Religion Around Billie Holiday 9780271087221

Citation preview

Religion Around Billie Holiday

Religion Around vol. 3

pe te r ive r kauf ma n, General Editor Books in the Religion Around series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies give readers a greater understanding of and appreciation for individual figures, their work, and their lasting influence.

religion around

Billie Holiday

TRACY FESSENDEN The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​ Publication Data Names: Fessenden, Tracy, author. Title: Religion around Billie Holiday / Tracy Fessenden. Other titles: Religion around. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Series: Religion around | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday’s life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2017058145 | isbn 9780271080956 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Holiday, Billie, 1915–1959— Religion. | Holiday, Billie, 1915–1959— Criticism and interpretation. | Music— Religious aspects. | Jazz—Religious aspects. Classification: lcc ml420.h58 f47 2018 | ddc 782.42165092—dc23 lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​ /2017058145 “A New Song,” “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” and “Song for Billie Holiday” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Any third-​party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission. “Things Are Looking Up” from Crazy for You, music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

Copyright © 1937 (renewed) Ira Gershwin Music and George Gershwin Music. All rights on behalf of Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright © 1937 (renewed 1964) Nokawi Music, Frankie G. Songs and Ira Gershwin Music. All rights for Nokawi Music administered by Imagem Sounds. All rights for Frankie G. Songs administered by Songs Music Publishing. All rights for Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. “The House I Live In,” words and music by Earl Robinson and Lewis Allan Copyright © 1942 (renewed) Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP). International rights secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC. All rights outside the U.S. administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

In memory of my father Frank Fessenden 1934–2016 Cool as a moose

Contents

Acknowledgments  {ix} Introduction  {1}

1 Religion Around  {15}



2 True Confessions  {55}



3 The Story of Jazz  {95}



4 Crossing Jordan  {133}



5 Our Lady  {171} Notes  {197} Bibliography  {225} Index  {249}

Acknowledgments

This book exists because Peter Iver Kaufman had an inspired idea and showed up in Arizona to tell me about it. I am grateful to Peter for conjuring the Religion Around series, and to Pennsylvania State University Press for giving a platform to the endeavor. It’s said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as though that were a bad thing. I take inspiration from the Martha Grahams and Savion Glovers of this genre: Daphne Brooks, Peter Coviello, Krin Gabbard, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Joshua Guthman, Eric Lott, Ingrid Monson, Robert O’Meally, David Stowe, Sherrie Tucker, Gayle Wald, and David Yaffe are some of those for whom this book is grateful praise. Readers and fellow travelers in the Religion Around series have supported me in ways that wildly exceed their formal contributions to this project. I’m convinced that Jason Bivins, like Louis Armstrong, never read or wrote a sentence he couldn’t play; his response to this book extends an ongoing, improvisatory collaboration, and I’m grateful that the last several years have given us so many occasions to gig. The intelligence, grace, and care that Tom Ferraro brings to his readings of my work will forever humble and astonish me; his suspiciously timed appearances over the whole of my career are to me a joyful mystery. So is the fierce brilliant light that is Kathryn Lofton, whose luminous gift for connection has enlivened the writing of this book in more ways than I can say. Generous interlocutors took time to answer queries and to deepen conversations. Wallace Best, Andrew Jewett, Michael Moon, Stephen Schloesser, and John Szwed offered insights, encouragement, and expertise. Adam Gussow counseled boldness and funk. Billie Holiday’s

godson Bevan Dufty welcomed me to his home in San Francisco and shared his stories and stunning trove of photographs and memorabilia. Sister Mary Carol McClenon of Baltimore helped me to a better understanding of the Good Shepherd Magdalens. Marty Lederman read Charles Black’s “My World with Louis Armstrong” aloud to me from the copy he keeps on his phone. Judith Weisenfeld shared tools and inspiration for genealogical deep digs. Rita Dove gave me the use of her Billie Holiday poem “Canary” and let me know she had written it while teaching on the campus where I write this book now, a benediction on the effort if ever there was one. Work on this project was made richer by kind and brilliant people whose gatherings included me. Cooper Harriss and Sarah Imhoff convened a rousing workshop at Indiana University. Peter Kaufman and his colleagues at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies brought prospective series authors to the University of Richmond. Sally Promey made the projects of Yale’s Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion the occasion for marvelous community. Kris Trujillo and Eleanor Craig opened a place for me in their Arts of Devotion seminar at the University of Utrecht. Chad Seales and his colleagues at the University of Texas welcomed me to Austin for a reading and performance at a blues bar where Billie Holiday once played; I owe special thanks to Harold McMillan for producing the event and to Pamela Hart and her trio for bringing Holiday’s songbook to life. For feedback and good company at these and other gatherings, I’m grateful to J. Kameron Carter, Heather Curtis, Jon Ebel, Steven Friesen, Constance Furey, Clark Gilpin, Jen Graber, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Amy Hollywood, Colin Jager, Pamela Klassen, Laura Levitt, Stephen Marini, Lerone Martin, Megan Milota, John Lardas Modern, Deborah Dash Moore, Martha Newman, Catherine O’Donnell, Stephanie Paulsell, Anthony Petro, Leonard Norman Primiano, Josef Sorett, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. For help in locating and making use of materials in their collections, I thank the staff of the Langsdale Library, Special Collections, at the University of Baltimore; the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University; the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; Special Collections at the Brotherton {  x  } 

Acknowledgments

Library, University of Leeds; the Literature and Rare Books Division, Special Collections and University Archives, at the University of Maryland, College Park; and the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) at Rutgers University–Newark. I owe a singular debt to Tad Hershorn and Elizabeth Surles, whose hospitality, depth of knowledge, and lively interest in this project made my visits to the IJS so fruitful and enjoyable. The list of those whose hands-​on contributions brought this book into final form begins with Kathryn Yahner and her generous and patient colleagues at the Press. Suzanne Wolk copyedited the manuscript with exquisite deftness and care. The image on the cover comes from a photo taken by the late Mel Levine at the Storyville club in Boston on April 24, 1959, one of Billie Holiday’s last concert dates. I am so very grateful to his sons, Noam and Oren Levine, for allowing me to reproduce it here. Many people at Arizona State University helped me finish this book, including some whose labors behind the scenes will never be fully known to me. George Justice and Matt Garcia, then dean of humanities and director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies (SHPRS), respectively, extended my sabbatical leave in 2014–15 and awarded me the Steve and Margaret Forster Professorship. Current SHPRS director Matt Delmont convened a school-​wide forum for this book and helped me imagine what its digital archive of images and sounds might include. Musicologists at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts welcomed me into their company. Faculty heads John Carlson and Eugene Clay fostered congenial intellectual community in religious studies, where the friendship of generous colleagues and students sustains me. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of listening to Janis Joplin with my father, Frank Fessenden, who shaped my early musical tastes and my sense of what life might be for. He died before I finished this book, but he asked about it for as long as he could, and he listened even as his mind began to free itself from everything but love. My mother, Maureen Fessenden, continues to teach me the meaning of grace and devotion. I am forever indebted to them and to my brothers, Frank and Drew Fessenden, for the wondrous gift of this family. a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s   { 

xi  }

When I met Kevin Dalton I could not have imagined the life we would share, or that it would bring us Hadley and Blaise, who turn every silly, schmaltzy song about love into poetry. I am grateful for our fierce and tender happiness, for our every mad adventure.

{  xii  } 

Acknowledgments

introduction

In August 1977, a thirty-​seven-​year-​old writer named Linda Kuehl arrived in Los Angeles from her native New York to interview Joan Didion for the Paris Review. Kuehl had published occasional pieces in the Paris Review and Commonweal and the literary sections of the New York Times, and she’d been at work on a biography of Billie Holiday for years. The interview took place in Didion’s light-​bleached living room overlooking the sea. To escape the bright glare of the sun off the sea, those who sat and talked in this room, Didion said, tended to gravitate toward its dark corners. The published interview, culled from hours of taped conversation, opens in Didion’s voice. “It is usual for the interviewer to write this paragraph about the circumstances in which the interview was conducted,” Didion begins, “but the interviewer in this case, Linda Kuehl, died not long after the tapes were transcribed.” Kuehl’s intelligence and acuity, Didion says, had made her “relaxed and even enthusiastic about talking, which I rarely am.”1 Kuehl had honed her skills in the scores of interviews she’d done by then with everyone she could find who’d known Billie Holiday and would talk on the record: accompanists, lovers, agents, friends, the

undercover cop who fell half in love with her after tailing her for years, the Catholic priest in Harlem who said her mother Sadie’s funeral Mass. Nine days before the meeting with Didion, Kuehl’s editor at Harper & Row, Frances McCullough, wrote Kuehl to say she was dropping the Billie Holiday project. The book refused to cohere, McCullough said; the reader gets lost in choppy waters. “God knows,” McCullough wrote, “if it’s painful to me, it must be awful for you.”2 Maybe Kuehl shared the news in eliciting this comment from Didion: “I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world.” But once begun, Didion went on, “I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.” But “maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.”3 Kuehl never finished the Billie Holiday book; in February 1978 she saw Count Basie and His Orchestra perform at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., then returned to her hotel and, under psychic circumstances that remain unknowable, plunged to her death from a window. Years later, McCullough deposited a stack of Kuehl’s notes and draft chapters with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. In the drafts, McCullough’s editorial hand is heavy; paragraphs and pages are crossed out in bold slashes. Some of her queries to Kuehl are deflating. In a passage she’d revised and retyped many times, Kuehl writes, “It is interesting to speculate about the origin of Sadie’s Catholicism.” McCullough flags the sentence and puts a question in the margin: “Is it really?”4 This book is a wager that yes, it is really; more, that the world Billie Holiday moved in was thick with religion of various stripes and degrees of remove from the pews, and that this religion mattered for her life and her sound and what she and others made of them. Had Linda Kuehl continued to speculate on the origins of Holiday’s mother’s Catholicism, she would likely have turned up the record of Sadie Fagan’s commitment to the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls in Baltimore, where she was sent at age thirteen to be “kept and detained” for five years.5 It was the same convent reformatory to which her daughter Billie, then Eleanora, was also sent by the courts, first when she was three months shy of ten and again two years later. {  2  } 

