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A revelatory look at the tumultuous life of a jazz legend and American cultural icon
In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America's most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday's artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.
During her lifetime and after her death, Billie Holiday was often depicted as a down-on-her-luck junkie severely lacking in self-esteem. Relying on interviews with people who knew her, and new material unearthed in private collections and institutional archives, Bitter Crop—a reference to the last two words of Strange Fruit, her moving song about lynching—limns Holiday as a powerful, ambitious woman who overcame her flaws to triumph as a vital figure of American popular music.
In 1958, Billie Holiday began work on an ambitious album called Lady in Satin. Accompanied by a full orchestra for the first time in her career and nervous, she was often late to rehearsal, drunk, or both. However, no amount of alcohol could make her voice blend seamlessly with the orchestra. After the album's release, critics unleashed their disappointment in striking fashion even as the public loved what she delivered. The Kansas City Star downgraded her voice, saying it "isn't what it used to be." The Los Angeles Times was more direct in their analysis, calling the album "sad," while the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Lady in Satin was "a [disturbing] experience for those who heard her when she was really singing."
Journalist Paul Alexander explains what the critics missed. "All the suffering, all the heartache was reflected in the damaged, tortured voice captured on the album." In his biography Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year, he characterizes the aged musician as vocally weak yet popular and revered, loved by many, but not, perhaps, by herself.
Billie Holiday was an important figure in my house. She was the first black singer to be popularized in the era of Jim Crow, but more importantly, she owned a deep racial conscience. She once said, "I'm proud of those two strikes [being a woman and black]. I'm proud of being a Negro." Despite her popularity, she was not spared the indignities of Jim Crow prejudice; anti-black racism amplified her scars and triggered her vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, her influence was so significant Frank Sinatra valorized her accomplishments: "[She] still remains the greatest single musical influence on me." Lady Day, as she was first called by saxophonist Lester Young (almost immediately thereafter everyone in the industry referred to her as "Lady"), was celebrated by audiences whenever she took the stage in her floor-length glittery evening gown, belting out tunes in her haunting voice.
She was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia in 1915. Her father, Clarence Holiday, was an immature adolescent who abandoned his responsibility, so Eleanora was raised by her mother Sadie, a housekeeper. At the age of ten, Eleanora was raped by a man named Wilbert Rich, her neighbor. Sadie interrupted the assault and called the police but Rich only served three months in jail.
To honor her father and her favorite actress Billie Dove (the stage name of Lillian Bohny), Eleanora changed her name to Billie Holiday. Her first singing gig was at a cabaret jazz club called Pod's and Jerry's. A columnist noticed her right away. "She was then about fifteen. She was dressed in a skirt and sweater, and she was barefoot. People gave her quarters and change to sing requests." Her first recording session was with Benny Goodman, who had never recorded with a Negro musician. She remembered, "I got there and I was afraid to sing in the mic because I never saw a microphone before…I was scared to death of it."
Café Society opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village and hired Billie as its headliner. Thrilled, she had no idea when she began performing there that she was under surveillance by the FBI because of her popularity and communist ties, which led to her being pursued and arrested on drug charges. She later wrote, "[M]y life has been made miserable. These people have dogged my footsteps from New York to San Francisco and all the territory in between."
She was appropriately fearful of being arrested again and coped by seeking the company of immoral and violent loser men, who didn't spare an opportunity to demean her, steal her money, or enable her drug use. What was tragic was not the male toxicity she was exposed to in itself but the desperate circumstances behind her allowance of it. She wanted to be a mother but adoption agencies turned her down because of her criminal record. The men she chose therefore became an ideation of her maternal fantasies. She took their abuse. She abused herself. Rinse. Repeat. The children were never born.
Billie's relevance returns annually whenever "Strange Fruit" (see Beyond the Book) is either sung or discussed during Black History Month. Nearly seventy years after her death, this points to her longevity in pop culture circles, a rarity for a jazz singer. "Strange Fruit" is her best-selling song and Alexander devotes an entire chapter to its rich history. His stirring prose evokes a camera following Billie all over the world. Billie at the Blue Note. Billie at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Billie at the Chatterbox Musical Bar.
"No matter what the motherfuckers do to you, never let them see you cry" is one of my favorite Billie quotes resurrected in this biography because of the perception it creates, that Billie Holiday was confident — and she was at times. But her insecurities were pronounced. Male abandonment beginning with her father, whose name she carried, triggered self-loathing that drugs, alcohol, and violent men only exaggerated. The aggressive and continued harassment of government agencies until her death affected her. She once told Parisian friends she was going to die between two cops, a sort of joke. But not a joke.
