Billie’s Blues

I remember Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit around the eddying cigarette smoke of Café Society Downtown. It was a Popular Front song about lynching (“Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”) sung for a Popular Front audience in a Greenwich Village nightclub. But it had its power and its validity in the exquisite torture of her singing, in the ungainly beauty of a dark face flatly delineated by the baby spots.

Those were great days for Billie Holiday, when jazz was the real and the true, when she was recording against the background of Teddy Wilson’s delicate suspensions of rhythm, the outburst of Artie Shaw’s clarinet, the plaintive alto saxophone of Johnny Hodges, or the clear, sweet tone of Bunny Berigan’s cornet. Those were the days of Billie’s Blues, out of the deep South via Harlem, of Summertime, in pounding accents which would have startled George Gershwin, of two wonderfully evocative pop tunes, Easy Living and Foolin’ Myself. They can be heard on Columbia’s Lady Day album (CL. 637)—and should be heard because this was Billie before the demons moved in.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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I remember Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit around the eddying cigarette smoke of Café Society Downtown. It was a Popular Front song about lynching (“Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”) sung for a Popular Front audience in a Greenwich Village nightclub. But it had its power and its validity in the exquisite torture of her singing, in the ungainly beauty of a dark face flatly delineated by the baby spots.

Those were great days for Billie Holiday, when jazz was the real and the true, when she was recording against the background of Teddy Wilson’s delicate suspensions of rhythm, the outburst of Artie Shaw’s clarinet, the plaintive alto saxophone of Johnny Hodges, or the clear, sweet tone of Bunny Berigan’s cornet. Those were the days of Billie’s Blues, out of the deep South via Harlem, of Summertime, in pounding accents which would have startled George Gershwin, of two wonderfully evocative pop tunes, Easy Living and Foolin’ Myself. They can be heard on Columbia’s Lady Day album (CL. 637)—and should be heard because this was Billie before the demons moved in.