Customer Reviews

Lady Sings the Blues

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked this book up because the woman's voice moves me. I wanted to learn more about her; wanted to know where all of the pain and dignity came from. I'll admit that I was apprehensive...I was certain that her version of the story would be sugar-coated. My fears were unfounded. Billie doesn't leave anything out. She seems to understand that darker points of her life were where the gift was coming from. She candidly discusses her heroin & alcohol addictions, as well as a brief bout of prostitution. She was as interesting as she was talented. Hers is assuredly a harrowing tale, but it is tempered with dignity, honesty & intelligence. She possessed a wisdom that can only derive from a lifetime of tragic mistakes. My one complaint would be that the disturbing chain of events leading to her death aren't covered here. But, alas, this is an autobiography & death can't really be covered in an autobiography. Get her life from her...try Donald Clarke's Wishing On The Moon: The Life & Times Of Billie Holiday(Viking/1994) for adequate coverage of her untimely death. There is enough trgedy and triumph in Lady Sings to satisfy the strongest craving. Ms. Holiday & Mr. Duffy educated me about jazz and its lifestyle, but, more than that, they made me want to know more...to experience more. Lady Sings The Blues is an amazing chronicle of one of music's most gifted and soulful human beings. If you have the slightest spark of interest, you would be cheating yourself by passing on this wonderfully haunting book. Billie Holiday saw that her story's value was dependent upon absolute honesty on her part. This book would mean nothing without it.

Long before celebrity confessions in magazines such as People Weekly, and when a pecadillo we'd find trivial today could still kill a career, it wasn't expected that a celebrity would ever tell the full truth about his/her private life. In Lady Day's time, almost all biographies were mere collections of colorful anecdotes and moral tales; true or not, few people really cared as long as they were entertaining. Anyhow, most readers would just shrug and give the book the benefit of the doubt, and enjoy the picaresque or sordid adventures of the celebrity, and nod with approval at all the morality lessons tough times had given the celebrity.

From what I've heard, Billie Holiday spoke to William Dufty and he put the book together based on her monologues. I'm sure that both Billie and Dufty wanted the book to be as commercial as possible; among other things, they found a very catchy opening with her Mom and Pop getting married when she was three... Yes, this is a lie, but by saying to the world that Sadie had married Clarence Holiday, she was just being loyal to her mother who had wished so much to marry Clarence in real life... and she was saving Sadie's face you could say since it was such a social stigma to have a kid out of wedlock until the early Seventies.

There's some evidence that Billie read the first draft of the book and approved it, even though she would claim later on that she had never read "the damn thing".

Rather than expecting the full truth about her entire life, you should read this book to catch a poignant, vivid glimpse of Billie Holiday, singer and African-American woman, who was blessed in so many ways but also had to overcome so many obstacles such as we can barely imagine today.

I apologize for my shaky English. My first language is French.

Other reviewers have made the case that this autobiography is less than accurate. That may be true however I believe the book captures the spirit of Billie Holiday as well as the tenor of the times in which she lived and consequently it is an important and very interesting book.

The tragedy surrounding Holiday's life and struggle with addiction is well known and yet here it is dealt with in such a gripping and personal way that the story is moving and emotionally wrenching. Billie Holiday emerges from this book as a warm living human being with a remarkable amount of wisdom regarding her own struggles and failings. One would expect an autobiography to seek to afix blame elsewhere or excuse shortcomings. None of that is found here. This was an inteligent, wise and obviously talented though flawed woman whose story deserves to be told.
Reading this has rekindled my interest in her music and that alone was a great benefit I received from this book.

This is everything Aretha Franklin's autobiography should have been but wasn't. It is brutally frank, almost scary in its honesty. Nothing is glossed over, including her relationships with men ( and women ) her heroin addiction and her experiences with sexism and racism , both in and out of the music industry. I read this book in one weekend, I just couldn't put it down.

this is the real billie holiday talking...she had a ghost writer...william dufty...but these are billie's thoughts and words. she comes out to be a real human...and a very intelligent one at that...her weaknesses proved to be self destructive and fatal..but we all have our faults...my only wish was that the book was longer...remember that other bios on billie holiday borrow and excerpt heavily from this book. this book is searing!

"Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three."
These are the first lines on the first page. It has also been researched, and explained in every other documented biography of Billie Holiday that this is in fact not true. at all. I agree that this is a good book... it is interesting to read, but you must be aware that nearly all you are reading is either complete fiction or gross exaggeration. If you want to read a good story, read this. if you want to learn what Billie Holiday's life was about, read any other biography of her... because these were written to set the record straight.

if you must insist that these are Billie's words, then you are arguing that Billie is a liar. why she would go to lengths to do this is absurd, which leaves but William F. Dufty... a guy who was paid by a publisher to write something people would buy.

