 First edition | |
| Author | Billie Holiday William Dufty |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 1956 |
| Media type | |
Lady Sings the Blues (1956) is an autobiography by jazz singer Billie Holiday, which was co-authored by William Dufty. [1] The book formed the basis of the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues starring Diana Ross. [2]
The life story of jazz singer Billie Holiday told in her own words. Holiday writes candidly of sexual abuse, confinement to institutions, heroin addiction, and the struggles of being African American before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.
According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle , Dufty's aim was "to let Holiday tell her story her way. Fact checking wasn't his concern." Since its publication, the book has been criticized for factual inaccuracies. [1]
In his introduction to the 2006 edition of Lady Sings the Blues, music biographer David Ritz writes: "(Holiday's) voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain." Despite some factual inaccuracies, according to Ritz, "in the mythopoetic sense, Holiday's memoir is as true and poignant as any tune she ever sang. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true." [1]
In his 2015 study of Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, John Szwed argues that Lady Sings the Blues, is a generally accurate account of Holiday's life, and that Holiday's co-writer, William Dufty, was forced to water down or suppress material by the threat of legal action. The New Yorker reviewer Richard Brody writes: "In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of Citizen Kane ." [3]
Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
Jamesetta Hawkins, known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer who performed in various genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and soul. Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as "The Wallflower", "At Last", "Tell Mama", "Something's Got a Hold on Me", and "I'd Rather Go Blind". She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse, and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch.
Lady Sings the Blues is a 1972 American biographical drama film directed by Sidney J. Furie about jazz singer Billie Holiday, loosely based on her 1956 autobiography which, in turn, took its title from Holiday's songs. It was produced by Motown Productions for Paramount Pictures. Diana Ross, in her feature film debut, portrayed Holiday, alongside a cast including Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan and Scatman Crothers. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards in 1973, including Best Actress in a Leading Role for Diana Ross.
"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century and the great majority of victims were black. The song has been called "a declaration" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement".
Charles James Shavers was an American jazz trumpeter who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Midge Williams, Tommy Dorsey, and Billie Holiday. He was also an arranger and composer, and one of his compositions, "Undecided", is a jazz standard.
William Francis Dufty was an American writer, musician, and activist.
David Ritz is an American author. He has written novels, biographies, magazine articles, and over a hundred liner notes for artists such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Nat King Cole. He has coauthored 36 autobiographies, including some celebrities' autobiographies.
Bernard D. Hanighen was an American songwriter and record producer best known for "When a Woman Loves a Man" and writing lyrics to the jazz composition "'Round Midnight" which was composed by jazz musician Thelonious Monk. Hanighen also worked with Clarence Williams and Johnny Mercer.
"God Bless the Child" is a song written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939. It was first recorded on May 9, 1941, by Billie Holiday and released by the Okeh Records in 1942.
"Lady Sings the Blues" is a song written by jazz singer Billie Holiday and jazz pianist Herbie Nichols.
"Don't Explain" is a song written by jazz singer Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. It was Billie Holiday’s final song.
Lady Sings the Blues may refer to:
Lady Sings the Blues is an album by American jazz vocalist Billie Holiday released in December 1956. It was Holiday's last album released on Clef Records; the following year, the label would be absorbed by Verve Records. Lady Sings the Blues was taken from sessions taped during 1954 and 1956. It was released simultaneously with her ghostwritten autobiography of the same name.
John F. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, African American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University and an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where he previously served as the Center's Director and Professor of Music and Jazz Studies. Szwed is the author of many books on jazz and American music, including studies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, Alan Lomax and Billie Holiday.
The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live is a live album by jazz singer Billie Holiday that was recorded on November 10, 1956 at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The two concerts promoted Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.
Becoming Billie Holiday is a 2008 book of poetry for young readers by American poet and author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper, originally published by Wordsong. It won an honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2009.
Billie is a 2019 documentary film about Billie Holiday, written and directed by British filmmaker James Erskine. The film is based around interviews recorded on audio cassettes through the 1970s by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, researching a book on Holiday that was never completed because of Kuehl's death in 1978: her body was found on a Washington D.C. street, and she was deemed to have died by suicide, although that supposition is disputed by her family. Erskine's documentary "is about both Holiday — as told through the voices of people who knew her — and Kuehl's obsession with crafting her biography."
"Your Mother's Son-In-Law" is a song written by Alberta Nichols and Mann Holiner that was recorded by Billie Holiday with a band led by Benny Goodman on 27 November 1933. It was Holiday's first recording. It was produced by John Hammond. The song was recorded in three takes, and Holiday was paid $35 for her performance.
Lady Day Swings is a compilation album by jazz singer Billie Holiday. It was released in 2002 by Sony Music's Legacy Recordings and presents a collection of 16 songs drawn from the Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944 box set released by Legacy Recordings in 2001.
