Donald Clarke - Billie Holiday: Wishing On The Moon

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In 1955, an album called I Like Jazz was released in the USA, one of the first samplers ever issued, with twelve tracks by Columbia jazz artists, mostly from the vaults. Probably intended to test the market for jazz reissues, it sold for 98 cents when a 12-inch pop LP was $3.98, and sold so well it reached the top five in the Billboard album chart. One of the tracks was Ill Never be the Same, made in 1937 by Teddy Wilson, with Billie Holiday and Lester Young; and that was my introduction, at the age of fourteen, to the music of Lady Day. (Lady was still working then, but we didnt hear her on the radio. We heard Patti Page instead.)

A couple of years later, another teenager called Linda Lipnack bought a Verve album of Ladys 1956 Carnegie Hall concert at Sam Goodys record shop, and was permanently smitten, as I had been.

In 1990, my editor at Viking/Penguin in London, Jon Riley, suggested that I write a biography of Billie Holiday. I liked the idea, but I was also awed by it. I knew that I would have to try to dispel the conventional image of her as a tragic black woman: her recordings, the primary source of evidence, reveal that she was nobodys stereotype, but a character as fascinating as any ever created by a novelist. Her ghost-written autobiography (Lady Sings the Blues, 1956), written to sell to the movies, was hopelessly inaccurate, and the 1972 film did even more to perpetuate the stereotype. Discographies and John Chiltons 1975 book Billies Blues would be good guides to chronology, but neither could tell me anything about the first twenty years of her life. Where would I begin?

Before the contract was signed, Jon and I heard from separate sources about a Holiday archive. John Jeremy, in making his revelatory but now dated TV film The Long Night of Lady Day, had found in his research that everywhere he went he was following a path already trodden by Linda Kuehl.

Linda Lipnack Kuehl had interviewed nearly 150 people, some of them exhaustively, and many of whom had since died. She did most of this in 197072 and subsequently had a contract for a book, but she died before she had written it. I went to New York to look at Kuehls material myself, and Viking/Penguin made a deal with the present owner for access, we thought, to the complete archive. This book could not exist in its present form without Kuehls work.

Kuehl was good at interviewing people, allowing their voices and personalities to come through. But she was clearly emotionally involved with Lady Day. Having discovered Lady through the Carnegie Hall concert that included reading from the ghost-written autobiography, Kuehl gave the book too much credence. I was not able to hear the tapes of the interviews. Some of the interviews were not transcribed completely, and Kuehl didnt always know what was important. She sometimes didnt know who was being talked about; Jimmy Luntsford was obviously Jimmie Lunceford, but I worried about Wallace Stein until I realized it was Ted Wallerstein, a record industry executive. Carl Drinkard talked about the 1954 European trip; there is a single sheet headed vocabulary from Europe tapes, with a note to the effect that Paris was a drag, and I never could be certain if she did run out of stuff. I think she was screaming and crying wolfas usual. This would indicate that they were using drugs in Europe, but no one now living has heard the entire Drinkard interview. Finally, since the interviews are usually not transcribed with both questions and answers, we cannot be sure of some of the testimony. For example, did Wee Wee Hill volunteer that summer of 1927 as the date that Eleanora Gough left Baltimore to become Billie Holiday, or was he prompted in some way? I hope the tapes survive for future historians.

The interviewees themselves are priceless, and each different. Big Stump was a terrible name-dropper, while Pops Foster enjoyed dwelling on the scurrilous. Bobby Tucker and John Levy (the bassist) are clearly two of natures gentlemen, Jimmy Fletcher is completely trustworthy, and Jimmy Rowles is a gas. And above all, the womenMae Barnes, Marie Bryant and many morewere valuable observers, and full of love.

Kuehl discovered that Sadie Fagans name at birth had been Harris, but she did not look for Ladys birth certificate; I hired Susan F. Koelble in Philadelphia to do that. Not knowing what the rules were in the USA in those days, I told Susan that my mother-in-law was Irish, that I was doing research on the Fagan family, and that this particular Fagan might be a Harris, all of which was true. Susan immediately found it, and when I told her whose birth certificate it was, she was delighted and subsequently did research for me in the census records for Baltimore and Philadelphia.

John Jeremy allowed me access to his research materials, and I found that his clippings file was much better than Kuehls, to say nothing of a complete set of admission documents from Alderson. As well as all of the people mentioned above, I have to thank Ernie Anderson, Jean Bach, Beryl Bryden, Thelma Carpenter, Leonard Feather, Delilah Jackson, Max Jones, Professor Robert OMeally, Chris Parker, Mary Schoonover, Bobby Tucker and Laurie Wright, who have put up with me writing and telephoning them and in some cases darkening their doorways. It was my honor to meet and talk to Johnny Fagan in Baltimore, and to Tondaleyo Levy, Ron Levy, Helen Clark and Jimmy Monroe in New York.