Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [29]
The next thing we knew, they revamped the whole show. They cut out the girls’ middle number. And when the chorus line opened the show, they’d fitted them out with special black masks and mammy dresses. They did both their numbers in blackface and those damn mammy getups.
When he saw what was happening, Basie flipped. But there was nothing he could do. We had signed the contracts to appear, and we had no control over what the panicky theater managers did.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Next they told Basie I was too yellow to sing with all the black men in his band. Somebody might think I was white if the light didn’t hit me just right. So they got special dark grease paint and told me to put it on.
It was my turn to flip. I said I wouldn’t do it. But they had our name on the contracts, and if I refused it might have played hell with bookings, not just for me, but for the future of all the cats in the band.
So I had to be darkened down so the show could go on in dynamic-assed Detroit. It’s like they say, there’s no damn business like show business. You had to smile to keep from throwing up.
But after a few more months with more of the same I quit. Mother almost blew her top. She thought this was the biggest opportunity of my life and I was throwing it over.
After a few weeks I began to think she was right. It turned out to be almost six months before I did anything musical after I quit. I didn’t even sing. I just ate my damn heart out.
There were a lot of great things about the Basie band, and the experts are just beginning to pick it to pieces after almost twenty years to find out what made it so great. But with the distance of years, you forget all the things that your nose used to be rubbed in, and can add up the score.
I still say the greatest thing about the Basie band of those days was that they never used a piece of music, still all sixteen of them could end up sounding like a great big wonderful one sound.
Most of my experience with bands before that had been in hanging out with Benny Goodman. I used to listen to him rehearse with high-paid radio studio bands and his own groups. He always had big arrangements. He would spend a fortune on arrangements for a little dog-assed vocalist.
But with Basie, we had something no expensive arrangements could touch. The cats would come in, somebody would hum a tune. Then someone else would play it over on the piano once or twice. Then someone would set up a riff, a ba-deep, a ba-dop. Then Daddy Basie would two-finger it a little. And then things would start to happen.
Half the cats couldn’t have read music if they’d had it. They didn’t want to be bothered anyway. Maybe sometimes one cat would bring in a written arrangement and the others would run over it. But by the time Jack Wadlin, Skeet Henderson, Buck Clayton, Freddie Greene, and Basie were through running over it, taking off, changing it, the arrangement wouldn’t be recognizable anyway.
I know that’s the way we worked out “Love of my Life” and “Them There Eyes” for me. Everything that happened, happened by ear. For the two years I was with the band we had a book of a hundred songs, and every one of us carried every last damn note of them in our heads.
Chapter 7
Good Morning, Heartache
I had been under contract to Joe Glaser for a year, but nothing was happening. Finally I got sore, went down to his office and raised hell.
It was then he told me he hadn’t booked me anywhere because I was too fat. I told him to tell that to Mildred Bailey the Rocking Chair Lady. I was big, sure, but she still had plenty of pounds on me. But I started losing weight and finally he told me he had a job for me at the Grand Terrace Club in Chicago.
Mom and I both thought this was the start of something big. Mom was so proud that I was headlining, she was ready to give up everything to hit the road with me—our flat, everything.
We should