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By Root 835 0

charge leveled at Lady is that Billie distorts the truth, that the book is largely inaccurate. In fact, scholars have proven this to be the case in some significant areas. (See Nicholson’s, Clarke’s, and O’Meally’s studies for specific instances.) But as Farah Jasmine Griffin so sensitively explains about Lady, “It should not be evaluated as a book that does not live up to its claims of ‘Truthfulness,’ but as another performance of the Holiday persona.” Griffin goes on to explain that the chapter titles, quotes from Billie’s famous songs, provide the key to understanding her memoir. Her memoir is a song, a long and languid improvisation. In the mythopoeic sense, it is as true and poignant as any tune she ever sang. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true.

Billie’s music is hard-edged and soft-edged, bitter and sweet, assertive and passive, confident and conflicted. So is this brutally frank book. The fact that its frankness is not always factual is beside the point. Billie didn’t write the book for music historians or ethnomusicologists. She wrote it for the same reason she sang—to express emotion. We judge the book using the same emotional criteria we use to judge her music. Does it feel true? Clearly she’s indulging in myth-making, the stuff of which all autobiographies are made. Whether we’re St. Augustine, Rousseau, Montaigne, or Malcolm X, when we write our life stories we aim not for the illusion of literal truth but for metaphorical truth, the deeper truth, the truth that sustains and inspires.

Finally, there is the matter of authorship. Critics have questioned whether Billie wrote it. Dufty has been accused of doing a cut-and-paste job from old interviews. I’ve read the majority of Billie Holiday interviews, and all strung together they do not make a book, or even half a book. There is simply too much never-before-discussed material in Lady to justify such an accusation. More important, though, the literal fact of authorship, like the literal accuracy of the material itself, is not the point. Clearly, Dufty had Billie’s confidence. Clearly, Billie revealed her soul. Her vulnerability, the key to any convincing memoir, is on full display. Her voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process worked, is real as rain. Her role as narrator is a marvel of dramatic exposition.

I know from long experience that the “I” of any book written by two people is an inscrutable mystery. You talk; you interview; you tape; you transcribe; you write; you edit; you rewrite. The worth of what emerges from this unscientific process is all in “the read.” The proof is in the pudding. And chapter after chapter, episode after episode, Lady Sings the Blues is filled with such proof.

Her language is always fresh, her descriptions delicious:

“If I had to sing ‘Doggie in the Window,’ that would actually be work,” Billie writes. “But singing songs like ‘The Man I Love’ or ‘Porgy’ is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.”

Or listen to her riff on Gladys, Lionel Hampton’s manager/wife:

“They [Lionel and Gladys] didn’t have the price of a bottle of champagne between them then. But Gladys has two-hundred-dollar hats now. She’s a hat freak, that girl. But she earned those bonnets the hard way.”

Or her characterization of an heiress of a paper business fortune:

“Every time she blew her nose she made some more loot.”

Or her introduction to working with white bandleader Artie Shaw:

“Don’t tell me about those pioneer chicks hitting the trail in those slip-covered wagons with the hills full of redskins. I’m the girl who went West in 1937 with sixteen white cats, Artie Shaw and his Rolls-Royce—and the hills were full of white crackers.”

Or her overview of the working conditions for musicians in New York:

“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.”

Or this powerfully succinct self-portrait:

“I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few