What Are You Listening To?
- Thread starter MariahLynn
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Mindmelted
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Mindmelted
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Mindmelted
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Mindmelted
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Alpha & Omega
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Wavels
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Billie Holiday was born on April 7 1915. One hundred years ago today.
Sorry for my pedantic nature but I am passionate about American music.
I cannot help myself, especially once I have a bowl or two up my snoot!
The following are some excerpts from a piece saluting Ms. Holiday.
Some of you may find them interesting, or not!
Excerpted from: http://www.steynonline.com/6896/dont-explain
The end came on July 17th 1959 in the Metropolitan Hospital in New York. Billie had been admitted at the end of May, for liver and heart disease, as well as a few other ravages to which the typical self-destructive artist is prone and which a sentimental public tends to lump under the catch-all category of "the price of fame". When they found out she was in the hospital, the NYPD busted her for possession of narcotics and installed guards in her room lest she flee jurisdiction. A few hours before her death, the cops were ejected from her bedside by court order - and then she did, indeed, flee jurisdiction, permanently. She was 44 and died with 70 cents in her bank account.
She went out more or less the way she came in a century ago today. Her autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, published three years earlier, has one of the great opening sentences of any celeb memoir:
Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.
Close enough. In fact, Mom and Pop never married, never even lived together. And, when Billie was three, "Pop" (not a name she ever called him) was 20, and Mom was 22. There are at least two versions of every episode in Lady Day's life. I've heard a lot of them over the years, from Artie Shaw, Toots Camarata and many others, and the narrative only gets more dispiriting with the inconsistencies. In the last 50 years, it's withered to a grim shorthand - loveless childhood, rape, prostitution, heroin, racism, and a signature song about a lynching:
Southern trees bear a Strange Fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange Fruit hanging from the poplar trees...
In the early Thirties, she was the first female singer to figure out, as Bing Crosby had done, that the microphone changed everything. In turn, she became a key influence on Frank Sinatra. People are sometimes a little befuddled by that, but it's true: In 1939, Down Beat magazine ran a great photo of the young Frank listening rapt to Miss Holiday at the Off-Beat in Chicago. He first saw her "standing under a spotlight in a 52nd Street jazz spot" - the Uptown House. "I was dazzled by her soft, breathtaking beauty," said Sinatra. But "influence"? He doesn't sound like her, does he? No, but he learned a lot about phrasing and nuance from her, and you can hear it in a lot of records, from his 1945 "You Go To My Head" to the Holidayesque intonation on "then" in his 1961 recording of "Yesterdays". Everyone acknowledges her greatness today, but Frank did it when she was around to hear it. A year before her death, he told Britain's Melody Maker:
Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular music in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the United States during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius.
......................................................................................................................................................................
"I saw the lipstick," she said. "He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch."
She cut him off in mid-flow. "Take a bath, man," she told him. "Don't explain." So Jimmy took her advice. But the words "Don't explain" somehow lodged in her head and declined to leave. "I had to get it out of my system some way," she recalled later. "The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases to myself":
Hush now, Don't Explain
Just say you'll remain
I'm glad you're bad
Don't Explain...
..........................................................................................................................................................................
In her prose poem, Don't Explain: A Song Of Billie Holiday, Alexis De Veaux writes:
Pain can be washed out with a song
Pain can become jazz digested and transformed...
"Jazz-digested" is a good way of putting it. In a too short life, pain consumed Billie Holiday, and jazz in turn digested and transformed her pain. She was a great jazz singer and, as Sinatra recognized, a consummate pop singer. Don't try to explain her; listen to her.
Sorry for my pedantic nature but I am passionate about American music.
I cannot help myself, especially once I have a bowl or two up my snoot!
The following are some excerpts from a piece saluting Ms. Holiday.
Some of you may find them interesting, or not!
Excerpted from: http://www.steynonline.com/6896/dont-explain
The end came on July 17th 1959 in the Metropolitan Hospital in New York. Billie had been admitted at the end of May, for liver and heart disease, as well as a few other ravages to which the typical self-destructive artist is prone and which a sentimental public tends to lump under the catch-all category of "the price of fame". When they found out she was in the hospital, the NYPD busted her for possession of narcotics and installed guards in her room lest she flee jurisdiction. A few hours before her death, the cops were ejected from her bedside by court order - and then she did, indeed, flee jurisdiction, permanently. She was 44 and died with 70 cents in her bank account.
She went out more or less the way she came in a century ago today. Her autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, published three years earlier, has one of the great opening sentences of any celeb memoir:
Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.
Close enough. In fact, Mom and Pop never married, never even lived together. And, when Billie was three, "Pop" (not a name she ever called him) was 20, and Mom was 22. There are at least two versions of every episode in Lady Day's life. I've heard a lot of them over the years, from Artie Shaw, Toots Camarata and many others, and the narrative only gets more dispiriting with the inconsistencies. In the last 50 years, it's withered to a grim shorthand - loveless childhood, rape, prostitution, heroin, racism, and a signature song about a lynching:
Southern trees bear a Strange Fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange Fruit hanging from the poplar trees...
In the early Thirties, she was the first female singer to figure out, as Bing Crosby had done, that the microphone changed everything. In turn, she became a key influence on Frank Sinatra. People are sometimes a little befuddled by that, but it's true: In 1939, Down Beat magazine ran a great photo of the young Frank listening rapt to Miss Holiday at the Off-Beat in Chicago. He first saw her "standing under a spotlight in a 52nd Street jazz spot" - the Uptown House. "I was dazzled by her soft, breathtaking beauty," said Sinatra. But "influence"? He doesn't sound like her, does he? No, but he learned a lot about phrasing and nuance from her, and you can hear it in a lot of records, from his 1945 "You Go To My Head" to the Holidayesque intonation on "then" in his 1961 recording of "Yesterdays". Everyone acknowledges her greatness today, but Frank did it when she was around to hear it. A year before her death, he told Britain's Melody Maker:
Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular music in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the United States during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius.
......................................................................................................................................................................
"I saw the lipstick," she said. "He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch."
She cut him off in mid-flow. "Take a bath, man," she told him. "Don't explain." So Jimmy took her advice. But the words "Don't explain" somehow lodged in her head and declined to leave. "I had to get it out of my system some way," she recalled later. "The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases to myself":
Hush now, Don't Explain
Just say you'll remain
I'm glad you're bad
Don't Explain...
..........................................................................................................................................................................
In her prose poem, Don't Explain: A Song Of Billie Holiday, Alexis De Veaux writes:
Pain can be washed out with a song
Pain can become jazz digested and transformed...
"Jazz-digested" is a good way of putting it. In a too short life, pain consumed Billie Holiday, and jazz in turn digested and transformed her pain. She was a great jazz singer and, as Sinatra recognized, a consummate pop singer. Don't try to explain her; listen to her.
Last edited:
Wavels
Well-Known Member
CBS has blocked your content...them bastids, I like Amy who also died waaaay tooo young!!!
Mr. Bongwater
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great songs
Blue Wizard
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Alpha & Omega
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Alpha & Omega
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Alpha & Omega
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Alpha & Omega
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Alpha & Omega
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