When Billie Holiday first stepped into a recording studio in
November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most
remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music.
Her voice weathered countless shifts in popular taste, and today new
reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of
singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele.
Most of the writing on
Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution
at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series
of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of
her autobiography. But Billie Holiday
strips away the myths and puts her music front and center, staying
close to her artistry, her performance style, and the self she created
and put on record and onstage.
Drawing on a vast amount of new
material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed
jazz writer and musician John Szwed presents not just a biography, but a
meditation on Billie Holiday’s art and its relation to her life. Along
the way, he illuminates her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic
genius, her signature songs—including Strange Fruit and God Bless the Child—and her enduring legacy as the greatest jazz singer of all time.
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