religion around billie holiday

When she was not in the House of the Good Shepherd, Billie/Eleanora lived along the rough edges of a jazz-​loving city with a shifting cast of mentors who catered to its hungers and pleasures. Holiday began her career in the Prohibition-​era good-​time houses on Baltimore’s waterfront, where she made money clipping johns and singing for tips. Childhood associates in Baltimore remembered that the “best-​dressed hustlers used to come around the neighborhood to get Eleanora for the sing.” She’d sing to the accompaniment of records on the Victrola, a piano if there was one, or simply to the backup of the “singing on her mind.”6 In her eleven months at the House of the Good Shepherd, Billie Holiday attended a compulsory Catholic Mass every day and sang every day from the forms set forth in the Liber Usualis, the common book of Gregorian chant used in the Mass, in daily and seasonal devotions, and in all feasts and celebrations in the liturgical year. It was a discipline at least as formative, one imagines, as Charlie Parker’s summer in the woodshed, playing scales. The Liber Usualis was revised in 1896 by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes, France, who sought a purer rendering of Gregorian chant’s rhythms and phrasing. Chant would still be sung sotto voce inside a minimalist melodic register, but no longer in weighty, metrical fashion. The Solesmes method liberated the singing of chant from a fixed beat in metronomic time, directing the “notes to be sung quickly and lightly” in the manner “of ordinary speech, or in unpredictable groups of two or three.”7 The combined apprenticeships, convent and street, went to Billie Holiday’s distinctive undemonstrative cool, her soft parlando delivery of straight-​up talk turned to song. “She had a whole way about her,” her accompanist Specs Powell recalled. “Tapped her foot very quietly, her head tilted slightly to the side. Nothing ever shocked her. She could say the most vulgar thing but never sound vulgar. She could curse a person out and still make it sound like music.”8 The hush-​now shimmer of Holiday’s voice was made for the microphone, invented just in time for her arrival in Harlem at the end of the 1920s. Producer John Hammond caught her act at Monette’s Supper Club on 133rd Street and said he’d never heard a sound like hers, so different from the blues belters and corny band singers he knew. “Something must be done about her for I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

3  }

gramophone records,” Hammond wrote of Holiday in his April 1933 column in Melody Maker, then put her in the studio with Benny Goodman to cut her first sides.9 The record industry stayed alive in the Depression on the nickels fed to jukeboxes, and jukeboxes brought Holiday’s sound into towns where black women singers were known mostly as singers of gospel or blues. Neither blues nor gospel was Holiday’s element, but she could mine their characters and plots for some of the songs she wrote (“God Bless the Child,” “Billie’s Blues”) and the stories she told or lived out in her life: the great-​grandmother who couldn’t read or write but knew the Bible by heart; the flinty Baptist aunt she used to torture by singing blues; her abusive cousin Henry who became a preacher; the preacher she married, Louis McKay, a brute the likes of any blues song’s baddest man. Religion Around Billie Holiday is not a brief for Holiday’s piety or impiety, her importance to religious history, or her prophetic voice for civil rights. It is not a study of sacred themes in her work, for indeed Holiday recorded almost nothing that could be called religious. There’s the slyly ersatz spiritual “God Bless the Child”; a bootleg version of “My Yiddishe Momme” that showed up on a 2010 pressing of Jewish classics; and the rumor of “O Come All Ye Faithful” on a flimsy laminate disk she made in a coin-​operated Voice-​O-​Graph booth, now a collector’s holy grail. She copyrighted a song she wrote about Louis McKay, “Preacher Boy,” but never bothered to record it. Religion Around Billie Holiday focuses not on Holiday’s religious practice or expression but rather on the environing religious conditions to which her genius responded, and in which her life and sound took form. The spiritual weather through which Billie Holiday moved and still moves (as sound, image, words, memory, desire) was made in the colliding pressure systems of multiple religious formations: the urban, pre–Vatican II Catholicism that undertook to reform her; the theologies, politics, spaces, and sounds of the Afro-​Protestant churches to which she never belonged; the vigilante faith that passed for justice in the gallant South; the vaporous, shape-​shifting Jewishness of the American songbook; the gravitational pull of her contemporaries’

{  4  } 

religion around billie holiday

eclectic religious orbits; and the mytho-​poetic charge of her own luminous iconicity. In Holiday’s lifetime, and certainly by the 1950s, America’s religious climate might register as a well-​behaved pluralism, Protestant-​ Catholic-​Jew, the nation scrubbed and made prosperous by its citizens’ investments in one spiritual tradition or other. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously remarked, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”10 But the firmament flickered with glints of a different dispensation. A year after Billie Holiday’s death, Norman Mailer covered the 1960 Democratic National Convention for Esquire. The magnetism of Eisenhower’s obliteratingly charismatic successor, Mailer supposed, had something to do with music. For all his “good, sound, conventional liberal record,” John F. Kennedy had “a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.” The murmur of jazz was the shush of a spiritual current that ran crosscuttingly beneath America’s dull and necessary civic faith, “a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”11 Religion Around Billie Holiday focuses broadly on the vernacular rituals and devotions that scholars have come to call lived religion—the Catholicism of the streets, the Jewishness of the stage, the Pentecostalism of the roadhouse or the concert arena—but not at the expense of more official religious forms and pronouncements in hierarchies, institutions, hagiographies, doctrines, and hymns.12 The secular habitations of Billie Holiday’s life and art, far from being spaces swept clean of religion, are where the worldly and the sacred trade riffs and skin: a Gershwin tune might clip a melody from synagogue chant, then slip into a jazz Mass by Mary Lou Williams. What Billboard first christened “rock and roll” were the Holy Roller hymns of gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharpe.13 When Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn made a film of the life of Saint Thaïs, the penitent libertine held up as a model for inmates of the House of the Good Shepherd, the board of censors insisted that he cut more than a dozen scenes from the theatrical

I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

5  }

release, including a stabbing, a suicide, several episodes of intoxication, and sex in various configurations and degrees of explicitness.14 To consider religion around is to pay attention to ambient feeling and mood, to energies, pressures, frequencies, powers. While there is no sequestering of religion in favor of “spirituality” in this project, Religion Around Billie Holiday seeks neither to silence the witness of unquiet spirits, nor to suppress the vague and tricky category of the spiritual itself. “Sound and spirits both spill beyond whatever formulation we can momentarily give to them,” Jason Bivins writes, “carried away on the breath—the inspiration—that creates and steals them both as soon as, as sure as they’re born.”15  What Bivins recognizes as the “unnamed surplus” of spiritual energies surrounding jazz feels especially dense around Billie Holiday, who was so careless of all that bound her to the flesh, and whose appearances had for so many the quality of a visitation. The haunting timbre of her voice set poets to trying to name it. “The distress we feel in your presence,” Charles Henri Ford wrote in his 1946 “Chanson pour Billie,” “is like hearing footsteps that / will take us away.”16 Holiday’s Catholic formations give ballasting weight to the more fugitive, apparitional qualities of her life and sound. At  various moments Billie Holiday may or may not have been a believing Catholic, a practicing Catholic, a lapsed or cafeteria or recovering Catholic. But she was indisputably a trained Catholic, and this training shaped her moves within what horizons of possibility were hers to navigate over the whole of her life. Before being sent to the convent, Holiday had been an on-​again, off-​again pupil at a Baltimore girls’ school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, one of two African American orders of Catholic nuns in the United States. A letter she wrote to break with Louis McKay in the last year of her life begins, “Louie, I am writing this on the back of my Prests [priest’s] letter. You know Father O’Connor Boston.” Father Norman O’Connor, a jazz DJ and the Catholic chaplain at Boston University, hosted Holiday on her visits to the city and was a celebrant at her funeral Mass. When Holiday died, leaving $750 in cash and seventy cents in a bank account, a wealthy Catholic layman, Michael Grace, offered to pay her funeral and burial costs, but McKay cabled to insist that no one else make “arrangements regarding my {  6  } 

religion around billie holiday

wifes (Eleanore McKay a/k/a Billie Holiday) funeral whatsoever or use of my name.” McKay fought Down Beat over the establishment of a fund to buy a stone for Holiday’s unmarked grave, but he eventually allowed her to be exhumed and buried in a plot with her mother beneath a headstone carved “Hail Mary, Full of Grace.”17 Holiday’s Catholic immersions have gone largely unremarked in the available accounts of her life. Certainly, they undercut the perception that her gifts were simply, prodigiously there, too wild for cultivation and too strong for her license and decadence to smother, and that she herself had no idea how to use them.18 It was a resilient view, voiced here by Greer Johnson, one of the bohemian literati who flocked around Holiday in the 1940s. Johnson believed that Holiday’s mother was “a relatively stupid sad little woman who had been caught in a relationship and produced a phoenix,” and that Billie, the phoenix, was “destroyed by the enormity of her gift which she did not know how to develop or where to place. And there was nobody to receive it.”19 Johnson’s devotion and that of Holiday’s broad and eclectic fan base give the lie to that “nobody.” It would be more accurate to say, with Will Friedwald, that Holiday was the constant beneficiary of her own and her followers’ good taste.20 “They loved Billie because she was real,” composer Irene Kitchings said, and they “followed her around everywhere—black people, white people, any kind of people.” She “wasn’t commercial”; she “had a mind of her own and a will of her own,” and “she made what she wanted to make.” Barney Josephson, who opened the Greenwich Village basement café where Holiday first sang of southern lynching in “Strange Fruit,” remembered her as “meticulous about her work.” If an accompanist “played a note that disturbed her while she was singing, he heard about it. If the piano was one note behind or too fast, she picked it up. If she wasn’t satisfied, she let them know.” She was “not a show woman,” bandleader Billy Eckstine said, and if she gave the impression “she didn’t give a shit” what her audiences thought, it was because she was singing not for them but for the ages. William Dufty, the as-​told-​to author of Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues (1956), said that Holiday “knew in her bones that a thousand years from now, as long as the language endures, people will still listen to her singing and be moved by it. Call it arrogance, serenity, hallucination, there it was.”21 I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

