Crash Course Timeline, No. 44: Billie Holiday, Triumph and Tragedy

This one feels right.

“Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.”
- PBS.org, American Masters Series (June 2006)

If your first experience of a piece of music or a particular performer happens decades after they impacted music, the fuss doesn’t always translate. Billie Holiday broke molds, minds and ran headlong into barriers her entire life. It’s a minor miracle she made it to adulthood, never mind an iconic place in pop culture. Because most of the fuss happened before the internet, I expect I’ll struggle to do her justice, but this feels like a good place to start.

“If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
- Billie Holiday (Biography, 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday)

While minor questions exist, most sources agree Holiday was born to two unwed teenagers in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent more of her childhood with her mother, Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan – her father, Clarence Halliday, left to pursue a career in music was she was very young - but, even given those circumstances, her home life veered between unstable and outright dangerous, as well as various cities (mostly Baltimore). Sources also generally agree spent her tween-to-teen years in a reform school (sometimes for her own protection) and doing chores and running errands at a brothel (and even getting arrested for prostitution, though that could be a wrong place, wrong time thing). The Biography piece claims she worked for a chance to listen to the madam’s Victrola instead of getting paid. Holiday recalled Bessie Smith’s “West End Blues” as a favorite, but she loved Louis Armstrong too.

After moving to Harlem to live with her mother again, Holiday, then 17, found work as a dancer-for-hire. When the dancing work slowed down, she asked the manager to let her sing. Though lacking in musical education of any kind, Holiday’s talent immediately came through. Over the next couple of year, she partnered with a tenor sax player named Kenneth Holan, working small venue and building a reputation. She took her stage-name from two sources: “Billie” from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and “Holiday” from her long-estranged father, who performed under that name. (She met him as an adult when he played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.) With the Harlem Renaissance in full-swing, people in a position to help her took notice – including John Hammond, the famous impresario/Svengali who played a major role in pushing black jazz and blues into mainstream musical culture. Hammond wasted no time in getting her into a recording studio; Holiday was still 17 years old when she recorded her first songs – “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch” – both with a then-unknown Benny Goodman.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 41: Artie Shaw, "Musically Restless" Is a Euphemism

I will never see this photo the same way.

I reviewed just two sources for this shallow dive into Artie Shaw - his Wikipedia page, plus a fairly lengthy article titled "The Trouble with Artie Shaw" on a site called Jazz in Europe - but those gave me the essential yin and yang that, based some earlier reading, matches my impression of Shaw. The Jazz in Europe piece unsparingly examines the great clarinetist’s flaws - the word “sociopath” repeats like a refrain - while the Wikipedia page leans into his preferred reputation of a frustrated genius. To start with an odd bit of framing:

“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”

Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.

“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.

Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe: