Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [76]
My friends are telling me, “You should be rich, Lady. I just paid ten bucks for a couple of your LPs.”
I always say I’m grateful they like my songs—even those of twenty years ago. But I have to tell them it ain’t going to bring me a quarter. I made over two hundred sides between 1933 and 1944, but I don’t get a cent of royalties on any of them. They paid me twenty-five, fifty, or a top of seventy-five bucks a side, and I was glad to get it. But the only royalties I get are on my records made after I signed with Decca.
I’ve been told that nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love.”
Maybe I remember what those words are all about. Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island, the Catholic institution and the Jefferson Market Court, the sheriff in front of our place in Harlem and the towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and my scars, Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and San Francisco—every damn bit of it.
All the Cadillacs and minks in the world—and I’ve had a few—can’t make it up or make me forget it. All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.
Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that.
Look at my big dream! It’s always been to have a big place of my own out in the country someplace where I could take care of stray dogs and orphan kids, kids that didn’t ask to be born; kids that didn’t ask to be black, blue, or green or something in between.
I’d only want to be sure of one thing—that nobody in the world wanted these kids. Then I would take them. They’d have to be illegit, no mama, no papa.
I’d have room for twenty-five or thirty, with three or four big buxom loving women just like my mom to take care of them, feed them, see to it the little bastards go to school; knock them in the head when they’re wrong, but love them whether they’re good or bad.
We’d have a crazy big kitchen with a chartreuse stove and a refrigerator to match, and I’d supervise the cooking and baking. We might have a doctor and a nurse and a couple of tutors. But I’d always be around to teach them my kind of teaching—not the kind that tells them how to spell Mississippi, but how to be glad to be who you are and what you are.
When they grow up enough to go out and do baby-sitting and take little jobs or start on their own, away they’d go. And then there would always be more.
Grownups can make it some kind of way. They might have a little more or a little less to eat than the next guy—a little more or a little less love, and it isn’t fatal.
But kids? Take me, I didn’t ask Clarence Holiday and Sadie Fagan to get together in that Baltimore hallway and have me and then have to leave me to get pushed around and hassle with life on my own. Sure, my old lady took care of me the best she could and she was the greatest. But she was only a kid herself. Her hassle was worse than mine. She was just a young kid trying to raise a young kid.
Anyway, that’s my dream and there is another dream too.
All my life I’ve wanted my own club. A small place where I can walk in, have my own piano, drums, and a swinging guitar. I’d want it to be crowded if there were one hundred and twenty-five people there—that’s how intimate I want it.
I’ve fought all my life to be able to sing what I wanted the way I wanted to sing it. Before I die I want a place of my own where nobody can tell me when to go on. I might go on at nine, or four in the morning; I might sing forty-nine songs or one song. I might