7  }

Holiday’s “timeless, floating quality,” write musicologists Hao Huang and Rachel Huang, “comes partly from our being unsure how to identify ‘the beat.’ ”22 Holiday famously sang to a tempo that lagged behind or floated over the beat of her accompaniment, which required her to inhabit two distinct temporal worlds at one time. It’s a useful image for considering the ways in which she moved with and against the religious currents around her. Black vernacular music reached ever-​expanding audiences in the middle decades of the twentieth century through a variety of channels: on records, in concerts and traveling shows, on radio and film, and in projects of cultural diplomacy during the Second World War and after. Chapter 1, “Religion Around,” listens in these settings for an implicit American civil religion, broadly Protestant in tenor and emancipatory tilt, that hallows American history as the history of freedom, and manages to assimilate black experience to that history. Among its musical precepts are that blues artists cleave away from black-​church beginnings in a break for self-​determination at the crossroads; that black music conjures both sacred depth and secular license, particularly for white listeners; and that jazz and jazz artists made a soundtrack of resistance to the Nazis and a clarion voice for freedom in the Cold War. Holiday never signed on to the version of the social gospel that made African American musical genius a benediction on the nation and a testament to its promise of equal opportunity for all. Compare Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues to Ethel Waters’s 1951 autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow. They’re nearly the same tale, with nearly the same protagonist at its center: a destitute black girl, educated by nuns, participant-​observer in a world of prostitution, drugs, and crime. She sings for tips in Baltimore and Harlem and eventually rises to a dazzling stardom. A key difference is that Waters is reborn in evangelical Christian faith along the way, and narrates her story through the lens of her conversion. The Baltimore Afro-​American, which panned Lady Sings the Blues as sordid and gratuitously explicit, noted of Waters’s book that the “truth is always lethal, especially when it is presented in the idiom of the street.” Nevertheless, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, not “pretty reading,” is “inspiring, for, after all, the essence of what many like to think of as ‘the American story’—from rags to riches—is here.” His Eye {  8  } 

religion around billie holiday

Is on the Sparrow was a middlebrow Book-​of-​the-​Month Club selection and was excerpted in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Waters afterward found a renewed celebrity singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the gospel hymn, for the stadium audiences at Billy Graham’s crusades.23 Unlike Waters, Holiday abandoned neither her Catholicism nor the idiom of the streets for the evangelical promise of rebirth into the American story. Chapter 2, “True Confessions,” reads Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues as spiritual biography, routed through two genres at considerable remove from the rags-​to-​riches story of American redemption. One genre is the written lives of women saints, some of body-​bending disposition and spiritual appetite, to which Holiday was exposed at Good Shepherd. The other is the breathless, tell-​all pulp magazines that Holiday read avidly, drew steady attention from, and modeled for on at least one occasion.24 In Catholic tradition the saints’ written lives were often begun in the spiritual intimacy of the confessional, a setting that Holiday’s fellow Catholic William Dufty explicitly invoked as the scene of their collaboration. The confessional was where Holiday had been taught to tell difficult truths, however embellished or pared by omission, according to particular conventions and rules of comportment. In Lady Sings the Blues, each tabloid-​ready chapter bearing the name of a signature Holiday song, Holiday’s persona and her repertory alike come into view as accretions of practiced confessional performance. Chapter 3, “The Story of Jazz,” takes its name from a movie Orson Welles never made. Welles met Billie Holiday in late 1941 and, enamored, hatched a plan to put her in his next film. Welles’s The Story of Jazz, loosely based on Louis Armstrong’s 1936 autobiography, would be set in New Orleans and feature Armstrong as himself. Billie Holiday would play Bessie Smith, with whom Armstrong recorded when Holiday was still a child in Baltimore, studying their sound on the records she heard in brothels. Before Welles could begin filming, just after Pearl Harbor, he was dispatched to Brazil by the Motion Picture Division of the Office of Inter-​American Affairs. In February 1942 Welles was in Rio de Janeiro shooting scenes of the Afro-​Catholic Lenten festival of Carnival. His idea was to weave together New Orleans jazz and Brazilian samba music, with the carnal indulgences of Mardi Gras and Carnival I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

9  }

as connecting threads. From his Hollywood studio’s perspective, the dangerous, erotically charged mingling of races in Welles’s Brazil footage put the kibosh on The Story of Jazz, and Welles moved on to plugging jazz on his wartime radio show.25 After the war, some of the original principals regrouped without Welles to make the lamentable film New Orleans (1947), which put Holiday in the role of a singing maid. Its storyline followed what lyricist Gene Lees disparaged as the groupthink “credo of jazz”: I believe in Jazz as America’s only begotten Art Form. Jazz is a folk music of protest against inequity, born in New Orleans to uneducated descendants of slaves. They made it up out of their own rhythmic tradition and the harmonic and melodic materials they found in Protestant hymns. . . . This religion was despised in the land of its birth until the Epistles of John the Hammond forewarned the Europeans, who became the first true Jazzians, and took up the burden of evangelizing the Philistine Americans to what had been wrought in their midst when their unrecognized saints went marching in.26 Had Welles returned to The Story of Jazz after his time in Rio, he might have built a better origin story around what Jelly Roll Morton, with considerable geographic license, called the “Spanish tinge.” Morton told Alan Lomax it was jazz’s crucial trace ingredient.27 By “Spanish tinge” Morton meant the Afro-​Cuban and otherwise miscegenous melodies and tonal structures that flowed into the southern port cities of New Orleans and Baltimore and the destination cities of the Great Migration, and made jazz a form and flourish distinct from hymns or blues. Chapter 3 centers this story of jazz on Billie Holiday, and considers the various musical and spiritual migrations that converge in her production. Early descriptions of jazz—“Negro minstrel music as interpreted by ‘Tin-​Pan-​Alley’ New Yorkers of Hebrew origin,” in the words of composer Henry Cowell—rightly lay stress on the epoch-​making collaborations of its two most visible creative constituencies, African {  10  } 

religion around billie holiday

Americans and Jews.28 Chapter 4, “Crossing Jordan,” focuses on the identifications, borrowings, and misrecognitions that pass between black and Jewish voices in the making of Holiday’s songbook, and the ways in which she did and did not enter into their overlapping narratives of deliverance. For Jewish immigrants and African Americans schooled in biblical narrative, crossing the Jordan River meant passing into the Promised Land. For Jewish refugees from the terror of the Old World, the land of Canaan was America; for black refugees from the terror of the Old South, it was an America north of slavery or otherwise purged of slavery’s ghosts. For some black and white Christians, “crossing Jordan” also means passing from this world to whatever Canaan lies beyond. In considering Holiday’s dealings with Jewish and Afro-​Protestant figures of redemption, this chapter contemplates her own resistance, particularly as she neared the end of her life at forty-​ four, to packaging histories of terror and enslavement in a language of redemption or deliverance. That resistance is audible in Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit,” the searing witness to lynching she first sang in 1939 and kept in her repertory for the whole of her career. Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the song’s Jewish composer, came to odds over Holiday’s role in making the song. She said she had a hand in shaping the melody; he insisted both the words and music were his. What was really at issue was the agency each imagined the song to have. By the time she recorded “Strange Fruit,” the industry’s black-​Jewish vibe was being picked up in the heartland. “Attention, Please!” demanded an earnest headline in the Cleveland Call and Post, “Have You Noticed the Jewish-​Negro Tie-​Up in Entertainment?” “Possibly it is the fact that they are members of two races that have always come in for more than their share of abuse at the hands of other races,” the piece begins, “but Negroes and Jews have always managed to hook up” in the music business.29 For Meeropol, Negroes and Jews marched shoulder to shoulder in the cause of freedom from racial terror and injustice. Holiday made it plain that from her side of the Jewish-​Negro tie-​up there was no putting of either behind. “It means when the crackers are killing the niggers,” Holiday explained to Maya Angelou’s twelve-​year-​old son, Guy, when he asked her about the words “pastoral scene” in the lyrics I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

11  }

of “Strange Fruit.” “It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat.” “That’s what they do,” she pressed on. “That’s a goddam pastoral scene.”30 Jack Kerouac, who made Holiday the heroine of the generation he named, said that the “vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific” came to him as he sat among the polychrome saints and martyrs in the candlelit Catholic church of his childhood.31 Chapter 5, “Our Lady,” reads Holiday’s iconic, doomed-​songstress persona—beatific and beaten, as Kerouac would say—as a “fatalism of choice.”32 The role of jazz martyr was a role Billie Holiday nurtured and owned; this chapter seeks neither to romanticize nor to discount her contributions to its making. “Jazz martyrs,” says Ishmael Reed, “are the ones who immolated themselves with heroin and alcohol, got cut, got shot, beaten up, jailed, tortured, denied accommodations,” who died broke by age fifty from the cumulative, combined corrosions of “disrespect, degradations, wounds, illnesses, self-​medication.” And “through it all,” Reed insists, “they were the advocates for life for joy for ecstasy even when in mourning.”33 An advancing consensus insists that Holiday’s hard-​luck story is beside the point. “However fascinating or instructive we may find the details of Holiday’s life as a case study of the drug addict, the mistreated woman, or the African American scapegoat,” says Robert O’Meally, “in the end what matters most is that somehow, out of whatever her personal history might have been, she was able to invent for herself a shining identity as an artist.”34 But Holiday’s addictions and abjection were not incidental to her identity as an artist; nor was it the point of her art to efface her raised bruises in aesthetic radiance. Both Holiday and Kerouac were trained in habits of self-​constitution in which the brutal and disconsolate things of life were not to be overcome so much as they were to be used. Holiday’s accompanist Roy Harte volunteered to Linda Kuehl that “Billie didn’t mind being used. It was one of the things we talked about seriously. It was very important to her to be used well.”35 “Our Lady” revisits Holiday’s models in the penitent saints and resident Magdalens—habitual offenders who chose to take the veil— whose stories she absorbed at the House of the Good Shepherd. Their {  12  } 

religion around billie holiday

example carried forward the paradox Caroline Walker Bynum identifies in late medieval women’s piety, the notion that divine mercy could be found in plumbing every resource of the flesh. Billie Holiday stretched her fast, hard life to breaking and offered it in service to her singing, or to whatever it was her singing aimed to touch. In a 1956 interview, Mike Wallace asks Holiday why so many jazz greats die early. She doesn’t hesitate. She says the answer “is we try to live one hundred days in one day and we try to please so many people,” and “myself, I want to bend this note and bend that note, and sing this way and sing that way, and get all the feeling,” and in the end “you can’t do it.” You’re done. “That’s why.”36

