Classic Music Profiles - A Look At Some Older Music

Necro · 06-19-2009, 04:18 AM

Well I've recently started to get into some classic type music, and have been viewing some history of the people I listen to. With younger members I thought it might be fun to get to know some of the older singers. Anyway, my first one is going to be Billie Holiday, and do a lot of other ones as well. Some of you I'm sure will of course know the ones I post, but others might be diving into something totally new to them.

Billie Holiday

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Necro · 06-19-2009, 04:38 AM

Billie Holiday

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Quote:

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora One who likes the same sexan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Above all, she was admired for her deeply personal and intimate approach to singing. Critic John Bush wrote that she "changed the art of American pop vocals forever." She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably "God Bless the Child", "Don't Explain", and "Lady Sings the Blues". She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including "Easy Living" and "Strange Fruit."

Birth name: Eleanora One who likes the same sexan
Also known as: Lady Day, Queen of Song
Born: April 7, 1915(1915-04-07)
Origin: Harlem, New York City
Died: July 17, 1959 (aged 44)
Genre(s): Jazz, vocal jazz, jazz blues, torch songs, ballads, swing
Occupation(s): Jazz singer, composer
Instrument(s): Vocals
Years active: 1930s-1959
Label(s): Columbia (1933-1942, 1958), Commodore (1939, 1944), Decca (1944-1950), Verve (1952-1959), MGM (1959)

Select studio albums:

Billie Holiday Sings (Clef MGC 118, 1952) reissued as Solitude (Clef MGC 690; Verve MGV 8074, 1956)
An Evening with Billie Holiday (Clef MGC 144, 1953)
Lady Sings the Blues (Verve MGC 721, 1956)
Body and Soul (Verve MGV 8197, 1957)
Songs for Distingué Lovers (Verve MGV 8257, 1957)
All or Nothing at All (Verve MGV 8329, 1958)
Lady in Satin (Columbia CL 1157, 1958)

Quote:

Early Life

Raised Roman Catholic,[3] Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood, which greatly affected her life and career. Not much is known about the true details of her early life, though stories of it appeared in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, first published in 1956 and later revealed to contain many inaccuracies.

Early singing career

According to Billie Holiday's own account, she was recruited by a brothel, worked as a prostitute in 1930, and was eventually imprisoned for a short time for solicitation. It was in Harlem in the early 1930s that she started singing for tips in various night clubs. According to legend, penniless and facing eviction, she sang "Travelin All Alone" in a local club and reduced the audience to tears. She later worked at various clubs for tips, ultimately landing at Pod's and Jerry's, a well known Harlem jazz club. Her early work history is hard to verify, though accounts say she was working at a club named Monette's in 1933 when she was discovered by talent scout John Hammond.[8]

Hammond arranged for Holiday to make her recording debut in November 1933 with Benny Goodman singing two songs: "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the Scotch". Goodman was also on hand in 1935, when she continued her recording career with a group led by pianist Teddy Wilson. Their first collaboration included "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "Miss Brown To You", which helped to establish Holiday as a major vocalist. She began recording under her own name a year later, producing a series of extraordinary performances with groups comprising the swing era's finest musicians.

Wilson was signed to Brunswick Records by John Hammond for the purpose of recording current pop tunes in the new Swing style for the growing jukebox trade. They were given free rein to improvise the material. Holiday's amazing method of improvising the melody line to fit the emotion was revolutionary. (Wilson and Holiday took pedestrian pop tunes like "Twenty-Four Hours A Day" or "Yankee Doodle Never Went To Town" and turned them into jazz classics with their arrangements.) With few exceptions, the recordings she made with Wilson or under her own name during the 1930s and early 1940s are regarded as important parts of the jazz vocal library.

Billie also wrote songs during the 1930s. Such songs include "Billie's Blues", "Tell Me More (And Then Some)", "Everything Happens For The Best", "Our Love Is Different", and "Long Gone Blues".

Among the musicians who accompanied her frequently was tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had been a boarder at her mother's house in 1934 and with whom she had a special rapport. "Well, I think you can hear that on some of the old records, you know. Some time I'd sit down and listen to 'em myself, and it sound like two of the same voices, if you don't be careful, you know, or the same mind, or something like that."[9] Young nicknamed her "Lady Day" and she, in turn, dubbed him "Prez." She did a three-month residency at Clark Monroe's Uptown House in New York in 1937. In the late 1930s, she also had brief stints as a big band vocalist with Count Basie (1937) and Artie Shaw (1938). The latter association placed her among the first black women to work with a white orchestra, an arrangement that went against the tenor of the times.

