Billie Holiday after 50 years

July 17th marks 50 years since Billie Holiday died at the age of 44 in a New York hospital from complications of drug and alcohol dependency. With the passage of a half-century, what is her legacy as a singer, an African-American woman, a victim (of a traumatic childhood, spousal abuse, and substance dependence) and a creative force for her times? Although she was less of a "pop star" (and much more of a true artist) than the likes of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, I would argue that Billie Holiday is equally an icon of American music, and her legacy is timeless.

Evolution of jazz

Almost disingenuously, Holiday reshaped American popular and jazz singing. In so doing she contributed to the transition from swing to modern jazz, and from big bands to the small group formats that have dominated the jazz scene ever since. I say "disingenuous" because she came up and learned music by listening to records and then doing some rather thankless club and road work. She acquired her style from recordings of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and others. She was not part of any movement or trend.

Nevertheless, she beautifully bridged the gap between the "blues" style of African-American singers and instrumentalists and the white-dominated "swing" that came into vogue around the time she began her career. If you listen to Holiday's 1930s recordings with Artie Shaw, Bennie Goodman, Teddy Wilson and other swing musicians, you can hear her break through the stilted rhythms of that era, going her own way with a song, yet somehow blending seamlessly with her backup musicians.

It was perhaps this synergy of musical styles, in addition to her soulful beauty, that so impressed saxophonist Lester Young that he famously called her "Lady Day," and which enabled him to interweave his solos flawlessly with her singing on their priceless recordings together.

Sinatra captivated

As Holiday evolved and developed, she gave rich and soulful interpretations to a wide scope of music, from the romantic to the lively and flirtatious, from the joyful to the almost unbearably sad, from powerfully stated realities ("God Bless the Child" and "Strange Fruit") to everyday standards ("I Wished on the Moon," "A Foggy Day," "No Greater Love"). At her peak, she was beautiful in appearance, a true diva with that gardenia in her hair, and captivating an audience with her expressive voice.

In 1939 (the year she opened at Café Society in Greenwich Village), the young Frank Sinatra went to hear Holiday perform at the Uptown House in New York. Sinatra (who was exactly the same age as Holiday) was entranced: "Standing under a spotlight in a 52nd Street jazz spot," he later recalled, "I was dazzled by her soft, breathtaking beauty."

Much later— a year before Sinatra credited Holiday as "unquestionably the most important influence on American popular music in the last 20 years." Virtually every major American pop singer of the previous 20 years, he added, "has been touched in some way by her genius." That's saying a lot of an African American woman who pulled herself up by her bootstraps from a deeply disrupted family life in a segregated society.

Stigmatized for her gender, too

The 1972 film, Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross, documented the tragedy of Holiday's deterioration from the effects of alcohol and heroin addiction as well as her troubled relationships with men. A late, classic photograph of her Holiday sitting wanly in front of a studio microphone with a glass of liquor in her hand contrasts sharply with one taken less than ten years earlier at the Café Society, where she glows like a rising star. Nevertheless, and despite the decline of her voice, her last recordings (for example, Lady in Satin and Songs for Distingue Lovers) possess even greater depth of feeling than her earlier ones and remain classics of recorded music.

Various explanations have been offered for Holiday's rapid decline, whether as a fallen angel, a woman defeated by circumstances, or a manifestation of the sorrow that she poured into poignant ballads like "Good Morning Heartache" and "Some Other Spring." The hard truth is that Holiday was a victim of the same drug and alcohol dependence that destroyed Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Charles Mingus, and so many other fine musicians. As a woman, Holiday was more stigmatized by her addiction than the men were.

Confronting the color line

Holiday's depth of emotion and her abhorrence of racism was nowhere more manifest than in her rendition of "Strange Fruit," the song by Albert Meeropol that stunningly documented the lynching of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and other Southern racists in the early 20th Century. This song, and Holiday's recording of it, played a significant role in the Civil Rights movement by raising public awareness of these atrocities. Holiday and her audiences were moved to tears whenever she sang it.

That song, as well as her own "God Bless the Child," demonstrates Holiday's concern about the social evils—the segregated clubs and facilities, the personal humiliations suffered by black performers— that directly impacted many jazz musicians. Indeed, everything she sang seemed to reflect her own personal experience. As Charlie Parker once said, "If you haven't been through it, it won't come out of your horn."

Ned Rorem's explanation

But what made Billie Holiday rise (at least musically) above her fellow victims? The classical composer Ned Rorem, who attributes his song cycles to Holiday's influence, pointed to the aesthetic simplicity of her style: She never wasted a note; there was nothing redundant in her singing. Her sense of timing, her awareness of where she was in a tune, her ability to lay back on the beat without losing the swing, and— perhaps most important— the range and depth of emotions that she expressed were all innovative for her era and remain peerless to this day.

All jazz vocalists since Holiday have learned from her, and many have transcended her in vocal ability, complexity and sophistication. But when you listen to almost any of her recordings, notwithstanding the technical limitations, they remain fresh as a garden after a rain shower, and no one has been able to exceed their interpretive power.