Reading journal - Lady Sings the Blues
Yesterday, I finished Billie Holidays autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. It opens like this:
Mom and were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.
Mom was working as a maid with a white family. When they found out she was going to have a baby they just threw her out. Pop's family just about had a fit, too, when they heard about it. They were real society folks and they never heard of things like that going on in their part of East Baltimore.
But both kids were poor. And when you're poor, you grow up fast.
I think this book is one of my favorite reads from 2025. I know it's technically 2026 now, but since I began in 25 and finished the 3rd I'm counting it as 25. The story of Billie Holiday is not an easy one to tell. It's a story about poverty, about battling with drug misuse, dealing with a racist system as a black woman in the early 1900s, and about police brutality. It is also a story about love, about great talent, and about still finding a way no matter how hard things are. It's not a self-help style, "rise to the top no matter what"-story; anyone who tries to reframe Billie Holiday through this perspective are gravely misunderstanding her. It's a story about surviving.
Billie takes us through almost everything. From going from door to door as a child begging someone to pay her dirt to scrub their stairs, to several sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. From being arrested as a ten year old because another man tried to rape her (!) to still being harassed by police as an international star 40 years later. She writes about touring with Count Basie and Artie Shaw in the 30s, how she came up with the nickname "Prez" for Lester Young, and how he came up with hers.
Almost every day there was an "incident". In a Boston joint, they wouldn't let me go in the front door; they wanted me to come in the back way. The cats in the band flipped and said, "If Lady doesn't go in the front door, the band doesn't go in at all." So they caved.
It's worth noting that this book isn't exactly true. Lady took a lot of creative freedoms in her interview with William Dufty. In a sense, she really stressed the idea that one should be allowed to own ones story, and Dufty didn't try to stop her. For one thing, Lady's parents were never actually married, and her mother was 19 at the time of her birth. Still, there is something about this book that I find intriguing, especially for an autobiography; in a sense, it paints a picture of Lady's perception of herself, not an objective observer perceives her. It's sort of as how Mingus paints a perception of himself with Beneath the Underdog, though Lady's book is far less pornographic.
I think that getting hooked on dope killed my own mother. It sure helped, anyway. And I think if a child of mine got hooked it would kill me. I don't have the strength to watch anybody else go through the torture I went through to get clean and stay clean.
All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long slow hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you. And that's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
I recommend anyone who is interested in jazz history read this book. It's short, fits in your pocket, is written like a story, not a report. It's told with a very verbal language, making it feel more like a conversation with someone over a coffee than any sort of historical documentation of a person. In a sense, it's an embodiment of jazz.
A great story from a great singer. Nothing more, nothing less.