I n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

13  }

1 religion around

Sound travels. You could, if you wanted, imagine any historical movement or migration as a history of sound, mapped to its paths. In the case of African American cultural flows—in broadest terms, of black culture’s expansive saturation of national culture in the century and a half since Emancipation—the sonic archive for such imaginings is vast and reverberant. Early blues singers who took to the road in the cause of freedom, art, and remunerative labor were also among the first to have their music pressed into disks of wax, shellac, and pulverized stone. Beginning in the 1920s, these “race records,” as they came to be known in the industry, were dispatched to a newly cultivated black buying public by a mobile network of newsboys, traveling salesmen, and Pullman car porters. Print advertisements for blues that sounded from the Mississippi Delta or the Carolina Piedmont might also feature the sermons of preachers from these parts, whose reach now stretched beyond their churches, tents, or itinerancies—another boon for the record industry. By the late 1930s nearly every metropolitan center in the United States had niche radio that included gospel, which meant that, given enough bandwidth, a Holy-​Roller church in Georgia could

shape the sounds of storefront ministry in Harlem or Detroit. And long before technology made it possible to project black voices across spatial, temporal, and social divides, traveling minstrel shows fashioned a national musical repertory—Oh! Susanna, Dixie, Old Folks at Home—from a common, plantation-​inspired songbook, served up in blackface and heard in town after town, night after night. The nation’s earliest popular music took form as this strange brew of degradation and homage, a singularly American mediation of blackness that gospel, blues, and jazz performers would release, recode, and broadcast on new terms. Jazz improvisation, with its on-​the-​spot negotiation of styles, skills, and agendas among musicians who find themselves together in one place, has been taken, not inaptly, as a metaphor for American democracy. As such, it reminds us that mobility in the United States is never simply upward or downward: there are tangents, retreats, spirals, salvos, moves. The habit of seeing mobility as economic first and foremost conjures peculiar divisions—art from labor, spiritual life from the rest of life—that were largely foreign to the west Africans imported to America and worked, bred, and sold as slaves. Jazz’s grace notes, blue notes, split and slurred scales are in this sense an archive of what its progenitors did with and inside of the system of buying and selling they were forcibly brought into, and in whose terms their worth was tallied. Music can never really be property: its makers can be bought and traded, and musicians and composers defrauded and destroyed, but because sound doesn’t stay in one place it can’t be hoarded or depleted in the silencing. When American jazz was banned in occupied France, musicians gave French names to the standards they played: Agate Rhythm, Tristesse de St. Louis. The gold standard for the record industry is crossover: music that passes from one audience demographic, one genre or idiom, one consumer market to another. But all music, all sound, potentially crosses boundaries fixed between hearers: American and French, slave and free, black and white, here and there. So too between insiders and outsiders to a particular religious life. Even absent technologies for moving sound over space, sound travels: it creeps, permeates, bounces, and surrounds, whether or not we choose to listen. Among the trickiest of religious freedom disputes to {  16  } 

religion around billie holiday

be sorted out in U.S. courts are those where sounds have been at issue: gospel shouts, carillon bells, or Islamic calls to prayer that neighbors of different or no religion hear as unwelcome impositions of alien belief—or simply as noise. In such cases, says Isaac Weiner, “Americans have perceived sound as dangerously porous and transgressive, spilling over and across imagined boundaries between public and private, between self and other,” and between discrete religious and racial demographics in ways that “often felt uncontrollable and uncontainable.”1 Jim Crow, the term that somehow came to settle on the legal and extra­legal maintenance of racial segregation after Reconstruction, was taken from the eponymous figure in a minstrel song, as if to signal that the barrier it named was already irremediably breached, that the races could no more be sequestered by violence or law than could sound and its hearing. Sound might even be heard to cross the boundary between the living and the dead. Widespread interest in séance spiritualism, a resilient episode of American religious history, took hold in 1848 when a series of table-​rappings near Rochester, New York, convinced the susceptible, a vast demographic, that the dead were still beating out time. There’s a different immediacy to sound recordings of the dead than there is to, say, photographs. The dead in old photos might carry the past with them in the quality of the print or the stiffness of the pose, material evidence of the distance they’ve covered to meet us. This is also often true of audio: early blues records tend to deliver their sound in a shroud of static, the distortions of age and wear made worse by the industry’s disregard for quality in this segment of the market. (That old blues recordings survived is thanks to impassioned collectors like loner Jim McKune, killed in a random homicide in 1971, who’d kept his carefully curated trove of Delta blues, exactly three hundred discs, under the bed in his room at a Brooklyn YMCA. McKune, it’s said, referred to his listening sessions as séances.)2 Yet what makes recorded sound more eerily alive than photographs, even in the audible presence of age and neglect, is that the photo you need to take out of the box, hold up to the light, or otherwise look at to see; the sound you might simply hear, absent your volition. Unless it’s a self-​portrait, moreover, a photograph records a gaze that its subject doesn’t see at the moment of its R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

17  }

making. But the recorded voice was heard also by the speaker or singer at the moment of recording, so that we hear what the dead hear; what we hear is not only the voice of the dead but the dead person hearing it, too. Its mobile, ambient, unevenly negotiable, occasionally ghostly or vestigial quality makes sound like religion, or like religion around: less what’s believed or affirmed in bounded institutional settings than what’s in the air, who’s dialed into it or answers to its pitch, where it’s coming from, how it moves and what it carries, what it muffles or lifts or drowns, what time it keeps, what story it tells, and what it registers of your own voice or hearing or indifference. If we listened for religion in the decades of Billie Holiday’s production, from roughly 1933 to 1959, we would hear it in many places and forms: in sacred songs and sermons (on discs, in tents, through storefront windows, in synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals), in the fervent oratory of communists and anticommunists and the cooler appraisals of an emerging secular elite, on religious radio geared to particular racial and denominational markets, on stage and screen (The Green Pastures, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Bells of St. Mary’s), and in the civil religious rhetoric of wartime jingles, entertainment, and reportage. If we listened for religion in the music of Billie Holiday’s era, and narrowed the sample to music that would variously claim her as its own, we might hear, among others, three sets or scores. One is the promiscuous if prickly interplay of sacred and profane in the race records that began in the 1920s to give rhythm, direction, and weight to American musical sound henceforward. Blues that conspicuously departed from church imperatives carried a revenant gospel as burden, as power, as animating if wracking pulse—“spirituals with a hangover” is a nice description of the genre.3 The Afro-​Protestant spaces where blues and church sounds echoed were not the sites of Billie Holiday’s religious or musical formation. Nor was she a singer of classic blues in the tradition of Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. Invocations of Holiday as a blues singer nevertheless persistently shape her persona and its reception, from her role at nineteen as an allegory of the blues in Duke Ellington’s 1935 film Symphony in Black, to her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, to her 1959 Time magazine obituary {  18  } 

religion around billie holiday

(“Billie Holiday, 44, Negro blues singer, whose husky, melancholy voice reflected the tragedy of her own life”), to interpretations of her art by James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and others. Blues artists laid the tracks that carried much of twentieth-​century American music to the world, and set terms for that music’s engagement with the religion that circulated through and around it. A second is a story embedded in the packaging and delivery of African American music to urbane audiences in the later 1930s and ’40s, a  story whose plotline moves from religious to secular, from primitive to modern, or in the name given to a legendary concert of gospel, blues, and jazz talent staged at Carnegie Hall in 1938 by the Marxist New Masses and millionaire producer John Hammond, “From Spirituals to Swing.” For some early midcentury metropolitans, the movement from spirituals to swing recapitulated the Great Migration, the modernizing path of departure from the South, from slavery, and from the now salving, now shackling energies of a black Christian habitus nurtured in bondage. For other listeners, the spirituals-​to-​swing narrative rooted black musical arts in a persistent residual primitivism: beguiling, desublimating, maybe dangerous, above all spiritually charged. In either inflection, the spirituals-​to-​swing plotline would enduringly task black music and musicians with embodying a freedom and wildness that promised also to liberate the culture at large. A third story might be called Civil Religion: The Musical, a gospel of social uplift and national possibility to which jazz standards were made the soundtrack, particularly during the Cold War, when the U.S. State Department dispatched jazz musicians to all corners of the world in proof of the attainments of American democracy. Jazz had come during the Second World War to signal a particularly American expression of resistance to antidemocratic regimes—the French jazz critic Charles Delaunay recalled that everything “original or redolent of American life” at the time “was baptized ‘swing’ ”—even as black soldiers were segregated in Jim Crow barracks and returned to diminished liberties in civilian life.4 Later deployments of jazz during the Cold War called on black musicians to embody and to radiate an American spiritual genius for equality, and so to cast absolving benediction on a history that testified otherwise. R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

19  }

We might also listen for religion around Billie Holiday in the Mass she sang each day in the Catholic schools she attended in the 1920s, particularly the freshly revived Gregorian chant whose essence was a new rhythmic liberty—“the ‘metered time’ disappears as such,” wrote Solesmes Abbey choirmaster Dom Joseph Gajard of the new method, such that “the rhythm, of material, becomes a thing of the spirit.”5 Or in the Harlem cadences of song and worship—Langston Hughes’s blues poetry, Father Divine’s jazz hymns—that riffed on and sometimes rattled the conventional religious geography of the Great Migration. Or in the Jewish inflections and synagogue melodies that found their way into Holiday’s sound via Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals, and the klezmer shadings of Benny Goodman’s or Artie Shaw’s clarinet. All of these are heard in the chapters that follow. What this chapter’s episodes reveal, rather, is that the religion that most densely surrounds Billie Holiday, Protestant in origin and progressive in spiritual bent, is the mythmaking genius that celebrates American history as the history of freedom, and manages to assimilate black experience into that history. The musical stories taken up here— the emergence of race records, the “Spirituals to Swing” concert, and the Cold War soundtrack of American civil religion—might all be heard to broadcast freedom of one sort or other: the freedom of emancipated slaves and their descendants to witness to unbridled capacities of body and spirit; the freedom of black and white performers, songwriters, and listeners to converge in the same theaters and concert halls; the freedoms for which American wars cold and hot have been waged. Together they bear witness to a collective national project, its impulses variously egalitarian, exculpatory, prophetic, reparative, expiating, and amnesic, of fitting African American historical experience to an all-​ American template of social and spiritual deliverance. Billie Holiday was both an accessory and an obstacle to that project. For example: Without Baptist or Holiness or Methodist beginnings, Holiday had neither black-​church sensibilities nor black-​church sound, yet she contributed a beloved and slyly subversive spiritual to the American songbook in “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own).” Holiday was largely AWOL among the Second World War’s “soldiers of music,” Down Beat’s honorific for the jazz musicians who made a {  20  } 

