[150 years ago this week, the great W.C. Handy was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Handy and other icons of the Blues, leading up to a special weekend post on some contemporary Blues greats!]
On
AmericanStudies takeaways from the two versions of Lady Sings the Blues, and one important additional layer to both of
them.
Billie Holliday (1915-1959) was only 41
years old when she published her autobiography Lady
Sings the Blues (ghost written by journalist William
Dufty) in 1956, but she had already been performing and recording, living
her fraught life in the public eye, for nearly three decades by that time. That
can mean a couple very different things for an autobiography, I’d say: it can
represent a chance to radically revise public perceptions; or it can offer an
opportunity for the famous person to capitalize on that public interest by
leaning into the more mythic images. Holliday and Dufty seem to have done more
of the latter, at least as biographer John Szwed argues in his 2015 book Billie
Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, leaving out a number of more
complicated and potentially controversial stories (such as Holliday’s affair
with Orson Welles) that would have certainly shifted public perceptions. If
so, that puts Holiday squarely in the tradition of some of America’s
foundational, mythmaking autobiographers, from Ben
Franklin on down the line.
What
neither Ben Franklin nor most of those other autobiographers did (nor were able
to do of course) was put out an album with the same title to accompany their
book, however. Also released in 1956, Holiday’s album Lady
Sings the Blues featured four new songs (including a title track) and new
recordings of eight prior hits, including my
personal favorite (and a contender for the most important American song) “Strange Fruit.” In that
new title track Holiday sings that “She tells her side/Nothing to hide/Now the
world will know/Just what her blues is about,” and while that might seem to
contradict what I said about her autobiography, I would argue something
different: that this song makes clear that it is through her music, rather than
her book or perhaps even her life, that Holliday has shared “her side” and “her
blues,” the most meaningful layers to her perspective and life. If so, that
would make Holiday a musical version of a
confessional poet (much like
Sylvia Plath, who was just beginning her own publishing career around this
exact moment), an artist whose identity can be found in complex but crucial
ways in their works.
Every part
of those works and that career and life were Holiday’s own, and a reflection of
her unique and prodigious talents. But it is interesting to add into the conversation
the role of other artists in helping create many of these texts, from Dufty
with the autobiography to songwriters like Abel
Meeropol, the Jewish teacher from the Bronx who adapted his own poem about
lynching into
“Strange Fruit.” I’ve written a number of times in this space about the counter-cultural
origins and influences
on a genre like
rock ‘n roll, and of course the blues itself was one of those influences. But
blues likewise developed in a cross-cultural and combinatory way, with amazing
African American artists like Holiday and the rest of this week’s focal figures
at the heart but with important contributions from many others as well,
including lots of white artists. Highlighting those histories doesn’t take
anything away from Holiday, and instead makes clear how much she was an iconic
part of longstanding and ongoing trends in American music, popular culture, and
society.
Next Blues
icon tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Blues figures or contexts you’d highlight?
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