Our Lady of the Gardenias

Is she the most celebrated and most revered African American woman in history? Perhaps, maybe after Harriet Tubman, but Billie Holiday (1915-1959) is definitely part of the Black Herstory pantheon. I imagine, after highlighting more obscure historical figures, I didn't need to post on a more popular icon like Lady Day. But, if I'm going to do a proper Black Herstory series, I need to commemorate those widely known alongside the lessser known. Besides, how many of us really know the woman behind the gardenias and her unique voice and style in singing jazz and the blues?

Holiday (née Eleanora Fagan) has one of those tragic life stories that seem to follow in the trajectory of the blues woman: born in poverty in Philadelphia before settling in Baltimore, raised by a single mother, abandoned by an absentee father (whose surname Holiday she took for her stage name), raped by the time she was 11, sent to a Catholic reform school after making these allegations and being perceived as a wild child, and moving to New York City with her mother in 1928 where she would again experience sexual assault, which her mother reacted to by turning in her perpetrator.

While Holiday's "autobiography," Lady Sings the Blues, is viewed as an inconsistent and fabricated life story, I do wonder if we should not allow an individual to tell her own story the way she wants to. Indeed, in this book, Holiday reveals that she was recruited to work as a prostitute in a brothel and spent some time in jail. During the 1930s, she started singing for tips in nightclubs in Harlem and once reduced her audience to tears when singing "Travelin' All Alone." When one listens to her voice, this is not hard to believe. In a recent biography by Farah Jasmine Griffin, titled If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery, the argument is made that Holiday deliberately creates a mystery out of her persona as a way to counter the limitations of her race and gender.

In 1935, she made her screen debut in Duke Ellington's "soundie" (early version of the music video), Symphony in Black. Although Holiday is unceremoniously dumped by her lover as the "other woman," what I find remarkable in this footage (see below) is the way Holiday's voice holds its own against the other masters of the trumpet and trombone (Ellington strategically features Holiday's vocals for a segment in his symphony called "The Blues").



However, four years later, Holiday would be approached to sing and eventually record what Time Magazine calls the song of the 20th century: "Strange Fruit."



In 1938, a progressive interracial Greenwich Village nightclub called the Café Society invited Holiday to sing a song composed by Lewis Allen (ne Abel Meerpol), a Jewish songwriter who was politically progressive and a member of the Communist Party, which described the grotesqueries of a Southern lynching through the metaphor of "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." Eventually, in April 1939, she recorded with Commodore Records her haunting rendition of the antilynching song after her record company, Columbia Records, refused to issue this controversial piece. She defined "Strange Fruit" as her signature song and eagerly performed it as a form of protest, as well as a proud "race woman."

Regardless of the mysteries surrounding her life - including rumors of her bisexuality as well as documented accounts of her drug abuse, most notably heroine addiction - we may be able to glean something about her life through the songs she sang and especially the way she sang. As Angela Y. Davis argues in her book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Holiday sang with an "ironic edge," whether singing sentimental love songs or political lyrics. “In the music, in her phrasing, her timing, the timbre of her voice, the social roots of pain and despair in women’s emotional lives are given a lyrical legibility” (Davis, 177).




Holiday, who professed that she never got in trouble with the law over her drug problems until she "tried to get off," died of a drug overdose at the young age of 44. Yet, she will not be so easily forgotten. The year that she died, a commemorative ballet number by John Butler, in the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, was choreographed, titled "A Portrait of Billie" (left image) . Then, in 1972, Hollywood made a movie based on her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (starring Diana Ross, who was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lady Day). For a brutally sharp and tough woman with a brutally honest singing voice, Holiday comes off in this film version as a sad, tragic, weak individual who, despite these flaws, was so revered by her adoring public. As James Baldwin so aptly puts it in his film review in The Devil Finds Work: "The film suggests nothing of the terrifying economics of a singer's life, and you will not learn, from the film, that Billie received no royalties for the records she was making then: you will not learn that the music industry is one of the areas of the national life in which the blacks have been most persistently, successfully, and brutally ripped off. If you have never heard of the Apollo Theatre, you will learn nothing of it from the this film, nor what Billie's appearances there meant to her, or what a black audience means to a black performer."

While Hollywood cannot tell us these things, I would like to suggest that her voice tells us something more than celluloid could ever hope. As African American artist Amalia Amaki suggests in her quilt, Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue (below), Holiday is a key voice weaving the experiences of black womanhood and building on a legacy set by the blues foremothers before her - Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among others.