A health librarian and music: Billie Holiday

My Dad was in the habit of playing music on records (those have made a comeback) or cassette tapes (those have not) around the house, and if it was not folk music, it was traditional jazz.    And one of the singers was Billie Holiday, so I have been listening to her for some years.    When I left home I took with me tapes of some of some things from his collection, including two of Billie Holiday, one from early in her career, with sparse jazz accompaniment, and one from much later, where her voice had become deeper, huskier and slower, with an orchestra.

I knew something of her life, but not, as it turns out, much.

A recent documentary, Billie: in search of Billie Holiday, compiled from taped interviews made in the 1970s onwards with people who knew her or had played with her, with some actual film footage of her singing, was shown recently and is as I write on the iPlayer catch up service (no use to you if you are not in the UK, I know).

Her early life saw her effectively being involved in prostitution, it seemed, from a young age.    I knew she had experienced racism when touring with white musicians, in that she had had to use the goods lift (elevator) not the passenger one, but I had not realised she (of course) had not been able to stay in hotels with the band and had to sleep in a car or bus.    I had also not realised the discrimination she had to endure when playing in clubs, some of it, it seemed to me, because she was a woman, and some of it because she was black, and a lot of it because she was a black woman.   The behaviour of some of the men who worked with her or managed her career was textbook sexual harrassment. 

It includes a film of her singing Strange Fruit, written for her by Lewis Allan (who deserves a blog post of his own).  I remember having a recording (on a record...) of that sung by UB40, though I don't remember if I realised the history and subject of the song.  I wonder how many hearers realise it, looking at some of the comments on another YouTube recording ("reminds me of the summer", "reminds me of the 1980s", that sort of thing).

It is a song about lynching, and she made a point of including it when she sang in clubs and theatres.   More about the song and its writer in this from the BBC and this (PDF) from the Library of Congress.

Then there is a forthcoming movie, The United States vs Billie Holiday.    This I have not seen yet, but the actor playing Holiday, Andra Day, has been nominated for an Oscar and was recently on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show.    Her interview, excellently conducted, is worth watching and is available for 11 months (as of 1st April 2021, in the UK only).

Though there are things out there on the Internet that say it is a French word first found in English in the 17th century, and does not have its origins in lynching era America, Day reported she will not use the word picnic, as it has associations with the lynchings portrayed in Strange Fruit, when the white townsfolk would go to watch and have a picnic afterwards.

Whether you choose to call it "decolonisation" or not, this all goes to show that you can always look at familiar music, singers, and language, from a new viewpoint, perhaps a viewpoint more like the one of the singer herself, in this case.