Julie Blackburn

If Billie Holiday had been able to steer her way past the troubles of her middle life into old age, then she would be celebrating her 90th birthday this April. “She couldn’t stand to look at the people,” remembers a friend. “But when there’s a pin on her, she can’t see them and there’s not really an audience, it’s like a living room.” The pianist Bobby Tucker, one of the few from the old days who is still alive, was very aware of Holiday’s fears. He remembered the occasion when she was being presented with an award and the house lights were suddenly turned on and “she literally froze, her voice was shaking, she was trembling”. This fear was always visible to the people who knew her well, but it was part of her strength, part of the energy of concentration. She said: “The time when you go out there on stage and you’re not nervous, that’s when you’re gonna stink.”

There are some people who believe that Holiday did all her best work during the Columbia years between 1937 and 1944, when her songs were bursting with a wild joy and defiance. Holiday, however, saw it differently. She knew she had never had a good voice in the sense that Ella Fitzgerald had a good voice, but she also knew that she could do lyrics and that was what mattered. And the more life she had lived the deeper and more powerful those lyrics became. “I’ve got stories about music,” she’d say, “and that means I can sing the top of a song.” When she was in Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital, with only a few more days to live, she said with her usual laconic humour, and no trace of irony: “I’m in the best voice in my life!” To return to Stump Daddy: “Lady Day was a tremendous mental musical being. She knew about the creative value of music. She’d come out of the sky with something and she could crack your skull with a riff.”

My book on Billie Holiday is based on a collection of tape-recorded interviews made in the 1970s with people who knew her. I have let some of the most interesting or eloquent speakers tell their own story of who she was and what she meant to them. As I worked with these interviews I began to see a very different person to the drug-riddled victim of her own vices so often and so flippantly described on CD covers and elsewhere. Certainly Holiday took drugs, as did many other musicians at that time. She started with marijuana in the days when it was legal and alcohol was prohibited, and for a while she and Louis Armstrong were known as the King and Queen of the Marijuana People. She could “drink enough for 10 men”; she mixed the booze with pills and cocaine and eventually, around 1943, with heroin, although

towards the end of her life she tended to rely on alcohol when she needed to drown her sorrows. As her pianist Mal Waldran explained: “Faults? Well of course she drank too much... she wouldn’t stop drinking and she never did really stick the dope habit. But Lady Day had an awful lot to forget.”

There were many things Holiday wanted to forget, but undoubtedly the most traumatic was the experience of imprisonment. At the age of nine, she had been sent to a reform school; at 15, she was incarcerated on New York’s notorious Welfare Island; and then in 1947, when her career was at its peak, she was arrested on a drugs charge and sentenced to a year and a day at a Federal Reformatory for Women in West Virginia. Apparently the drugs were not really the problem, but there was anger about her insistence on singing the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit”, even when she was warned against it, and there was anger at the way she mixed so easily with white people as well as black, and the way she “dragged her mink around” as if she didn’t care about its value. That first arrest was followed by several others, including the last and most horrific one in 1959, when Holiday was in hospital.

After her release from prison in 1948, Holiday was denied her Cabaret Card and in spite of

repeated applications, she never got it back. This meant that for the last 11 years of her life, she was not able to sing in any New York club that held a liquor licence. She lost the main source of her income and was forced to go on endless, gruelling tours. But right until the end she remained an absolute professional in her work. I’ll give the last word to pianist and composer Irene Kitchings, who had known Holiday since 1934. She said very simply: “Once Billie got big, it didn’t matter to her. All she wanted was to have some decent music to accompany her and the people to be quiet and listen to her sing... Singing was all she knew how to do. That’s all that made her real happy.”

Julia Blackburn’s With Billie is published by Jonathan Cape on April 7. — The Guardian