EARLY INFLUENCES

BILLIE HOLIDAY DIDN’T of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Later, just sing a song, she took looking for ways to explain her genius, she possession of it. And she would say she wanted to combine “Smith’s big repossessed it every time sound and Pop’s feeling.” she sang. From the begin­ The whole trajectory of Billie’s life was in ning, even in 1933 when she her voice. There was the cocky verve of the was eighteen, recording for the first time (with early recordings, and later, in 1937, the pure Benny Goodman), and “scared half to death” authority of musicianship in her sessions with by the big studio microphone, she liked to Lester Young, saxophone and singer gliding move in slowly. She would feel out the bones of around each other like angels on greased a tune, lift up a lyric (something as mundane wings. Her delivery got even slower in the as “out of the frying pan”), shake it out, then Forties as she came into her own as a star, a smooth the words like a glove over the con­ songwriter (“God Bless the Child,” “Don’t tours of her own heartache. Explain”) and, less happily, as a poster child for As Carmen McRae once observed about the segregation’s horrors, thanks to her brooding woman affectionately known as Lady Day, signature ballad “Strange Fruit.” “she sings the way she is.” And she never Those were also the years she came into the stopped showing the song who was boss. heroin habit that pursued her - along with Jim Bobby Tucker, who played piano for Holiday Crow and dogged narcotics agents - until she in the 1940s, said she had “the greatest con­ died in 1959. At the last “Lady in Satin” ses­ ception of a beat” he’d ever heard. Strolling sions, gin and disillusion had seeped into all just a little behind, or slipping her tongue over the cracks of her voice, but she stepped around a few words, in a hurry to catch up, she was, the ruins with almost unbearable gallantry. by her very insouciance, acknowledging She didn’t live to see forty-five. exactly where the song’s pulse lay. There’s probably not a singer alive who hasn’t She was bom Eleanora Fagan in Philadel­ learned something about phrasing from Billie phia on April 7,1915, to a teenaged mother, Hobday’s records. She changed the prevailing Sadie, whom she revered. Her father, Clarence notion of a singer’s relationship to the material. Holiday, who gave the nickname Bill to his big­ No longer an entity to be interpreted or a tra­ boned tomboy child (she lengthened it in dition to be belted, the singer’s song became homage to actress Billie Dove), had studied real life - or an intensely distilled experience of trumpet, but after being gassed during World it - immediate, authentic, wholly owned. That War I, switched to guitar and later traveled sense of ownership paved the way for Elvis with Fletcher Henderson’s band. Billie liked to Presley, Laura Nyro, Janis Joplin, maybe even tell the story of her own early musical training: the Sex Pistols. In fact, Billie Holiday is here, an ambitious girl scrubbing floors at a in memory, tonight for the same reason that Baltimore cat house and bartering her wages the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists at all. for a chance to sit alone in front of the madam’s Like rock & roll, she changed people’s notion expensive Victrola, mesmerized by recordings of what was possible.