religion around billie holiday

career of boosting the morale of Allied troops.6 Nor was it imaginable that Holiday, with her string of relentlessly publicized drug arrests, would be tapped to serve alongside Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald as a jazz ambassador during the Cold War. Beginning in 1953, the U.S. government nevertheless nurtured a global fan base for Billie Holiday in its worldwide broadcasts of her music on Voice of America Jazz Hour. These endeared her especially to a black political underground in Paris, where in the last years of her life, William Dufty reported, she was welcomed among African nationalists “as plain speaking and intransigent as she was.”7 The stories here, roughly chronological in order, are not intended to track the phases into which Billie Holiday’s career is most often divided—the brash and exuberant early recordings, the middle period’s expansive demands, the rarer beauty of the end and then the very end, the voice worn now to a brittle thread, breaking. I offer them rather as repertoires, performative sets that sourced, shaped, and constrained her production, and that she in turn played with and against. For the remainder of this chapter, Holiday’s presence within these musical stories is the largely spectral presence of the hearer, the one on whom their sound imposed, bidden or unbidden. When John Hammond or John and Alan Lomax canvassed the Depression-​era South in search of words and music to record, their projects were driven by a preservationist impulse, a conviction that, absent their trained ears and curatorial labors, the sounds they sought to capture would fade away unheard. John Lomax was a folklorist who worked under the auspices of the Library of Congress and later the Works Progress Administration to record hundreds of former slaves and their descendants in sung and spoken testimony. He first caught their voices on the three-​hundred-​pound cylinder recorder he hauled across the former Confederacy in the trunk of his Ford sedan. Working often with his son Alan, who extended their project after his father’s death, John Lomax pressed into disks the quotidian soundscape of sharecroppers, migrant laborers, and prison inmates, the guitarist and songwriter Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter) being the best-​known example of the last. After recording Lead Belly at the state R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

21  }

prison farm in Angola, Louisiana, in 1934, Lomax moved quickly to book him a gig at that year’s meeting of the Modern Language Association, followed by a string of Ivy League teas. John Hammond was a Yale dropout and Vanderbilt scion whose trust-​fund fortune, ear for genius, and zeal for self-​mythologizing fostered some of the most remarkable musical careers of the twentieth century. In 1933 Hammond heard seventeen-​year-​old Billie Holiday in a Harlem speakeasy and put her in the studio with session musician Benny Goodman to cut her first record. Hammond took credit for the match—he even supposed, he told Linda Kuehl, that he himself “may have been the first white guy who ever heard” Billie Holiday sing—but Goodman already knew Holiday from the after-​hours clubs he’d played in or visited uptown, including the one run by Billie’s mother from their place in Harlem. “Billie lived with her mother in a whore house,” jazz trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison told Linda Kuehl. “Okay? Ha, ha. That’s what it was.” Holiday’s father, Clarence Holiday, and his wife, Fannie, ran a different good-​time place a few blocks over. “You could go up there and drink and take your girlfriends,” drummer Walter Johnson recalled. “Lots of people doing after-​hours-​in-​the-​home.”8 During the 1930s, Hammond traveled the back roads of the South and Midwest with his car radio tuned to the tinny low-​watt stations that relied on in-​house broadcasts of local talent. This was how he found Count Basie in Kansas City, guitarist Charlie Christian in Oklahoma, and blues harpist Sonny Terry in the Georgia Piedmont, all of whom he would bring to New York for “From Spirituals to Swing.” The program notes for the 1938 concert called it “the music nobody knows.”9 Hammond aimed to redress the purported neglect. Record companies’ ambitions were less lofty. “Race” records were made not because the industry was progressive or preservation-​ minded but because they turned a profit. Unlike Hammond or John Lomax, who heard in the black musicianship of the earlier twentieth century a raw material each would arrange in considered relation to white, urbane culture and taste, manufacturers of race records worked fast to get their product out, cutting corners as expedience and avarice demanded. By the time of the Lomaxes’ or Hammond’s scouting trips, the Depression had caused the industry to flatline in all but a {  22  } 

religion around billie holiday

few recording sectors. Paramount and Okeh, two leading makers of race records, had closed shop; the Victor Talking Machine Company stopped manufacturing its Victrola phonographs and turned to selling radios instead. But for much of the 1920s there were millions to be made from delivering black talent to a new black record-​buying public. In 1920 a Harlem cabaret singer named Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” on Okeh, the first commercial recording of a song with “blues” in the title by a black artist. Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I got the crazy blues. Within six months of its release, “Crazy Blues” sold half a million copies, almost all to black buyers. What gave blues such reach? “Theologically,” writes James Cone, “there is more to be said about the music of black people than what was revealed in the black spirituals.” Blues put more to be said on the record in tales of fugitive love and lawless disposition, their subtext what Cone calls “the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive.” Legislative and judicial entrenchments of white rule after Reconstruction—the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, the gutting of the 1875 Civil Rights Act in 1883, the mandate of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—combined to deprive emancipated slaves and their descendants in the South of what hopes they’d fleetingly nurtured of equal protection under the law. In its absence, the murder and mutilation of black bodies, their cash value to whites zeroed out by slavery’s end, could be pursued with near impunity, as terrorism and spectator sport. Blues artists sang of a freedom that was and wasn’t, and of the feelings that went with that essential and relentless contradiction: aching hollow hungers, low-​down meanness, trouble in mind. This is what it’s like to be a person, still, in the face of personhood denied. Blues’ sexual language and sexual plots insist on the freedom to enjoy, lament, or abandon partnerships beyond those forced and forcibly severed under slavery, the violent regulation of black sexuality R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

23  }

by lynching notwithstanding. The importance of the blues, says Cone, “is their affirmation of black humanity,” resilience, and emotional range “in the face of immediate absurdity.”10 Paramount Records makes a good case study of the strange career of these early race recordings, the mix of serendipity, greed, and haste that enabled them to capture particular affirmations of humanity that a more tutored production aesthetic might have polished away. Paramount opened its doors in 1917 in Grafton, Wisconsin, as a record-​ pressing plant on the site of the Wisconsin Chair Company. The decision to open a record business in a chair factory was made because the Wisconsin Chair Company manufactured phonograph cabinets and other small furniture in addition to chairs, and you couldn’t sell phonograph cabinets to customers who didn’t have phonograph records to play. Unable to compete with recording giants in New York City, Paramount executives played hit or miss with various niche markets, Wisconsin polka among them, making shoddy records that seldom sold enough to turn a profit. Then, in 1922, they stumbled into race records, with their jackpot combination of high demand and criminally low production costs. From that point on, with race music as its signature line, Paramount made shoddy records that did sell, from a roster of talent that included, astoundingly, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Charley Patton, Alberta Hunter, and Ida Cox. Paramount’s race list was largely the work of Mayo “Ink” Williams, one of the earliest and shrewdest black producers in the business. The Arkansas-​born Williams was a Brown graduate, a Great War veteran, and one of three black football players recruited by the NFL for its 1920 opening season. (Paul Robeson was another.) Enterprising and smooth, Williams reportedly came by the nickname “Ink” for his knack for getting his talent to sign no-​royalty contracts for as little as five or ten dollars a side. From 1924 to 1927 Williams worked for Paramount out of a studio in Chicago, which had both local musicians and a train line to the Mississippi Delta. Paramount used wax masters recorded in Chicago under Williams’s direction, packed in ice in summer to keep from melting, and delivered by horse-​drawn wagon to the record-​pressing plant in Grafton, one hundred miles to the north. Workers in Grafton made metal casts from the wax originals and used {  24  } 

religion around billie holiday

them to cut 78 rpm records from a gluey medium of shellac, a staple of the furniture-​making arm of the business, and mud dredged up from the Milwaukee River that flowed through the center of town.11 In 1932 Paramount Pictures—its relation to Paramount Records at that point is unclear—would produce a ten-​minute short with an all-​ black cast called A Rhapsody in Black and Blue. In a twist on Depression-​ era Hollywood escapism, the film promotes the transporting power not of movies but of records, whose sales had tanked since the stock market crash of 1929. In the film, a Louis Armstrong fan receives a knockout blow to the head when his wife finds him playing Armstrong’s “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” and banging out rhythm on the kitchen pots and pans. What happens next suggests a studio executive’s platonic idea of blackness: the scene dissolves into the mythical land of Jazzmania, where the dizzy fan is saluted as African royalty, shown to a pharaoh’s throne, and entertained by court musicians costumed variously in animal skins and prison stripes. Leading their band is none other than Armstrong himself, who reprises “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” for the dreaming monarch. Armstrong wears a caveman’s leopard-​skin toga in A Rhapsody in Black and Blue but otherwise plays it like any other gig, the riotous procession of sounds from his horn laying waste to the sideshow setup as much as if he’d taken an axe to it. By that time, Paramount Records had shuttered its studio in Chicago and was recording its last few pressings in Grafton, with musicians traveling by train to Milwaukee, twenty-​two miles south of Grafton on the Chicago line. There were no Jim Crow hotels in Grafton and possibly no black people living there—the pro-​Nazi German-​American Bund would open a flourishing training camp in the town in the mid1930s—so musicians who arrived in Grafton would return to Milwaukee to sleep or else bunk on cots in the chair factory. Son House, Charley Patton, and Blind Blake all recorded in Grafton, and it’s rumored that Louis Armstrong made the trip once. At least one studio recording from this period picks up the sound of hammering in the background.12 What else do these early records pick up? You hear the hearing they record in the kinds of attention—cajoling, rapt, reproving—that pass between the singer and accompaniment, or among the various R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

