Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [3]
I love the language of Lady, but I also love the pictures she paints of Baltimore in the twenties; her recollection of the NYC and L.A. jazz scenes of the years before, during, and after World War II; the dazzling cast of characters—Ethel Waters, Sarah Vaughan, Benny Goodman, Orson Welles, Lester Young, Bob Hope, and especially her mother, the Duchess—who parade through the pages of her life. I love Billie’s humor, I respect Billie’s anger, I’m inspired by Billie’s candor. “Lady was one gutsy woman,” singer Carmen McRae, who knew her well, once told me. Well, Lady Sings the Blues is one gutsy book.
Billie died in 1959 at age forty-four, three years after Lady appeared, her heroin habit unchecked. Dufty, who wound up marrying Gloria Swanson and writing the famous antisugar treatise Sugar Blues, died in 2002 at eighty-six. Their collaboration, though, has not died. As this memoir starts its second half-century of life, I salute its authors for their remarkable achievement. I thank them for making literary music out of a life where music triumphed over pain. In the pages of this book and in the sound of her records, Billie Holiday continues to feed our spirit. She is our wounded angel whose voice will never fade.
DAVID RITZ has collaborated with, among others, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, Marvin Gaye, Etta James, the Neville Brothers, and Smokey Robinson on their life stories. His lyrics include “Sexual Healing.”
Chapter 1
Some Other Spring
Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.
Mom was working as a maid with a white family. When they found out she was going to have a baby they just threw her out. Pop’s family just about had a fit, too, when they heard about it. They were real society folks and they never heard of things like that going on in their part of East Baltimore.
But both kids were poor. And when you’re poor, you grow up fast.
It’s a wonder my mother didn’t end up in the workhouse and me as a foundling. But Sadie Fagan loved me from the time I was just a swift kick in the ribs while she scrubbed floors. She went to the hospital and made a deal with the head woman there. She told them she’d scrub floors and wait on the other bitches laying up there to have their kids so she could pay her way and mine. And she did. Mom was thirteen that Wednesday, April 7, 1915, in Baltimore when I was born.
By the time she worked her way out of hock in the hospital and took me home to her folks, I was so big and smart I could sit up in a carriage. Pop was doing what all the boys did then—peddling papers, running errands, going to school. One day he came along by my carriage, picked me up and started playing with me. His mother saw him and came hollering. She dragged at him and said, “Clarence, stop playing with that baby. Everybody is going to think it’s yours.”
“But, Mother, it is mine,” he’d tell her. When he talked back to his mother like this she would really have a fit. He was still only fifteen and in short pants. He wanted to be a musician and used to take lessons on the trumpet. It was almost three years before he got long pants for the wedding.
After they were married awhile we moved into a little old house on Durham Street in Baltimore. Mom had worked as a maid up North in New York and Philly. She’d seen all the rich people with their gas and electric lights and she decided she had to have them too. So she saved her wages for the day. And when we moved in we were the first family in the neighborhood to have gas and electricity.
It made the neighbors mad, Mom putting in the gas. They said putting pipes in the ground would bring the rats out. It was true. Baltimore is famous for rats.
Pop always wanted to blow the trumpet but he never got the chance. Before we got one to blow, the Army grabbed him and shipped him overseas. It was just his luck to be one of the ones to get it from poison gas