By Stuart Mitchner

I was going to begin with some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — about “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts” — except that setting the passage as an epigraph would have been typographically unsightly, and the only thing it has to do with Billie Holiday is that I can hear her singing it, beautifully, in her special way, making new words of old words. I can also hear her singing of “something given and taken” from the same sequence, and of “selflessness and self-surrender” and “the moment in and out of time.”

It’s fun to imagine Lady Day enlivening Eliot as she did various Tin Pan Alley songwriters. You can hear her on YouTube singing “My first impression of you was something indescribably new” to words by Charley Tobias (“The boy who writes the songs you sing”) and music by Ukrainian-born Sam Stept — but first I had to skip an ad flogging Trump bobbleheads and the call to arms for a second American Civil War that follows it.

A Stunning Revelation

My “you are the music” moment with Billie Holiday was a long time coming. Writing on the occasion of her centenary in April 2015 (she was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia), I began by admitting that until a misty April night in my mid-twenties, she was a voice from somewhere far far away, terra incognita. It wasn’t just that she sang of suicide and lynching in songs like “Gloomy Sunday” and “Strange Fruit,” it was the way she sang: dreary and dismal, our lady of misery, or so it seemed way back then.

The title of Paul Alexander’s new book — Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year (Knopf 2024) — is taken from “Strange Fruit,” a song that, along with Alexander’s book, forced me to take a closer look at my nearly lifelong enjoyment of Holiday’s music. Around 80 pages into Bitter Crop, the man who wrote “Strange Fruit” refers to the image he based the song on — “a shocking photograph that haunted me for days.” The picture shows a festive lynch mob staring up the savaged bodies of two black teenagers hanging from a tree on the courthouse square of Marion, Indiana, a two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Bloomington, where I grew up and went to school. It’s strange indeed to think that the few times I listened to “Strange Fruit” over the years, the references to “the southern breeze,” and a “pastoral scene of the gallant south” were relocated from a town in my home state in the so-called heartland.

Making Black History

While John Szwed’s Billie Holiday: The Musician and The Myth (Viking 2015) sent me back to favorite recordings like the 1937 Columbia sessions with Lester Young and the Commodore sessions of 1939/1944, Bitter Crop makes it clear that from the time Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” which eventually sold “in the millions” and created a nationwide controversy, she was making Black history as surely as if she’d sat on the bus beside Rosa Parks or marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr.

The fact that February is Black History Month highlights the documentary relevance of “Strange Fruit” and the punishment Holiday endured — body and mind and career — for continuing to sing a song the government of White America was sure would arouse discontent among Black listeners.

Enjoying Enjoyment

Billie Holiday’s infectious artistry transcends politics the same way the extrasensory rapport she enjoyed with tenor saxophonist Lester Young transcends the tropes of romance implicit in the titles of the recordings she made in New York City between June and September 1937 — songs like “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” “Born to Love,” and “Without Your Love.” The sheer enjoyment of those “you are the music” moments — what John Szwed calls “the romance of obbligato” — is joyously evident in the second chorus of “Me, Myself and I,” where Holiday and Young are side by side melodiously, inspirationally elevating playful lines like “We’d be satisfied dear if you’d belong to one of us.” In “Without Your Love,” contrary to the lyric, Young’s adoring tenor sax is with Billie all the way, creating wordless poetry as she sings “I rode the crest of a wave with you beside me, now who’s to guide me?”

Her Real Lover

One of the songs pairing Young and Holiday in Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection is Irving Berlin’s “He Ain’t Got Rhythm.” The session was recorded on January 25, 1937, with trumpeter Buck Clayton, clarinetist Benny Goodman, pianist Teddy Wilson, and the Count Basie rhythm section — bassist Walter Bishop, drummer Jo Jones, and Billie’s real lover at the time, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green. While Young may be Holiday’s musical partner in the romance of the lyrics, the man she loves is the “pulse” of the Basie band, its designated driver. Unmentioned by either Alexander or Szwed, “the greatest rhythm guitarist in jazz history” was also the great “might-have-been” of her life, according to Julia Blackburn’s With Billie (Pantheon 2005). Unlike the abusive men in the relationships described in Bitter Crop, Green was “good and kind and gentle,” and “would have cared for her and protected her, and given her the children and the securityshe always longed for.”

Back Home in Indiana

Right now I’m thinking of the special moment a teenage admirer spent with Freddie Green, who signed the 16-year-old’s Basie album, warmly shook hands, and said some kind words. Though I knew little about either T.S. Eliot or Billie Holiday at the time, I knew that Green’s steady strumming was to Basie’s big band like Eliot’s music “heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.”

This is how history jerks you around. As much as I wanted to forget what happened in my home state on August 7, 1930, that memory of Freddie Green sent me back home to history and the photograph that inspired “Strange Fruit,” a wide-angle view of the faces of the citizens of Marion, Indiana, some lewdly smiling as they stared up at the savaged bodies of two black teenagers hanging from a tree, both having been beaten to death before being put on display for a crowd that numbered in the thousands.

But what about the third teenager, waiting for death as the crowd jeered? He’d already been severely beaten and would have been hanging up there with the other two (the rope around his neck had been pulled so tight that it left a scar) if not for a woman in the crowd shouting that he was innocent. The teenager’s name was James Cameron and after serving four years in prison as an accessory before the fact, he became a civil rights activist, founding three chapters of the Indiana NAACP before moving to Milwaukee, where he gave lectures on African American history and founded a Black Holocaust museum. James Cameron died in 2006 at the age of 92 and the sympathetic face on his Wikipedia page reminds me of Freddie Green, whose history with the Basie band was historic in itself, lasting from 1937 to March 1, 1987, when he died of a stroke after playing the first two sets of a show in Las Vegas.

History Bites

Paul Alexander ends Bitter Crop with numerous reflections on Billie Holiday’s legacy, finally closing with comments from tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins: “Sometimes when I listen to her it brings me to my knees the way she improvises on a song” and composer David Amram: “She was a communicator on a soul-to-soul level, which is the highest achievement any human being can offer. Even when she was going through hell, she made it heaven on earth for everyone who knew her or saw her or heard her.”

Out of all the Holiday songs I enjoyed on a “you are the music level,” the one that most often comes to mind is “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which she recorded for Commodore on April 1, 1944, in a session produced by Milt Gabler and arranged by Eddie Heywood. As on the other Commodore sides, the muted, musing accompaniment casts a subtle spell while Billie makes poetry of old familiar places, small cafes, parks across the way, children’s carousels, wishing wells, the sun and moon, and above all “this heart of mine,” wounded, devoutly bitter, and true to the end of life.

As reported by John Szwed in a quote from page 707 of the Starr Report, Monica Lewinsky said that Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” was the song she and Bill Clinton bonded over.

The rest, as they say, is history: the debacle of the 2000 election decided by the Supreme Court, two terms of a Bush presidency, the invasion of Iraq, two terms of the first Black president, Barack Obama, who said that he heard in Holiday’s music “a willingness to endure and the strength not to be hurt.” After that, back we go to T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” the third of his Four Quartets: “Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage … the unprayable prayer at the calamitous annunciation?” Near the end, Eliot writes, “We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.”