25  }

musicians on the set. Jazz takes from black churches the antiphonal structure of call-​and-​response, a leader voicing a theme and a chorus answering. You hear call-​and-​response in that reciprocal stirring— taking up, spinning off, urging on—between members of an ensemble. You hear it structurally as the running commentary on the melodic theme by any number of improvised riffs or rejoinders. You might hear it too in the way the instrumental phrasing of jazz follows sung and spoken intonations—wails, tangents, supplication, patter, “liquefying [the] words,” as Zora Neale Hurston described black church vocalizations, as though the instruments themselves were voices in a gospel choir.13 Early black recorded sound often came directly from churches: spirituals and sermons and the chanted prayer that combined them, giving rise in the 1930s to gospel as a genre. In  1926 an Alabama preacher named J. C. Burnett recorded a sermon (“The Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar”) that outsold blues legend Bessie Smith that year. Race catalogs scrambled to sign black preachers, and about a hundred pressings of sermons on wax were made before the Second World War. Labels made little distinction between religious and secular audiences in marketing race records: print ads, handbills, and mail-​order catalogs routinely featured jazz and blues alongside spirituals and sermons. Agents sent by the industry to cultivate a black buying public in the rural South doubled as talent scouts who listened for good music and good preaching as they went.14 Even as they traveled as a pair, church sounds and blues conspicuously touted a divide between them: saved and sinning, sacred and profane, God’s word and the Devil’s music. Strains between church and blues forced stark choices on performers who tell of severing spiritual ties to sing the blues, or else of silencing blues repertoires in the cause of sanctified life. Recorded sermons preached against the blues for drawing listeners from the Gospel, or for taking freedom and delight in an unfettered sexuality. Church songs offered refuge in sound from the violence, worry, and meanness of blues living, that is to say, from the violence, worry, and meanness of living black in the Jim Crow South. But preaching and blues could speak each other’s language, broadcast and suffer each other’s affronts, and put new endings to each {  26  } 

religion around billie holiday

other’s stories in ways that suggest less antipathy or anathema than the more complicated amities and rivalries of kin. The title and antiphon of Reverend J. M. Gates’s best-​selling 1929 sermon “Dead Cat on the Line,” for example, is frank blues vernacular for a two-​timing woman.15 Blues told tales of preachers’ lusts—“Preacher come to your house / You ask him to rest his hat / Next thing he want to know / Sister, where’s your husband at”16—and called down sacred power in the cause of sexual deliverance. Paramount’s bold print advertisement for “Prove It on Me Blues,” Ma Rainey’s 1928 anthem of lesbian prowess—the ad shows a rakish woman in a man’s jacket, tie, and hat chatting up two elegantly dressed companions—might as easily have pitched Gates’s cautionary tale of “Mannish Women,” a righteous (and undeniably rocking) sermon recorded two years later. Gates, who rose from his rural Georgia pulpit to become the most commercially successful of black preachers on wax, used his industry clout to shepherd the career of gospel legend and former bluesman Thomas Dorsey, whose songwriting credits include both “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and the unabashedly unscriptural “It’s Tight Like That.” The Paramount ad for “Prove It on Me Blues” offered a companion list of “Favorite Spirituals” that listeners could receive in the same mail-​order packet that brought them Rainey’s Sapphic appeal. And like Dorsey and so many other bluesmen and blueswomen, Rainey began and ended her career in the church. Recorded sermons that tangled with blues living shared a blues idiom of loose women, no-​account men, hellhounds trailing, and the sonorous names of trains. “Sin [is] the engineer,” chants Reverend A. W. Nix in his best-​selling sermon “Black Diamond Express to Hell.” “Pleasure is the headlight. And the Devil is the conductor. . . . A bell is ringing hellbound, hellbound”—to which the women of the congregation respond with the requisite fervent affirmations—Amen, Mm-​hmm, Yes, Lord—and their own tuneful riffs.17 The novelist Jonathan Lethem once described pop music as the collaborative fever dream of ten or fifteen Delta bluesmen and a million screaming teenage girls.18 The recorded sermons of this era remind us that the sisters of the church, whose backup testifies to the spirit-​moving power of the preached Gospel— or the Motown single, or Keith Richards’s guitar—contribute as much to that alchemy. R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

27  }

When a rock producer in the studio says, in 1969, “I hear a girl on this track—get one on the phone”—which is Mick Jagger’s version of how gospel singer Merry Clayton’s transcendent vocal came to be laid over his own in the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”19—to “hear a girl” is shorthand for a sound and a history that begins with the blues. Black preachers began making records when blues catalogs were dominated by women. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and other blueswomen all recorded venturesome tracks—“I Ain’t Gonna Marry, Ain’t Gonna Settle Down,” “Trust No Man,” “If  You Don’t, I Know Who Will”—just as rural preachers were becoming a professional class with studio-​fueled ambitions of national reach. In tents and churches or on wax, the sparring of preaching and blues was often an explicitly gendered tussle. Preachers condemned women’s appetites and independence as blueswomen were delivering straight-​up sermons on sexual agency and sexual politics beyond the respectable habitus of the church or the black middle class. Billie Holiday’s childhood friend Mary “Pony” Kane said the popular numbers Holiday first learned to sing were on records that sounded from the wind-​up Victrola in the Baltimore brothel where the two girls worked in the latter 1920s. “They have all of ’em Florence Mills records and Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith,” Kane remembered. “They wasn’t too much with Louis Armstrong, nope. They was mostly with blues singers. Them women blues singers.”20 “If he don’t want me, he had no right to stall,” Bessie Smith sang; “I can get more men than a passenger train can haul.”21 Railroads that snaked into southern states in the 1830s and 1840s etched racial caste into the landscape in the segregated cars and divisions of labor that remained a feature of train travel long after Emancipation. In black expressive culture, trains would nevertheless enduringly conjure respite, risk, and freedom in the possibility now of moving, of choosing one’s destination rather than remaining chained in place. Trains entered black recorded sermons—the persona of the minister as conductor, the all-​aboard cadences of the call to sanctified life, the plotting of sermonic sequence as stations on a journey— as blues artists sang of escaping heartache and trouble by rail.

{  28  } 

religion around billie holiday

Journeyin’ over Jordan don’t have no fear, Jesus gonna be my engineer . . . Train is comin’ round and it’s passin’ the curve. Think I’m leavin’ this distressful world.22 The land beyond this distressful world of tenant farms, vagrancy laws, and lynch mobs could be figured as a heavenly kingdom, as in Gates’s sermon “Death’s Black Train Is Coming.” It could also be figured as Chicago or New York. Gonna go up north Gonna ease my pain Yessuh, Lord, gonna catch that train.23 The Great Migration, the mass uprooting of black southerners in the early twentieth century, was felt first in Chicago and fanned out across the industrial cities of the North, where some half-​million arrivals made their way between 1910 and 1920. Henry Ford chartered freight trains to bring black workers north to Detroit after successive waves of European immigration stalled in the First World War. African American soldiers who went overseas served in nations whose black populations had not arrived in chains; those who returned brought with them a new cosmopolitanism that might now view the industrial North as closer in spirit to the cities of France than to the cotton fields of Texas or Alabama. The wartime economy created new labor shortages, new labor disputes, and new kinds of jobs open to black men, including those required to standardize the railway system linking South and North. Blues and recorded Afro-​Protestant sermons figured train travel as exodus, spatial and spiritual; to board the train in either context was to take one’s leave from a world steeped in slavery’s bitter effects. But the movement of the train in these recordings was not a movement out of a blues or a church idiom. Northern black listeners might hear southern sounds, church or blues, as unwelcome reminders of a world well abandoned, or as throwbacks to a simpler time to which

R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

29  }

they might, on occasion, be nostalgically drawn. But black southern migrants didn’t arrive in the North as the past of the North, and neither did their music enter metropolitan settings as old-​fashioned sound, servile and easily shed. Just the opposite was true: blues arrived in the city not as the deadening old but as the quickening new, a transformative energy that would infuse and forever alter the course of popular music in America and the world. Prior to the earliest waves of migration, black professional musicians in the North mostly performed marches, light opera, and ragtime, or in dance orchestras that played for white dancers. Some New York musicians who came up in these venues recalled that before the arrival of blues musicians from the South, and their sounds on record, no one in the city played anything that could really be called jazz.24 A black expatriate community of musicians flourished on Paris’s Right Bank after the First World War, among them a cadre of volunteers in the all-​black 369th Infantry Division, who soldiered alongside the French when white U.S. fighting units refused to station with them. Under the direction of black lieutenant, composer, and bandleader James Reese Europe, the 369th’s band played blues and early jazz in civilian concerts in Paris, creating a haven for black American musicians after the Armistice and winning the French avant-​garde to their sound.25 At the same time, blues would be pegged as primitive and retrograde by some American arbiters of big-​city musical taste. White bandleader Paul Whiteman presented jazz as a black music raised up by and for white moderns, “the wilderness tamed to the ballroom,” the “primitive African swing” of “negroes lounging in the sunshine” mingled now with “the clanging of the machinery, the broken crashing rhythm of Whitman’s poetry, the gigantic steel and stone of the skyscrapers.”26 Whiteman’s 1924 concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall, famously billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” announced itself as proof of “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant Jazz, which sprang into being about 10 years ago from nowhere in particular, to  the really melodious music of today, which—for no good reason—is still called Jazz.”27 The evening began with the orchestra miming barnyard sounds

{  30  } 

religion around billie holiday

in a deliberately crude rendition of “Livery Stable Blues,” a hit record for black composer and bandleader W. C. Handy when it was released seven years earlier.28 From there the “Experiment in Modern Music” built steadily toward its climax, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Whiteman had commissioned for the occasion from the rising-​star composer, then just twenty-​five. In different ways, John Lomax and John Hammond would likewise plot the music they delivered to white audiences within a developmental scheme that moved from animalism to abstraction, chthonic depth to skyscraper urbanity. Lomax trained in folklore at Harvard in a time of disciplinary transition. Under the influence of Franz Boas and the Columbia School of Anthropology, early twentieth-​century ethnographic researchers began to revise the colonial assumptions of Victorian anthropology. “The educated world of Europe and America,” Edward Burnett Tylor had instructed in Primitive Culture (1871), could readily measure “progress and retrogression” by “simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life.”29 Boas’s signal contribution was to move ethnography out of the library and into the field, where local cultures could be apprehended in their complexity, and no longer through the ideological scrim of armchair theorists like Tylor. In the place of quasi-​temporal schemes of progress and retrogression that figured primitive cultures as stalled in time vis-​à-​ vis those understood to be modern, the Boasian anthropologist might substitute a spatial map on which divergences among contemporaneous cultures could be charted. To Lomax, the phonograph recorder was ethnography’s perfect tool, since it promised to render immediate, empirical evidence of its subjects’ worlds, absent the distortions of educated prejudice and taste.30 If the primitive subject of Boasian anthropology was no longer imagined as stuck in time, however, he or she still might be figured as stuck in Arkansas or Mississippi. “Since it seems so nearly impossible to transport Negro folk-​singers from the South and keep them untainted by white musical conventions,” Lomax observed,

