One winter she wore a great lynx coat, and in it she moved, menacing and handsome as a Cossack, pacing about in the trap of her vitality. Quarrelsome dreams sometimes rushed through her speech and accounts of wounds she had inflicted with broken glass. And at the White Rose Bar, a thousand cigarettes punctuated her appearances, which, not only in their brilliance but in the fact of their taking place at all, had about them the aspect of magic. Waiting and waiting: that was what the pursuit of her was. One felt like an old carriage horse standing at the entrance, ready for the cold midnight race through the park. She was always behind a closed door—the fate of those addicted to whatever. And then at last she must come forward, emerge in powders and Vaseline, hair twisted with a curling iron, gloves of satin or silk jersey, flowers—the expensive martyrdom of the “entertainer.”

At that time not many of her records were in print, and she was seldom heard on the radio because her voice did not accord with popular taste then. The appearances in nightclubs were a necessity. It was a burden to be there night after night, although not a burden to sing, once she started, in her own way. She knew she could do it, that she had mastered it all, but why not ask the question: Is this all there is? Her work took on, gradually, a destructive cast, as it so often does with the greatly gifted who are doomed to repeat endlessly their own heights of inspiration.

...Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness begin to threaten the theatrical eyelids.

Elizabeth Hardwick on Billie Holliday (from Sleepless Nights)

Billie Holliday actuando en el Cafe Society, el primer club nocturno integrado de Nueva York, 1947 - fotografía de Gjon Mili.

Billie Holliday

las nenas lindas como yo escuchamos jazz ¿ustedes cómo están?

🚢Boat Song Tournament🚢

Round 1A, match 14

Links: 🚢, 🚢

Billie Holiday-Louis Armstrong "New Orleans" 1947, de Arthur Lubin.

Billie Holliday at Cafe Society, New York

Photo by Gjon Mili, 1947

Red Mitchell with Billie Holiday, Carl Drinkard (?), and Elaine Leighton in The Hague, The Netherlands, January 31, 1954. Photo by Wouter van Gool.

[AFRO BLUE CATS]

* * * *

“You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”

― Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues

Love Billie's voice, love Billie's face, love Billie's courage

Strange fruit sung in 1959 and 1939, horror and emotion

31 Days of Literary Spookiness: Poetry Edition - October 22

Art by Anton Jarvis

“Strange Fruit” by Abel Meerpol

Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

The Last Dance (gigs part 2)

It’s 1993 and I’m at Olympia, It’s the last few gigs on The Cure’s Wish Tour. I’d been to the warm up gig in Islington, a disturbingly red-neck gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange where the police stopped the car and did the full “you ain’t from ’round here are you?” schpiel. The Kilburn gig was a good one and the jolly to the one in Paris was an absolute hoot. I was getting confused now though as…

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