This book has had some exellent reviews, and after reading it I was not disapointed. I totaly agreed with what many people said about the book: It is one of the most honest autobiographies ever written. Then I found out the truth behind the book. I saw a special on Billie one night, and was shocked to hear that Billie had nothing to do with the writting of the book. Some ghost writer typed it up, and all Billie did was sign off on it. It is not even known if she ever even read the thing. So my rating of the book is 3 stars. It is still quite informative, and does contain mostly facts, but to call it an autobiography is some what misleading.

While Billie Holiday had a co-author on this one, the latter thankfully must have served mostly as "scribe and editor," because I could really feel what Billie felt and saw what she saw during her career. The book is well-done and reads like a great novel.

Billie Holiday was a hugely popular, incredibly talented and beautiful, black blues vocalist and club entertainer, often attached to big bands, traveling the nation predominently during the 40s and 50s. In her own words, you'll hear how she engaged in every form of behavior in order to maintain her career, to survive, and even to recreate; thus, she indulged herself in prostitution, took drugs like a fiend, and succumbed to occasional extortion brought on by various rotten people who surrounded her.

Rather than to detail what Billie said about herself, I'd rather hit upon the ambiance of Billie's soul... by the time I finished this book, I had developed a HUGE respect for Billie Holiday. She often spewed the most vile language, usually at her numerous tormentors, but she was neither malicious, nor petty, nor hateful. She endured the most heinous forms of personal treatment during her travels with the various bands with whom she was attached, solely due to the fact that she was black. Of course, this was tragically common during this era of American history.

But what is most amazing to me was that Billie never "whines" about any of this in her book. Yes, she expresses displeasure, but this was a lady who had far too much personal dignity to bellyache about her circumstances. She doesn't say this... it's something that the READER extracts from the aggregate of her comments.

Most of Billie's money sadly went for drugs of abuse which no doubt contributed to her premature death. She recorded hundreds of songs and, at least in my older hardcover edition of the book, there is a very nicely organized discography in the back.

If you want to get a sense of what this book is all about and how it is presented, just listen to a 50s version (Billie's voice was rasping a bit by this time but I much prefer her recordings from this "late period" of her checkerboard career) of "Lover Man," which was Jack Kerouac's favorite tune and one of mine too. And if you want to know how she was handled by associates, just listen to her most haunting rendition ever, "Strange Fruit". You can look up the lyrics online which will also give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

Compare Billie's life to the similarly tragic activities of the late Janis Joplin -- the two were alike in many ways and shared similar experiences (pawns) in the music world and in their personal lives. This biography is a "must read" for music and celebrity fans, but it's also a great casual read for folks who garner more general interests.

I have a deep love and respect for some of the most influential female jazz and soul singers of our time, like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Carmen McRae, Lena Horne, and last but not least, Billie Holiday. In LADY SINGS THE BLUES, Holiday recalls some of the most resonant memories of her turbulent past--the good, the [mostly] bad and the [frequently] ugly. From the very start, Billie Holiday (birth name Eleanora Fagan), born to thirteen year old Sadie Fagan and sixteen year old Clarence Holiday, had a very difficult life. The young girl saw much in the rough streets of Baltimore, Maryland, as a call girl, a jailbird and a spitfire with a vey hot temper.

Billie didn't even consider a career in singing, and her introduction as a vocalist was (perhaps) accidental, but definitely fate. Her descent into drug addiction, jailtime, turbulent relationships (with both men and women) and the great antipathy she faced in the storm of racism, jealousy and gossip made for a very adverse life, on and off of the stage. Some of the greatest moments of her career are documented here, as told to writer William Dufty. We learn the stories behind songs like "Strange Fruit," that are songs she created and truly lived and experienced, before setting them to lyric and melody. Though, I never heard Billie Holiday's speaking voice, I heard it throughout this piece, and I can see why it was brought to the screen, as a film. I haven't seen it, so I honestly have no idea how well it translated as a movie, with Diana Ross. Though, I have heard it was fantastic. Highly reccomended.

I just finished reading this book and lstened to the 1956 recording of billie's concert at Carnagie hall. She i so honest about her drug use it breaks your heart, Oh, if only she had lived today maybe she woul dhave liked herslf more. I love Billie Holiday and you wil to after readign this book