Music |
Billie Holiday
By
Published: Jan 13, 2016
Category:
Cabaret
Frank Sinatra, born in 1915, had a centennial year last year. It was quite a celebration — the only white person who failed to bend a knee to Sinatra was the Pope, who somehow forgot to elevate him to sainthood.
Billie Holiday was also born in 1915, and I’d bet this is the first you’ve heard about her centennial.
And yet Sinatra and Holiday had much in common. Both sang of late nights and loneliness. Both projected emotion and vulnerability that suggests they know how it feels to be abandoned and unloved. Both leave behind recordings that will be cherished as long as there are lovers and love songs.
It’s their obvious differences that are the first reasons we remember him and ignore her. Sinatra was Italian, skinny, hot, a movie star, and, from a young age, an American institution. Holiday was black, often addicted, a permanent outlier in America.
There’s a more meaningful difference. Sinatra evokes 3 AM in a saloon, a lit cigarette in an ashtray, a glass of brown liquor on the bar — a romantic male image out of a movie. Holiday serves up sexual, tormented, deeper pain — stories you can’t tell. To hear her, to really hear her, is to be opened up to parts of yourself that are wounded, slow to heal, and may never heal.
[The 4-disc centennial Sinatra event costs $51 on Amazon. In contrast, the CD of the 20 song Billie Holiday Centennial Collection costs just $9.99 at Amazon, and you get a free MP3 download. There’s also an MP3 download.]
The Sinatra story is one of revenge: An angry kid gets even by becoming, at a young age and continuing for half a century, a global success. The Holiday story is of a short, tough life, with a narrow window of success. “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married,” she wrote in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. “He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.” Her father left, she was farmed out to relatives. Raped at 10. Quit school at 12. Worked as a maid and prostitute. Was discovered at 16. Sang with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, became a glorious oddity: a black singer in a white orchestra. At an interracial club, Cafe Society, became the darling of intellectuals and the chic set. Had an affair with Orson Welles, and, a decade later, Tallulah Bankhead. Became addicted to heroin, was arrested, tried, jailed; on her release, she gave a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. Then more drugs, cirrhosis, heart disease, and, at 44, death.
A friend says: When Billie sang about a man gone missing, you don’t think he’s gone out for cigarettes, you know he’s gone for good. The upside of that acute sense of romantic defeat is alchemical. Take that sadness, give it to a singer of Billie Holiday’s talents, and it emerges as art.
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