By Stuart Mitchner

And what curious flower or fruit
Will grow from that conspiring root?

—Elizabeth Bishop

Those lines are from the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s reimagining of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Bishop has admitted that she was hoping someone would compose tunes for her suite “Songs for a Colored Singer” (an acceptable title in the 1940s). “I think I had Billie Holiday in mind,” she said in a 1966 interview. “I put in a couple of words just because she sang big words so well — ‘conspiring root,’ for instance.”

The Bishop-Holiday connection was pointed out by Paul Alexander in Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, the subject of last week’s column. In fact, a misprint in that article (“Back” for “Black”) is the reason I’m  returning to Holiday and rereading Bishop with particular attention to “The Man-Moth,” a great New York poem inspired by a newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”

A Chaos of Misinformation

Another reason for going back to Holiday was to learn more about two very special songs, “I’m Pulling Through” and “God Bless the Child.” The music to “I’m Pulling Through” was composed by pianist Teddy Wilson’s ex-wife Irene, who “became close” with Billie when Wilson left her for a show girl, according to John Szwed in Billie Holiday: The Musician and The Myth. Billie then introduced Irene to songwriter Arthur Herzog and together they wrote the song. Although Szwed makes it clear that Irene Wilson was later known as Irene Kitchings, Wilson’s affair with the nameless showgirl created a chaos of misinformation, as in the composer credits on various online lyric sites that list Irene Kitchings and Irene Wilson as if they were two different people. While Irene appears as Irene Kitchens in Bitter Crop, she’s Irene Kitchings in Julia Blackburn’s With Billie. It gets worse when another Irene enters the narrative. As Szwed points out, the original Irene is “not to be confused — as she always is — with Irene Higginbottom,” who also composed several songs for Holiday, leading to a whole new world of misprints and misinformation. 

Who to Thank?

“I’m Pulling Through” has kept me company for years. It’s one of those pieces of music you turn to in hard times and relate to as if it were composed for you. So whenever Billie sang the line “Thanks for the lift in time and thanks for this song,” I was thanking whoever she was thanking without knowing the backstory of the July 7, 1940 recording session with Irene’s ex-husband on piano as Billie sang Irene Wilson’s story of loss and healing. But when  Holiday is singing, it becomes her story, the thanks for “the lift in time” is for her, for the depth of feeling she puts into the performance. A year before the session Holiday told an interviewer, “What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.”

Honing In on Herzog

Although the person listed as Irene’s co-writer on “I’m Pulling Through” is Arthur Herzog Jr., I find it hard to credit a man with this hymn of thanks, compassion, and companionship that includes lines like “You made me see how lovely life could be … When I thought that hope was really gone, you showed me I was wrong … you taught me how to carry on … When I was stranded came your helping hand … Lonely hurt I had not known which way to turn … I’m pulling through and it’s because of you … I’d do the same for you if your turn came, hope it never will for I’ve been through the mill … I won’t forget this debt….”

  The presence of a white male New Yorker is easier to associate with the word “debt” in the penultimate line, not to mention the second verse, where “lifted up my heart” is followed by “made me count the cost to find I’d gained not lost.” The way Billie lives the lyric makes all the difference. Her harsh delicacy takes the edge off “debt” and “cost,” and brings out the “pain” in “gained.”

“God Bless the Child”

Herzog’s fixation with debt and credit is also present in the lyric of “God Bless the Child,” for which he and Holiday share the credit, however reluctantly. Consider lines like “Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade” and “Money, you’ve got lots of friends,” and the reference to “rich relations” giving “crusts of bread and such / You can help yourself, but don’t take too much.” Billie’s contribution to the lyric can be felt in the words “mama may have, papa may have,” and the title line, “God bless the child that’s got his own,” which was her answer at the outset when Herzog asked for “an old-fashioned Southern expression.”

Herzog says the song took 20 minutes to compose and that “he wrote both the words and music,” except for the titular line. According to Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday’s memoir, written with William Dufty, she and Herzog sat at the piano while she sang it and he picked it out (“We changed the lyrics in a couple of spots but not much”). However, Szwed points to another source that has Herzog contradicting himself by claiming, incredibly, “She has never written a line of words or music.” That classic piece of inglorious misinformation is worth mentioning  because it reveals the glorious truth, which is that Holiday writes what she sings, as she sings. The voice and style and art and humanity are the reality, on the record, where the words and music, beauty and truth, are hers.

   All you need to do is watch Holiday’s August 1950 performance of “God Bless the Child” with the Count Basie septet. There in black and white and color (YouTube gives you both), you can see her creating, encompassing, and embodying the song, which, in effect, is her child. As always, it’s Billie Holiday’s inspirational performance that “pulls us through.”

“Strange Fruit”

The most powerful rendition of “Strange Fruit” I’ve ever witnessed is the one Holiday delivers on a British television show on her last trip to London in February 1959 (you can see it on YouTube). When she sings “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck … for the wind to suck … for the sun to rut, for the trees to drop,” she’s singing the words in her lowest, darkest, raspiest register; it’s a devastating, merciless, performance, and the last line, “Here is a strange and bitter crop” is, as Alexander writes in Bitter Crop, like “a wail of mourning.”

If you’re curious to know more about Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship with Billie Holiday, you can find it in Bitter Crop, which recounts the time the poet returned to her New York apartment only to find her lover in bed with — Billie Holiday.

Traveling Backwards

Rereading the four poems Bishop hoped that someone, preferably Holiday, would sing, it’s too bad that some sufficiently powerful or notable personage (perhaps Billie’s eventual lover Orson Welles) couldn’t have arranged a “Holiday Sings Bishop” recording session. That said, it’s hard to imagine even Billie Holiday performing a variation on “Strange Fruit” where the blood shining on the leaves is “dew or tears.”

In the spirit of Back-for-Black, I’d rather go back to the New York poem midwifed by a misprint, where the Man-Moth “returns to the pale subways of cement he calls home” and “seats himself facing the wrong way” as “the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.”

June 7, 1940

The Friday June 7, 1940 recording session that gave us “I’m Pulling Through” also produced memorable performances of “Laughing at Life” (“Live for tomorrow, be happy today”) and “Time On My Hands” (“moments to spare with someone you care for”). The session can be found on various albums, including the Definitive CD: Billie Holiday & Lester Young: A Fine Romance 2: The Complete Joint Recordings.

The player Billie called the President died in March 1959, four years before the death of the singer he called Lady Day. Tap dancer James “Stump” Cross offers a line for the ages, quoted in Julia Blackburn’s With Billie: “Lester Young loved Lady like he loved spring, summer, winter and fall and every day that broke at dawn.”