R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

31  }

“the improved recording-​machine affords the best means of preserving this music.” Lomax’s search for “the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man” led him to the penitentiary, where, he supposed, the segregated “convicts heard only the idiom of their own race.”31 Lomax reenacted his most famous prison “discovery” in a 1935 March of Time newsreel, which chronicled the events leading up to his MLA exhibition of Lead Belly, namelessly billed there as “Negro Minstrel from Louisiana.” Lead Belly was “a ‘natural,’ ” Lomax explained, who had “no idea of money, law, or ethics and who was possessed of virtually no self-​restraint.” Lead Belly’s touted naturalness encompassed at once his generic, unstudied art (the Negro’s “songs burst from him, when in his own environment,” said Lomax, “as naturally and as freely as those of a bird amid its native trees”) and his particular lawless depravity: “He was the type known as ‘killer,’ ” Lomax wrote in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, “and had had a career of violence the record of which is a black epic of horrifics.” Under the banner “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel,” Life magazine printed a photo of Lead Belly’s fingers on the frets of his twelve-​string guitar, with the caption “These hands once killed a man.”32 Lomax’s presentation of Lead Belly in the cause of documentary truth tracked the studied marketing of black music to white audiences in the urban North, where a cultivated whiff of danger, together with the portrayal of even prodigious virtuosity as no more than a surfacing of jungle aptitudes, would dog black performance for decades to come. Black artists accommodated themselves in greater or lesser degrees to the theatrics of white assumption. In what Amiri Baraka described as “those uptown ‘black and tan’ clubs that catered largely to sensual white liberals” —the Plantation Club, Small’s Paradise, the Cotton Club—white pilgrims to Harlem could indulge in performances of Negro abandon scripted to their tutored expectations of exoticism.33 One habitué of this scene was the German theologian Paul Tillich, who joined the faculty at Union Theological Seminary at Broadway and 121st Street in 1933. Tillich’s wife, Hannah, recalled that the émigré pair initially found America alienatingly repressive, but that they “found some sort of consolation in Harlem.” {  32  } 

religion around billie holiday

Somebody must have taken us to Small’s Paradise. . . . Inside the long, dark room, we sat facing clouds that drifted behind an orchestra of Negroes, who played noisily and shrilly. It was as if we had entered a tropical forest with parrots screaming, dark faces peering out of a jungle, falsetto voices, and brilliant colors. A Negro danced with me, a Negress with Paulus. We did not know the rhythm so we stopped dancing, but we sat there and felt good among the emotional outbursts in color, voice, and smells, which we had missed so much—at Union, nobody smelled of anything. We felt relaxed at Small’s and returned there with our friends, grateful voyeurs, taking in the primeval charm of the hearty men and swaying women. We considered it an aesthetic show. We did not think at all in economic, political, or social terms.34 In his theological writings, Tillich invoked the “art of primitive peoples,” their “fetishes” and “dance-​masks,” as portals to what he called the “depth” dimension of religion, the whole “substance [and] ground” of “man’s spiritual life.”35 Tillich had come to Union Theological Seminary at the invitation of its liberal Presbyterian president, Henry Sloane Coffin, first cousin to John Hammond on Hammond’s mother’s side. On his installation as president in 1926, Coffin urged a vision of theology hospitable to Tillich’s worldliness, one that kept pace with “the gains of current philosophy and the sciences,” gripped the imagination of both “sinner and saint,” and offered itself as a “protagonist for the freedom of the Christian mind.”36 Tillich assumed a joint position at Union and in the Philosophy Department at nearby Columbia University, where the Program in Religion would begin taking shape in collaborations among Boas’s students in anthropology, John Dewey’s students in philosophy, and fellow travelers in theology like Tillich. Scholars of religion have Tillich to thank or to blame for casting the sacred as the locus of “ultimate concern,” the really real that various religious (or secular) apprehensions of ultimacy can only approximate or pursue. A residual primitivism nevertheless persists in the study of religion post-​Tillich, R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

33  }

just as it did in the projects of many fieldworkers post-​Boas. For Tillich, “primitive” religion represents the condensed form of all religions, since it lies closer to the universal depth dimension in each. At the same time, the march of secularization, also presumed to be universal, potentially turns all religions into primitive survivals.37 For his part, John Lomax figured African American religion not as primitive depth but as assimilative accretion. “There are particular reasons for the Negro’s almost universal neglect of his secular or ‘sinful songs,’ ” Lomax said, “songs far more numerous than the spirituals, and certainly, it seems to me, more original and revealing.” Sacred songs recycled “idioms and phrases drawn directly from the Bible and from the older white spirituals.” They were the dulling camouflage of the endangered, “adopted in comparatively recent times.” The vibrant “sinful” songs, by contrast, were primordial and authentic, called up to “deal with situations as old as the Negro race.”38 Since religion, in this view, was but a superficial overlay on authentic Negro experience, a prisoner might reasonably be ordered to suspend it in the cause of the documentary project. The Lomaxes, father and son, tell lightly of enlisting correctional authority on this score: “Black Sampson, whom we found breaking rocks in the Nashville State Penitentiary, admitted that he knew the song [we wanted] and had once sung it; but, since he had joined the church and had turned away from the world, he no longer dared to sing it. All our arguments were in vain. The prison chaplain protested that he would make it all right with the Lord.” Still the inmate resisted, relenting only when ordered to sing by the warden. “He stepped in front of our microphone and, much to our surprise, when he had made sure that his words were being recorded, said, ‘It’s sho hard lines dat a poor nigger’s got to sing a worl’ly song, when he’s tryin’ to be sancrified; but de warden’s ast me, so I guess I’ll have to.’ And he did. But he had registered his protest before the Lord on an aluminum plate, now filed in the Library of Congress.”39 Neither John nor Alan Lomax was a Communist, though a stray remark by Lomax Senior about his son’s adolescent leanings would prompt an FBI investigation and a file running into the hundreds of pages.40 The Lomaxes’ documentary aesthetic—and perhaps too their dismissal of {  34  } 

religion around billie holiday

religion as false consciousness to be sloughed away—nevertheless won them the sympathies and cultural sponsorship of the Communist Left in the 1930s. Soon after the Nazis came to power, the Communist International embraced the need to extend its base and to mount a broad coalition of traditions and powers allied in opposition to fascism. The Popular Front, as this far-​reaching formation came to be known, championed the regional idioms and expressive culture of the unlettered and unsung, an aesthetic that encompassed the Dust Bowl ballads of Woody Guthrie, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the geographic guides produced under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project, whose authors included Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright.41 This is how the Marxist New Masses came in 1938 to sponsor millionaire John Hammond’s staging of the Carnegie Hall musical extravaganza “From Spirituals to Swing.” In his 1977 memoir, Hammond explained the concert’s genesis. “For several years I had wanted to present a concert in New York which would bring together for the first time, before a musically sophisticated audience, Negro music from its raw beginnings to the latest jazz. The concert should include, I thought, both primitive and sophisticated performers, as well as all of the music of the blacks in which jazz is rooted. I wanted to include gospel music, which I listened to in various store-​front churches wherever I traveled, as well as country blues singers and shouters, and ultimately the kind of jazz played by the Basie band.”42 The performers Hammond collected for “From Spirituals to Swing” took to the stage as living chapters in the developmental narrative he used them to tell. “From Spirituals to Swing” imposed on African American music a plotline and allowable range, spirituals to swing, and mapped it to the geography of the Great Migration. It linked black musicality to a persistent religious primitivism marked by innateness, irreducibility, and unshakeable spiritual power, and it called this power “authenticity,” a new form of secular cultural capital. Hammond’s own career in music bore the stamp of a secular calling. He credited cousin Henry Sloane Coffin with exerting “a profound effect upon my life,” even as his immediate family conspicuously distanced itself from its liberal Presbyterian wing on political and theological grounds. Hammond passed his childhood a “confusing R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

35  }

combination of jazz fan, vaudeville addict, and religious nut.” His mother was experimentally devout, embracing Christian Science with fervor and attending Methodist and Episcopal services with her more conventionally observant relatives. Hammond’s youthful spiritual passions were mercurial, and gave a luminous charge to his growing interest in music, especially the records he strained to hear from an old Grafonola being played at night in a distant servants’ wing. On discovering the source of this music, Hammond appears to have seized both the machine and the records as his own. “In the grooves of those primitive early disks I found in my house, I discovered a new world, one I could enter as easily and as often as I pleased simply by winding the handle of a phonograph.”43 At age eleven Hammond heard his sister singing “I’m Just Wild About Harry” from Shuffle Along, and persuaded his governess to accompany him secretly to a performance of Runnin’ Wild, a copycat all-​ black revue. From that point on, Hammond cultivated his devotion to black musical forms with brashness or stealth, as occasion demanded. When his mother came to his bedside at night to read the Bible aloud, he “would listen thoughtfully, not to a passage from Ecclesiastes but to muted strains of music coming through a set of earphones” hidden in the bedclothes.44 “As music in all its forms absorbed me,” Hammond recalled, “religion, still the strongest influence in my life, seemed more and more contradictory,” not least in the assignment of black worshippers to the rearmost pews of the Episcopal church his family attended. Hammond briefly “wanted to be Jewish” when he “realized that many prominent people in show business, theater owners, agents, the stars themselves” were Jewish, and he admired them just “as I admired the black artists on my favorite records.”45 By the time he started prep school at Hotchkiss, Hammond had made jazz and blues his religion, a channeling of allegiance well beyond his immediate family’s elliptical spiritual orbit and with the blessing of Henry Sloane Coffin, whom he had secretly enlisted to baptize him without his parents’ knowledge. In the 1920s, popular dances that originated in Harlem—the Charleston, snake hips, the black bottom, the Lindy hop—were arranged and performed on Broadway in loosely themed stage shows. Blackbirds, {  36  } 

religion around billie holiday

Dixie to Broadway, The Chocolate Dandies, and Plantation Revue were among the most popular, in addition to Shuffle Along. Ethel Waters and Josephine Baker both rose to fame in these productions. So did dainty Florence Mills, whom Hammond saw in Blackbirds shortly before her sudden death from peritonitis in 1927 brought a hundred thousand mourners, black and white, into the streets of Harlem for her funeral.46 On Broadway, Mills had sung “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird,” and an airplane flew above her funeral cortege, releasing bluebirds into the sky. In 1924 Paul Robeson played the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, to great acclaim, and in 1933 he reprised the role in Hollywood. (Billie Holiday said she was an extra in the film, though no one has managed yet to pick her out of the crowds.) The drama Porgy had a successful run in 1927 before its operatic reworking by George and Ira Gershwin as Porgy and Bess, which debuted in 1935 with an all-​black, classically trained cast. The Green Pastures, another all-​black debut, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930 for its staging of the Bible in the language of the spirituals. As their names suggest, however, a minstrel idiom ruled the popular song-​and-​dance revues. In an essay on Blackbirds’ Florence Mills, Richard Newman suggests that the star’s appeal to white theatergoers reflected “real appreciation for the authenticity of black song and dance, and the realization that Negro portrayals by blackface performers like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor were only imitations of the real thing.”47 The need that black performers who found success as the “real thing” were called on to supply was the need for authenticity, as various audiences conjured that need. Two points might be made about John Hammond in relation to New York’s black music scene in the 1930s. One is that he massively overstates his intervention in packaging “From Spirituals to Swing” for Carnegie Hall audiences as “the music nobody knows.” But two, he wasn’t wrong in assuming that those who successfully styled themselves arbiters of authenticity had an outsize role to play in determining where, when, and which black musicians got a hearing. Hammond would pursue his ends with the doubly keen entitlement that came with access to his family’s wealth and indifference to its R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

