AT 3.10 in the morning on this day 40 years ago, Billie Holiday, one of the greatest and most influential singers of this century, died in the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem. Her death, like her life, was full of the scandalous, the tragic and the bizarre. Reduced to a skeleton by a lifetime of excess, she was under arrest as she shuffled off her mortal coil.
About an hour before she died, she gave a nurse a roll of $50 bills wrapped tight in Scotch tape that she had secreted in her vagina and asked her to give it to Bill Dufty, her friend, who was keeping vigil in the hospital. Dufty, who had helped with her - unreliable - autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, saw it as a sign, he said, that the end was near.
But Lady Day, as Lester Young, her musical alter ego and colleague in Count Basie's orchestra of just 20 years previously, called her, never did anything by halves. She was profane, promiscuous, alcoholic, unpredictable, with a predilection for marrying violent men, totally uninhibited about nudity, yet incredibly vulnerable, warm and giving. She could be stupid and perceptive, confrontational and accepting, mean and generous. Always, it seemed, she lived with little sense of the multiple minor compromises most of us make to get through each day.
And she lived almost completely without any barrier between a thought or feeling and its immediate expression. It's this, perhaps more than anything else, that may be a key to her greatness as a singer. But, like all truly great artists, there is a core quality to her work beyond the explanations of personality and circumstance.
She was born Elinore Harris in 1915, in Philadelphia to 18-year-old Sadie Harris. Sadie, like her child, was born out of wedlock; her father was a working-class black, Charlie Fagan, which accounts for Sadie's use of the surname later on and Billie's being called Eleanora Fagan until Donald Clarke's definitive biography, Wishing on The Moon, settled that question for those interested.
Billie's own father was a drifter, Clarence Holiday, a guitarist who scarcely figured in her life and made it into the big bands before dying of pneumonia in 1937. By then she was already on her way to the big time herself, having been discovered by a songwriter, Bernie Hanighen, and John Hammond, a wealthy jazz fan who also helped push Basie on to the national stage in the US.
In between, though, there had been a lot of living, all of it coloured by being black and poor. In Sadie's home town, Baltimore, Billie had been to correctional school for playing truant. At 11 and tall for her age, she was streetwise and rough-tongued, and she wasn't much older when casual prostitution supplemented the family's meagre income. Even then, she wasn't controlled by any one pimp. Apparently, they all liked her for her "light-complected" beauty, her personal warmth, and the fact that she could sing - and, no doubt, take care of herself.
In the late 1920s, when Sadie took her to New York, she had already made some money singing in Baltimore. Sadie got her a job as a maid and Billie soon got herself fired, before settling into a brothel in Harlem. But opportunities to sing in music-saturated Harlem abounded and by 1933, when she was performing in a place called Monette's Supper Club, Hammond had become one of her most important early fans.
He was struck by the instrumental quality of her phrasing - not surprising, since she had early modelled herself on Louis Armstrong. She was also influenced by the great "Empress of the Blues", Bessie Smith, but never had a big enough voice to equal Smith's majestic, blues-drenched utterances. Somewhere between the two, he later said, "I guess I found Billie Holiday". The name, by the way, was a compendium of her father's and either Billie Dove's - Dove was a movie star of the time - or a friend of the singer's who was also called Billie.
At any rate, Hammond got her a recording debut at the end of 1933 - a few nondescript songs on which she sounds edgy. But she was on the way up, with gigs at the Apollo and other prestigious theatres and clubs. When she got back into the studios nearly two years later, she was ready to don the mantle of greatness. From 1935 until the end of the decade she made a series of small group recordings that defined the art of jazz singing.
Casually conceived and using musicians from the big bands of Goodman, Basie, Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bunny Berigan, or whoever was available, they were made on the cheap for the juke box market. On them, she seemed to function as much on instinct as on an appreciation of the great musicians who recorded with her. The sides with the great tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, sound as if one of the great love affairs of the century was being consummated a second time on disc.
They weren't, alas, lovers. In the Basie band, the real life affair was with the band's guitarist, Freddie Green. But on disc, Billie and Lester turned songs like I'll Never be the Same and A Sailboat in the Moonlight into caressingly beautiful, poignant antiphonies of almost painful intimacy. For five years these and other recordings, under her own name or pianist Teddy Wilson's, put down a benchmark in popular singing that was to influence some of the greatest, including Frank Sinatra.
Her voice, harsh and direct, was an acquired taste. But the subtle changes she made to the songs she sang, her instinctive matching of the altered melodic flow to the words in a way that gave them depth and meaning, were unique and affecting. Her time was a marvel, so lithe, flexible and relaxed it seems to float on the rhythm. She sang ballads and blues to tear at the heart, and even the lighter songs had a wariness behind the joy.
If the wider public was slow to catch on, musicians knew her worth. Stints with Basie and Artie Shaw's big bands in the late 1930s pushed her to the top among swing era singers. Shaw, in fact, had to face down racism when she performed with his all-white orchestra - not from his musicians, who adored her, but from some audiences in the South and from the then owner of New York's Lincoln Hotel, Maria Kramer, who banned her from the bar and the dining room.
Despite all this, she should have had a great career. Ella Fitzgerald, born in equally poor circumstances, managed it. So did Lena Horne and others. But Billie was Billie. Unlike Ella or Lena, she had little technique to draw on when she had an off night. Living on the edge of her feelings as she did, she could be a devastating performer - or just plain bad. And even when she had a major critical success in 1939 with Strange Fruit, in a mesmerising musical delivery of the anti-lynching poem, it typecast her in a way which placed difficulties across the path of her career. As if she wasn't good at doing that herself.
By the mid-1940s, when her career was at its peak, drink, hard drugs and hard men were taking their toll. Finally, she was busted for narcotics in 1947 and spent a year in the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. Many blamed her then husband, a trumpeter and heroin addict called Joe Guy, for turning her on but, typically, she would have none of it. "I'm a grown-up," she said. "I knew what I was doing. Joe may have done things he shouldn't, but I did them of my own accord too."
Her colleagues, however, remained appreciative despite her volatility. So were prominent managers and producers like Joe Glaser and Norman Granz. And though her physical decline is clear even in the late 1940s, she could still cut it with the best, as recordings with such as Benny Carter, Oscar Peterson and Harry Edison proved. And when she made her final recordings in the late 1950s, with Ray Ellis's string-laden orchestra, a setting somehow at odds with the earthiness she epitomised, she still had the power to tear the listener's emotions apart. How she did it, she never knew. Neither do I. But she did it, and the art of popular song in this century is immeasurably the richer for it. Unfortunately for her, she was not.
Her death epitomised it all. In hospital with cirrhosis of the liver and her heart and other organs reduced by drink and drug addiction, she was in no state to combat her illness and withdrawal symptoms at the same time. Doctors, to their credit, could see that and defended her. The police thought differently, threatening to take her away, before they put some of New York's Finest on guard at her hospital door. Legal moves got that halted, but when she rallied a bit the DA's office sought a bedside arraignment on the narcotics charge. Pickets at the hospital helped stop that.
Her last husband, Louis McKay, added to the grotesque by turning up out of the blue, broke, at the hospital, where he read the 23rd Psalm to her. Her response was typical. "I've always been a religious bitch," she told Dufty afterwards, "but if that evil motherfucker believes in God, I'm thinking it over."
The rally was brief, however, and she was suddenly back on the critical list. Dufty was there when she finally gave up. "Her face relaxed, in an incredible repose," he said. "The nurse felt her pulse and said: `She's gone'."