every song she sang. One of my favourites from that compilation CD I had is the delightfully upbeat I Hear Music, where Holiday describes the rich musicality she hears in the world around her, from the “murmur of a morning breeze up there” to “the rattle of the milkman on the stair”.
She thought of herself as more like a trumpet player than a traditional singer, aiming to rewrite the song every time she approached the mic. After an 18-year old Holiday recorded with Benny Goodman, the King of Swing said that she was the first female singer he worked with who “sang like an improvising jazz genius” and credited her with changing his musical taste.
When she sang with Count Basie’s orchestra, the renowned band leader recalled that his musicians learned to just get the music to however Holiday wanted it to sound. Despite his obvious respect for her musicality, the Basie-Billie combo didn’t last long. One side says she was fired for being unprofessional, temperamental and unreliable; the other complained about low pay, bad conditions and not being able to do what she wanted with the music. The truth lies…well, we’ve already spoken about that.
Holiday’s powerful interpretation of Strange Fruit was fuelled by her own experiences of racism, especially when she toured the southern states of America with Artie Shaw. As the first black woman to sing with a white orchestra, Holiday was frequently abused, despite Shaw’s efforts to stand up for his singer. Back in New York, she resented having to use service entrances and elevators when she played at the city's upmarket hotels.
Yet her strongest connection to the song was through her father. Clarence Holliday had died of lung problems and his family believed that he was denied treatment that could have saved his life by racist medical staff. This is why she made Strange Fruit her own. Why she took the song to Commodore Records when her own label Colombia refused to let her record it because of the subject matter. Why she continued to perform it night after night, despite fearing that it would get her into trouble.
She wasn’t wrong about that. Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was an unapologetic racist who believed jazz music was un-American and desperately wanted to pin drug charges on black musicians. He focused most of his efforts on serial cocaine and heroin user Holiday because he hated Strange Fruit.
At the peak of her success in 1947, Holiday was arrested for drug possession. Her lawyer didn’t turn up for trial and the judge ignored the prosecutor’s plea that she should be sent to rehab. Instead she spent almost a year in prison, where it’s said she never sang a note.
The lady
I first heard Solitude while watching the Ken Burns documentary series Jazz. In a scene about 1940s New York, the film devotes a couple of minutes of Holiday singing the song over evocative photos of the city’s black neighbourhoods. It’s a magnificent sequence that highlights the stark sadness of the song, while providing some context for the brutal and beautiful world from which its singer came.
True to form, it’s not entirely accurate. Though the episode is about the wartime era, the version of Solitude playing is from 1952. Holiday had originally recorded the song in 1946 – the year before her imprisonment – for Decca Records but the lush orchestration and her bright vocals are more in keeping with the style of its original writer, Duke Ellington. The events of the intervening six years of Holiday’s life are evident in her later version.
Solitude starts with a soft plucked guitar that sounds somewhat cheerful but disappears from the mix as Holiday comes in with her croaky opener, “In my solitude”. A double bass sets a slow and steady pace and a piano twinkles softly. A trumpet drifts in and out accenting the late-night loneliness, while every syllable Holiday sings shivers through the stillness.
In her 1946 version, she elongates the words, allowing them to glide through the rich milieu. Here, she plays with pitch in every stretch, a rollercoaster of reverberation that keeps the song from sinking into straight-up sadness. It’s a melancholy mood but she also seems to be reveling in sitting in her chair, wallowing in the despair.
She had a lot of experience with the subject thanks to a succession of marriages, relationships and affairs with mostly terrible men. Her first husband, trombonist Jimmy Monroe introduced her to heroin, beat her and cheated on her – she wrote Don’t Explain as a response to him trying to justify lipstick on his collar. Then came Joe Guy, another musician, who was essentially her drug dealer and was banned from set when Holiday was in Hollywood making a movie.
Her next husband Louis McKay worked for the mafia, had plans to use her name and reputation to set up a music-related business and was often abusive and violent. Her band said she would arrive at venues with broken ribs so they’d strap her dress tight and point her towards the stage.
You won’t hear stories like these in her autobiography, as that book was very much McKay’s handiwork. Ghostwritten by a friend of his, Holiday said she’d never even read it. A 1972 film version starring Diana Ross as Holiday, had Billy Dee Williams portray McKay as an unfailingly supportive and not-at-all-violent heroic figure. The real McKay was the film’s technical advisor.
The end
All her life, Billie Holiday was treated badly by the people she loved. She even fell out with her great friend and musical collaborator Lester Young, who had given her the Lady Day nickname. It often seems she was so accustomed to abuse that it became easy for her to accept it.
An uncomfortably large number of her songs reference her forgiving mean lovers, like the stunning Fine and Mellow, which she wrote in 1939. When she finally reunited with Young to perform the song for a TV special in 1957, the mean theme was tragically still pertinent.
Two years later, she was dead. Wasting away from years of drug and alcohol abuse and recently diagnosed with cirrhosis, Holiday’s end came in a New York hospital with police outside the room waiting to arrest her for drug possession. Most of the earnings from her successful musical career had been squandered or stolen. But it’s said she still had a couple of hundred dollars strapped to her leg when she died.
This small but significant fact/legend says a lot about Billie Holiday. Despite everything, she wasn’t simply accepting her fate. She had kept some cash from the scoundrels around her. She had a roll for scoring even with the law at her door. She had enough to start again when she got off her hospital bed.
This is the defiance you hear in Solitude. She gives those earnestly sad words an unfathomably great depth, filling them with the agony and ecstasy, the compliance and complexity of her inconceivable life. The way she sings that strung-out and ascending “ma-ay” in the last rendering of the title line is perhaps my favourite two syllables in music. It’s Lady Day at her most illuminating and unknowable.
On the surface, Solitude is a straight-up sad song. In Billie Holiday’s hands, this is more one fact that’s not quite the whole truth.
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If you like this, try:
I Hear Music
Fine and Mellow
Strange Fruit
God Bless the Child
Don't Explain
The Child - Alex Gopher
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Go to 74 - Donnie Darko by Let's Eat Grandma
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