Here's something to understand about Alexander's biography of Billie: He isn't in awe of her, and therefore treats her like one would the non-famous if they earned the right to a public biography. As Oscar Wilde said, "be yourself, everyone else is already taken," and Billie is herself in Alexander's biography. But here's where my mind drifted. I thought of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with a layer of gold dust. If only that could apply to the human soul, to someone like Billie. Painting gold over her deep scars as relief. But that would be reductive and miss the essence of Lady Day.
Her signature look was a white gardenia tucked behind her ear and it made a memorable statement for nearly three decades. When her voice was gone, the flower disappeared too. As if she knew the gardenia no longer fit her life. A more appropriate choice at this point would have been a yarrow: A cluster of small white blooms that survives in neglect, that is resilient and a beautiful color.
Reviewed by Valerie Morales
Dan Morgenstern, executive director emeritus, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University
Don Winslow, New York Times best-selling author of City of Dreams
Gloria Steinem, award-winning author and political activist
In February 1959, Billie Holiday sang the anti-lynching song she popularized, "Strange Fruit," on the London television show Chelsea at Nine. She was battling liver disease because of a prodigious vodka and gin addiction. It was rare for Billie to sing "Strange Fruit" when she was this physically fragile.
"She just needed a reason to sing it," notes journalist Paul Alexander, author of Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year.
As Billie was known to do, she exaggerated the facts that night, telling the London audience it was a song written just for her. It wasn't.
"Strange Fruit" began as a poem titled "Bitter Fruit." It was written by a Russian Jew named Abel Meeropol, a Harvard University alum who taught high-school English in the Bronx. Meeropol was a member of the Communist Party beginning in 1932 and a writer whose pen name was Lewis Allan, taken from the names of his stillborn children. Like many communists, Meeropol believed strongly in racial equality. One day, as he was perusing a civil rights magazine, he came across a photograph of a lynching party that made him sick to his stomach. Lynching, the people who were responsible for its entrenchment, and those who profited from it centered his rage.
The photograph was taken in Marion, Indiana by a man named Lawrence Beitler. Hanging from trees were two innocent black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been accused of raping a white woman. Meeropol was emotionally overwrought after seeing the photograph and began writing. The poem "Bitter Fruit" was published in a teaching journal, and later he decided to turn it into a song that was then sung at leftist meetings, often by Meeropol's wife Anne. A black woman named Laura Duncan sang it in 1938 at Madison Square Garden. But Meeropol wanted a larger audience. He knew the owner of the Greenwich Village jazz club Café Society and trusted him.
The lyrics are haunting: Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees/Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh/And the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Right before Billie sang "Strange Fruit" for the first time, everything in Café Society quieted to a hush. The waiters and busboys were noiseless figures along the wall. The lightless room with only her face drowning in a pearly light was oddly melodramatic but appropriate considering the lyrics. Billie sang the song with her eyes closed, as if visited by the lynched, as if they were her father and brother. By the end, tears were streaming from eye to chin. When she finished, according to biographer David Margolick, "the lights went out, she was to walk off the stage, and no matter how thunderous the ovation, she was never to return for a bow."
She wanted to record the song. Her record company, Columbia Records, refused but allowed her to record it elsewhere as a compromise. After its release, the black newspaper The New York Age wrote that "Strange Fruit" was "believed to be the first phonograph recording in America of a popular song that has lynching as its theme." Time magazine said it was "a prime piece of musical propaganda" with "grim and gripping lyrics." Many consider "Strange Fruit" the symbolic start to the civil rights movement.
Although radio stations refused to play "Strange Fruit," it sold ten thousand copies its first week of release and reached number 16 on the popular charts.
Twenty years later on Chelsea at Nine, there Billie Holiday was in a sparkly gray dress and high-heeled shoes. She sang "Strange Fruit" impressively considering her illness. Her voice was mournful and vibrant and at the song's end — here is a strange and bitter crop — she was frozen in place as the applause echoed in her ears. She had leaned into the lyrics as if telling a painful story about her own sad life and her narration was stirring. As the audience cheered, she may have had no inkling of sand running through the hourglass. Time was fleeting. This would be the last time Lady Day was seen on television, After the performance, she went to a party to celebrate her appearance and later left London in a pleasant mood. Three months later, the famous Billie Holiday would be dead.
But "Strange Fruit" was for the ages. Time magazine, who had once labeled the song propaganda, in 1999 called it the "song of the century."
Filed under Music and the Arts
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs.
The triumphant story of how an all-Black Broadway cast and crew changed musical theatre—and the world—forever.
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