The Commodore years and "Strange Fruit"

Holiday was recording for Columbia in the late 1930s when she was introduced to "Strange Fruit", a song based on a poem about lynching written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Meeropol used the pseudonym "Lewis Allan" for the poem, which was set to music and performed at teachers' union meetings. It was eventually heard by Barney Josephson, proprietor of Café Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, who introduced it to Holiday. She performed it at the club in 1939, with some trepidation, fearing possible retaliation. Holiday later said that the imagery in "Strange Fruit" reminded her of her father's death, and that this played a role in her resistance to performing it. In a 1958 interview, she also bemoaned the fact that many people did not grasp the song's message: "They'll ask me to 'sing that sexy song about the people swinging'", she said.[10]

When Holiday's producers at Columbia found the subject matter too sensitive, Milt Gabler agreed to record it for his Commodore Records. That was done in April, 1939 and "Strange Fruit" remained in her repertoire for twenty years. She later recorded it again for Verve. While the Commodore release did not get airplay, the controversial song sold well, though Gabler attributed that mostly to the record's other side, "Fine and Mellow", which was a jukebox hit.[11]

Decca Years and "Lover Man" (1944-1950)

In addition to owning Commodore Records, Milt Gabler was an A&R man for Decca Records, and he signed Holiday to the label in 1944 when Holiday was 29. Her first recording for Decca, "Lover Man" and "No More". "Lover Man" was a song written especially for her by Jimmy Davis, Roger "Ram" Ramirez, and Jimmy Sherman. Although its lyrics describe a woman who has never known love ("I long to try something I never had"), its theme—a woman longing for a missing lover—and its refrain, "Lover man, oh, where can you be?", struck a chord in wartime America and the record became one of her biggest hits.

A month later in November, Billie Holiday returned to the Decca studio to record three songs, "That Ole Devil Called Love", "Big Stuff", and "Dont Explain". Holiday wrote "Don't Explain" after she caught her husband, Jimmy Monroe, with lipstick on his collar.

After the recording session, Holiday didn't return back to the studio until August 1945. She recorded, "Don't Explain", "Big Stuff", "You Better Go Now", and "What is This Thing Called Love?". Big Stuff and Don't Explain were recorded again but with an additional strings, and a viola.

This is Holiday's only recording session in 1945, for she returned again back to the studio back in January of 1946, recording here biggest hits, "No Good Man" and "Good Morning Heartache". "Big Stuff" was also recorded for the third time. She came back on March 13, 1946 to record "Big Stuff" with a smaller group.

At the end of the year in December, Billie recorded "The Blues Are Brewin", a song that she in her first and last feature film, New Orleans. She also recorded "Guilty".

In February of 1947, Holiday recorded two hits, "There Is No Greater Love" and the haunting "Deep Song". She also recorded "Solitude" and "Easy Living", songs that she recorded with Teddy Wilson in the last 30's.

Billie's next recording was after her release from prison in 1948. She recorded this time with a vocal group behind her (The Stardusters). She recorded "Weep No More" and "Girls Were Made to Take Care of Boys". Worried that people wouldn't like the recordings, they recorded two more songs without the group. These singles became one of her biggest hits on Decca. She recorded, "My Man" and Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy".

The next year, Billie had a streak of hits. From her brassy rendition of Bessie Smith's, "T'Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do", "Gimme A Pigfoot (And A Bottle of Beer)", "Do Your Duty", and "Keeps on Rainin'", to her lush "You're My Thrill" and "Crazy He Calls Me". She also recorded a song that she wrote called ,"Sombody's On My Mind".

In her last recording in 1950, she recorded two songs. Both of them were backed by strings, horns, and a choir. She recorded her own "God Bless the
Child" and "This is Heaven to Me".

1947 arrest and Carnegie Hall comeback concert:

On May 16, 1947, Holiday was arrested for the possession of narcotics and drugs in her New York apartment. On May 27, 1947, she was in court. "It was called 'The United States of America versus Billie Holiday'. And that's just the way it felt," Holiday recalled in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Holiday pleaded guilty and was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. Holiday said she never "sang a note" at Alderson even though people wanted her to.

Luckily for Holiday, she was released early (March 16, 1948) due to good behavior. When she arrived at Newark, everybody was there to welcome her back, including her pianist Bobby Tucker. "I might just as well have wheeled into Penn Station and had a quiet little get-together with the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service."

Ed Fishman (who fought with Joe Glaser to be Holiday's manager) thought of the idea to throw a comeback concert at Carnegie Hall. Holiday hesitated at the idea because she thought that nobody would accept her back, but she decided to go with the idea.

On March 27, 1948, the Carnegie concert was a success. Everything was sold out before the concert started. It isn't certain how many sets Holiday did. She did sing Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and "Strange Fruit". The concert was not recorded.

Death

On May 31, 1959, she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying and her hospital room was raided by authorities.[12] Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her person.

Some Songs:

Fine and Mellow (1957)

Interesting Note - "Fine and Mellow" is a jazz standard written by Billie Holiday,[1] who first recorded it on April 20, 1939 on the Commodore label.[2] It is a blues lamenting the bad treatment of a woman at the hands of "my man".

God Bless The Child

"God Bless the Child" is a song written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939, first recorded on May 9, 1941 under the Okeh label.

Holiday's version of the song was honored with the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in (1976).[1] It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lady Sings the Blues

It is the title song to her 1956 album, released on Clef/Verve Records (MGC 721/Verve MV 2047).

The song was also chosen to be the title of a movie based on Billie Holiday's life, with Diana Ross as Holiday.

Her voice to me is so moving. She had such a short life, filled with drug abuse, being physically abused, just a lot of turmoil. But listening to her music combined with all the instruments is just unbelievable.