When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 3-1936-37) 

CD Review

By Music Critic Seth Garth

The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 3, 1936-37

Everybody, at least the everybodies who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day (I believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young, who backed her on many recordings and in many a venue gave her that name and it fit her as did that eternal flower in her hair) had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin.      

Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if you listen to this CD under review, the third volume in the series you will also know why in the first part of the 21^st century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, kept your own blues at bay. That last statement is really what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right. Here is the not nice part. Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie and they, maybe under the influence of the film or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues   away. That is why we still listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today. 

Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the 1930s, the time of her time, covering Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. Check out Pennies From Heaven and I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.