HULIDAY died a few weeks ago. I have been - PDF document

Statesman, HULIDAY died a few weeks ago. I have been until now to write about her, but since she survive many who receive longer obituaries, a short in one small appreciation will not harm her or us. she died we musicians, critics, all who were transfixed by the most heart-rending voice of the past bitterly. There was no reason to. people pursued self-destruction more wholeheartedly she, and when the pursuit was at an end, at the age of she had turned herself into a' physical and wreck. Some of us tried gallantly to pretend taking comfort in the occasional moments when still sounded like a ravaged echo of her greatness. had not even the heart to see and listen any more. preferred to stay home and, if old and lucky enough own the incomparable records of her hey-day from 1937 1946, many of which are not even available on British to recreate those coarse-textured. sinuous, sensual and sad noises, which give her a sure corner of Her physical death called, if anything, for rather than sorrow. What sort of middle age would have faced without the voice to earn money for her and fixes, without the looks in her day she hauntingly beautiful attract the men she needed, business sense, without anything but the dis- worship of ageing men who had heard and seen in her glory? yet, irrational though it is, our grief expressed Billie art, that of a woman for whom one must be The great blues-singers, to whom she may be justly played their game from strength. Lionesses, often wounded or at bay {did not Bessie Smith call "a tiger ready to jump"?) their tragic equivalents Cleopatra and Phaedra; Billie's was an embittered She was the Puccini heroine among blues- or rather among jazz-singers, for though she sang cabaret version of the blues incomparably, her natural was the pop song. Her unique achievement was to twisted this into a genuine expression of the major by means of a total disregard of its sugary tunes, indeed of any tune other than her own few delicately elongated notes, phrased like Bessie Smith or Louis in sack-cloth, sung in a thin, gritty, haunting whose natural mood was an unresigned and welcome for the pains of love. Nobody has will sing, Bess's songs from she did. this combination of bitterness and physical submission, of someone lying still while watching his legs being which gives such a blood-curdling quality to anti-lynching poem which she turned an unforgettable art song. (I need hardly say this record, with its companion blues not available on British discs.) Suffering was her but she did not accept it. need be said about her horrifying life, which she with emotional, though hardly with factual, truth her autobiography in which self-respect was measured by a girl's on picking up the coins thrown to her by clients her hands, she was plainly beyond help. She did not it, for she had the flair and scrupulous honesty of John to launch her, the best musicians of the Thirties accompany her Teddy Wilson, Frankie and Lester Young boundless devotion of all connoisseurs, and much public success. It was too to arrest a career of systematic embittered self- To be born with both beauty and self-respect the Negro ghetto of Baltimore in 1915 was too much a handicap, even without rape at the age of ten and drug- in her teens. But while she destroyed herself, she unmelodious, profound and heartbreaking. It is not to weep for her, or not to hate the world made her what she was.