Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [52]
I took the song to Milt Gabler at Decca and I went on my knees to him, I loved it so. I didn’t want to do it with the ordinary six pieces. I begged Milt and told him I had to have strings behind me. I think Milt Gabler had got in solid at Decca on account of me and my recording of “Strange Fruit,” but I had to crawl to get that song recorded, and recorded right. Ram Ramirez gets all the credit for “Lover Man,” but that’s only part of the story.
People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it. I’ve fought as long as ten years to get to record a song I loved or wanted to do. Plenty of times people come to me with material. I like it, I tell them I like it, and then nothing happens. I’ve still got songs I’m fighting to record.
Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose. Because if you win and the song comes out and it dies, the recording people hold that over your head for years and beat you out of having your way.
Something like that happened with “Some Other Spring.” It was a beautiful song and it had Irene Wilson’s heartbreak over Teddy written all over it. She was a famous pianist herself, and John Hammond had spotted her long before either of them saw Teddy. He was a boy when she met him, taught him, and married him. Later Teddy fell for her best friend across the hall and left Irene. Poor Renie almost died. I was out with her one night and Benny Webster and Kenny Klook Clarke, trying to cheer her up. There was a damn noisy radiator going in the restaurant, and when somebody said the radiator noise sounded like a melody we began kidding about it, and the next thing we knew we had a song. Arthur Herzog and Danny Mendelsohn got into the act before we were through, and I took it finally to Benny Goodman.
Benny liked it. In fact he said it was too beautiful, it wouldn’t sell. Everything right then had to be hot and jumping. Benny said nobody would buy it. But I went ahead and recorded it anyway. He was right. It didn’t sell.
I guess “Travelin’ Light” was one of my biggest-selling records. It happened on the West Coast in 1944. Trummy Young, that great trombone player, was about to get thrown out of his Los Angeles hotel for the usual reason. So was I. Both of us might have been thinking about traveling light via the fire escape or something when Jimmy Mundy, the arranger, approached me and asked if I’d like to do the number with Paul Whiteman’s band.
Sure, I told Jimmy, I’d be glad to.
Trummy had actually written the tune. I had worked on it just a little to make it right for me.
The same day I recorded it with Whiteman’s band, Johnny Mercer and Martha Tilton were around recording the same tune. From that, we thought we were really going to hit it big. Trummy got seventy-five dollars for the tune and I got the same for singing it.
We took that loot, paid our rent, went out and celebrated, had some Chinese food, and wound up only five bucks ahead of where we’d been at the start. I had to wire Mom for carfare so Trummy and I could grab a bus and make it back East.
Trummy and I never got another quarter. Royalties were still unheard of. I didn’t know there was such a thing.
Chapter 14
I’m Pulling Through
I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.
When I was on, I was on and nobody gave me any trouble. No cops, no Treasury agents, nobody.
I got into trouble when I tried to get off.
Along about the end of the war I went to Joe Glaser’s office and told him I wanted to kick and I’d need help. I went to my boss at the Famous Door on 52nd Street, Tony Golucci, and I told him. Tony had been Mr. Wonderful to me before, but he was so good to me at that time I hope God will bless him all his days. I didn’t say a word to another soul.
Tony kept my job open. He offered to backstop me with the money I needed. But it was