On this day 65 years ago: Billie Holiday died in New York City, aged 44

Originally published in Hot Press in 2005:

For once, judge the book by cut of its jacket. The cover portrait that adorns Julia Blackburn’s new Billie Holiday biography With Billie shows not a dog-eared iconic image of heroin ruin, but a proud, imperious figure shrouded in smoke, shoulders draped with furs, beloved Chihuahua at her feet.

“I’ve never seen it used anywhere,” says Blackburn, an Orange Prize short-listed novelist whose previous biographical subjects include Goya. “It seemed to be the person I was trying to describe. You see how serious she is, and what a thinking person she is, a streetwise thinking person.”

With Billie was assembled by Blackburn from more than 150 taped interview transcriptions conducted over 30 years ago by one Linda Kuehl, herself something of a tragic figure. Kuehl supplemented the testimonies of former lovers, pimps, musicians and Federal narcotics agents with legal documents, hospital records, court transcripts, royalty statements, shopping lists, postcards and private letters, planning to write a monumental biography of the singer for New York publishers Harper & Row, but the magnitude of the task got the better of her.

After a Count Basie concert one night in January 1979, she wrote a suicide note and jumped from her third floor window, and her cache of research material passed into the hands of a private collector.

“I found out about it through another book written about Billie Holiday that used it as well, but in a very cutting-and-pasting way,” Blackburn explains. “I finally got the phone number of the man who had it. I went to New York and looked through this box of interviews, it was all complete chaos, and I just had a day to go through an enormous lot of stuff. It’s very haphazard, but I quite like that. If I’d had everything, I don’t think I could have coped.”

Blackburn wisely avoided trying to shoehorn these depositions into a linear narrative structure and instead allowed the various voices to contradict as well as corroborate each other’s statements. The result is akin to a stage play in which the supporting cast line up to testify about the absent lead character.

“It’s so nice to think that there is no truth!” Blackburn laughs. “I wanted to give everybody the chance to say their piece. I liked the idea of giving dignity to all these people. And I was interested to see if Billie could emerge not as a victim. She was always dismissed as not being political, and I felt that while she was not vocal, she certainly wasn’t stupid. Okay, she was a heroin addict, an alcoholic and all that kind of stuff, as were many of her contemporaries, but it became increasingly apparent to me that it was more to do with how she was treated by the FBI and narcotic agents, that she was selected for several reasons, obviously there was a big file on her.”

One of the more remarkable interviews contained within the book is with one such agent, Jimmy Fletcher, whose good terms with the singer didn’t keep him from busting her. Fletcher’s account of his investigative methods frequently skirts LA Confidential territory.

“That thing of saying how he trained informers,” Blackburn affirms, “it’s so down to earth.”

As for Holiday not being an overtly political artist, it’s been argued by many – not least David Margolick, author of the excellent Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, And An Early Cry For Civil Rights – that ‘Strange Fruit’ was perhaps the most powerful protest song of the last century.

“You see it as she sings it,” says Blackburn. “She did quite often say, ‘I’m a race woman.’ She got on as easily with white men and Black men, but she’s not somebody who was going to be able to face the McCarthy un-American Activities Committee and fight her corner. She couldn’t speak when she was brought up before the authorities. When she was cornered she began to fall apart and became a kid, as it were.

“The same with her singing. If she was in front of a crowd that wasn’t listening, she couldn’t sing, but the moment she sensed that it was working, she could. So the whole business of what a hopeless decline it was… in Paris at the end of a European tour they booed her off stage, but then when she was playing The Blue Note, trying to make enough money to go home, people said she sang fantastically because they listened to her.”