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As for Holiday's parents, her mother is presented as a hard-working maid who took great pride in Holiday's achievements, while her father was conspicuous by his absence, constantly on the road with McKinney's Cotton Pickers and later with Fletcher Henderson's band. Holiday claimed that her great-grandmother had sixteen children by the plantation owner, an Irishman named Charles Fagan, of whom only one survived. The book also received criticism for certain of Holiday's omissions, though how a person's life can be summed up in a mere one hundred and eighty pages without leaving out a few people, places and facts is anybody's guess.īorn Elenora Fagan in Philadelphia in 1915, Billie Holiday's great-grandmother had been a slave on a plantation in Virginia. Lady Sings The Blues was ghost-written by journalist and author William Dufty, who captures the gritty essence of Holiday's short life, even if some of the details have since been proven to be inaccurate. There's not a trace of self-pity in her tale, even when at her lowest. Yet for all her misadventures and her run-ins with the law, Holiday's story is also one of determination and perseverance. It's also a cautionary tale of the personal demons that plagued her -namely alcohol and heroin.
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This Penguin Modern Classics reissue is a timely reminder of the obstacles that Holiday faced, from endemic racism and abusive men to a cut-throat music industry. With her autobiographyoriginally published by Doubleday in 1956Holiday got to tell her side of an often tempestuous story, one of many highs and lows, both personal and professional. Certainly the number of imitators that Holiday has spawned attests to her lasting influence. Six decades after her death from alcohol-related illness at the age of forty four, Holiday remains a hugely admired and somewhat mythologized figure.
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All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.For many, Billie Holiday was the greatest of all the jazz singers, while her emotive delivery and tragic persona seemed to embody the early jazz life in all its boho chic and with all its dark undertones.
#Lady sings the blues movie#
We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit” with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more) and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation-a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz
![lady sings the blues lady sings the blues](https://jazzjournal.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Holiday-Billie-Lady-Sings-The-Blues.jpg)
Perfect for fans of The United States vs.