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Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday
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A lavishly illustrated biographical essay on the peerless Billie Holiday, featuring never-before-published material.
Dead at fourty-four, killed by a lifetime of fast living with hard men and hard drugs: Billie Holiday. As a figure of trouble, Lady Day has secured a place in the pantheon of American icons. Pop history, fed by her own autobiography, has canonised her in print and film as the image of the star-as-victim, the heroin addict and dupe of a succession of husband/pimp/managers who kept her singing to support themselves.
But in this authoritative account of her life and art, Robert O'Meally brings Holiday's musical genius into sharp focus, offering new information about her early musical growth and how she made herself the greatest jazz singer in history. Emphasising Holiday's artistry and training rather than the more frequently highlighted miseries of her personal life, he uses voluminous archival material, much of it never seen before, to correct common myths about her, including those she herself was responsible for. Chronicling Holiday's rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, paticularly Lester Young, Lady Daybrings Billie Holiay to life and confirms her place in the annals of American jazz.
A lavishly illustrated biographical essay on the peerless Billie Holiday, featuring never-before-published material.
Dead at fourty-four, killed by a lifetime of fast living with hard men and hard drugs: Billie Holiday. As a figure of trouble, Lady Day has secured a place in the pantheon of American icons. Pop history, fed by her own autobiography, has canonised her in print and film as the image of the star-as-victim, the heroin addict and dupe of a succession of husband/pimp/managers who kept her singing to support themselves.
But in this authoritative account of her life and art, Robert O'Meally brings Holiday's musical genius into sharp focus, offering new information about her early musical growth and how she made herself the greatest jazz singer in history. Emphasising Holiday's artistry and training rather than the more frequently highlighted miseries of her personal life, he uses voluminous archival material, much of it never seen before, to correct common myths about her, including those she herself was responsible for. Chronicling Holiday's rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, paticularly Lester Young, Lady Daybrings Billie Holiay to life and confirms her place in the annals of American jazz.
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