37  }

protocols. He “travels by car, with the radio going full blast, and never wears a hat or coat,” the New Yorker reported of Hammond’s scouting expeditions. “As soon as he reaches a potential refuge of talent, he buys all the newspapers, especially the Negro ones. From the amusement sections he picks out the dives that appear to be most barrel-​house and goes there. If he finds a number of men he likes, he herds them together at a nearby studio and makes some records.” Hammond arranged one night in 1932 to send “four Negroes, a Jew, a wiry little guitarist, and a long-​faced fellow with a clarinet” up from Manhattan to the whites-​only Mt. Kisco Golf and Country Club in Westchester County. The ensemble included Fats Waller, a “comparatively unknown Negro piano player,” in the New Yorker account, who “took one look at his prospective audience and swallowed a hearty swig of gin” before sitting down to play “the weirdest dance music that had ever been heard north of White Plains.” What members of the Mt. Kisco Golf and Country Club thought of the music mattered little to Hammond, whose father was president of the club.48 Where Hammond did seek to out-​Vanderbilt his family was in the mystique of connoisseurship its privilege enabled. “I had eyes that saw what others didn’t see,” he recalled knowing at an early age. “I had ears that heard what others didn’t hear.” His mother’s “way of handling the conflict between living in opulence and the always nagging sin of ostentation” was to furnish the Vanderbilt mansion “as  she accoutered herself,” in costly, dull, and well-​made abnegation. Hammond remembered not “a single rare antique or piece of real beauty in the house.”49 He had no allegiance to the mansion or the rare and beautiful things it might have housed. What he wanted you to know was that he had an ear. “From Spirituals to Swing” was Hammond’s case for popular music’s African American pedigree and, in joint confirmation, his own curatorial power. By the time of the 1938 concert, swing was on its way to becoming shorthand for music white kids would buy. Swing was feel-​good, on-​your-​feet music that had risen to prominence in the leanest years of the Depression, when big bands and Hollywood moguls alike accepted the charge of projecting energy and optimism to a demoralized nation. In the meantime, discretionary spending power {  38  } 

religion around billie holiday

had eroded less and rebounded sooner for white record buyers than for black. White musicians like Gene Krupa, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman studied to sound like the black musicians they admired. And in what would evermore stick as its signature pitch and defining demographic, the popular record industry capitalized on white artists sounding black in its targeting of swing to a market until now largely untapped—white youth. On a smaller scale, the mass marketing of swing fostered a subculture of purists who disdained it, sustaining a documentary niche for musical forms that might otherwise languish unrecorded in the shadow of commercial jazz. “Jitterbug taste is not the arbiter of hot music,” Hammond insisted, but equally “guilty of planting misconceptions about hot jazz are the cultists who have well nigh segregated jazz from the normal recognition it should have as music.” “From Spirituals to Swing” would steer a course between the jitterbugging throngs and the jazz ivory tower. Black authenticity, touched by Hammond’s connoisseurship, was its lodestone. “In this concert we aim to show you what the real thing is by presenting some of its best Negro practitioners,” Hammond promised his audience. What “you will hear is the most sincere and valid representations our researches could find.”50 The New Masses billed the concert as an evening of “American Negro Music as it was invented, developed, sung, played and heard by the Negro himself,” the “true, untainted” article, presented by the “greatest living artists from the South, the Southwest, and Negro communities in the North.”51 What, beyond talent, made the artists gathered in Carnegie Hall that night the real thing? For Hammond, poverty and obscurity ranked high on the list. “Most of the people you will hear are absurdly poor,” the program said. “The greatest of these artists die of privation and neglect.”52 In its review of the concert, the New York Times played along with the conceit of black American music’s obscurity. “The program book’s leading article was called ‘The Music Nobody Knows.’ Nobody? Well, hardly nobody. There is, for one, John Hammond.”53 The concert program offered snapshots of the artists assembled in testimony to Hammond’s knowing. Pianist Albert Ammons lives in penury and doesn’t read a note. For some years he shared a R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

39  }

boardinghouse room with pianist Meade Lux Lewis, who toils in a Chicago garage. Blind blues harpist Sonny Terry is here because his neighbor Blind Boy Fuller had been hauled off to a Piedmont jail for murder when Hammond came to North Carolina to fetch him, so Hammond signed Terry instead. Between record dates, blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy is a farmhand. Horn man Sidney Bechet makes ends meet in his Harlem tailor shop. Hammond presented his roster of musicians as hand-​plucked from the hard living and unheralded genius from which his concert offered brief reprieve. Except when it didn’t: the program ruefully announced that twenty-​seven-​year-​old Robert Johnson, penniless and unknown, died a week earlier in the Mississippi Delta “at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23.”54 The press and program notes implied that “Spirituals to Swing” was the first event of its kind at Carnegie Hall. But ten years earlier black bandleader and composer W. C. Handy, whose rendition of “Livery Stable Blues” had served Paul Whiteman as the baseline against which modern musical progress could be measured, had produced a Carnegie Hall concert of spirituals, work songs, blues, and jazz, capped by James P. Johnson’s orchestral “Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody.” Fats Waller was there on piano and organ, four years before Hammond sent him up to his father’s country club. And sixteen years before that, James Reese Europe’s all-​black Clef Club Orchestra played a Carnegie Hall concert of spirituals, ragtime, and early jazz, all by African American composers. The sold-​out 1912 concert was reprised in 1913 and 1914.55 The sole precursor Hammond acknowledged, obliquely, in the program notes for “Spirituals to Swing” was Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music,” which had culminated in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” “George Gershwin, among other white composers, made a sincere attempt to distill from [Negro music’s] folk qualities a concert type of music that would be acceptable to prosaic audiences,” Hammond said. “It is doubtful, however, if this approach did anything more than suppress the genuine thing.”56 Whiteman’s orchestra had begun the evening with “Livery Stable Blues” in its display of primitive sounds from which symphonic art, represented by Gershwin, would eventually {  40  } 

religion around billie holiday

be released. Hammond’s “Spirituals to Swing” opened with a “record of wild African chanting” obtained from “scientific recordings made by the H. E. Tracy expedition to the west coast of Africa.”57 In the advance billing of the New Masses, the concert would present “all the significant trends, all the roots,” of Negro music—including sounds purportedly “known only to explorers like Hammond and Alan Lomax”—in the order of “their proper chronology.” It was to be, in short, an “evening of great discovery.”58 The program listed “African Tribal Music” first, followed by “Spirituals and Holy Roller Hymns,” blues, early New Orleans jazz, and finally swing. As “primitive” religious expression had for Paul Tillich, what Hammond saw as Negro musical primitivism possessed for him a double valence. On one hand, black music’s “raw beginnings” belonged to an archaic past away from which modern sensibilities had evolved. “From Spirituals to Swing,” Gayle Wald suggests, registered in its very name a story of “African American social development expressed in musical form: from spirituals sung by ‘unlettered’ musicians to the swinging rhythms of ‘sophisticated’ dance bands, from South to North, from folk functionalism to mass entertainment, from the sounds of slavery to the music of modernity.”59 On the other hand, primitive sounds were for Hammond the vitalizing core of all black music. Sacred songs and their inchoate cognate, “wild African chanting,” came first in Hammond’s musical program because, in the logic of the program, they lay closest to the essential Negro reality that the program as a whole intended to convey. What sounded most audibly in the sacred and archaic sounds on the program was the primitive depth dimension that ran like a plumb line through the program in its entirety, from spirituals to swing. According to Hammond, the Holy Roller hymns of Sister Rosetta Tharpe were the evening’s “surprise smash.” “Except for one fleeting appearance at the Cotton Club, she had never sung anywhere except in Negro churches,” Hammond said, and she “knocked the people out” at Carnegie Hall that night, for her “singing showed an affinity between gospel and jazz that all fans could recognize and appreciate.”60 The press for the concert reflected Hammond’s unstated continuum of the religious, the primitive, the authentic, and the authentically black. The evening’s “spirituals sung in their primitive majesty,” R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

41  }

in the write-​up of the Marxist New Masses, ranked foremost among the “true, untainted, entirely original works that the American Negro has created.”61 “They represented in their concentration, true musical feeling, integrity and unaffectedness Negro music in its pristine aspects,” the New York Times reported of Mitchell’s Christian Singers, who came onstage in the “Spirituals and Holy Roller Hymns” segment of the concert. “Their singing is done after the day’s work. They have had no formal teaching; they do not use fancy arrangements,” and their “music and verse are so real to them that they act it out, almost like an ancient miracle play.”62 Perceptible religious feeling, made credible by artlessness and modest means, was black authenticity’s marker. Yet insofar as an animating and authenticating relationship to the sacred was the imprimatur of all genuine Negro music, the boundaries between spiritual and worldly music required no particular deference or care. Mitchell’s Christian Singers, said Hammond, “originally included William Mitchell as bass, but his voice was found to be unsuitable by James B. Long, the remarkable white man who discovered these singers and introduced them to recording.” James B. Long, Hammond explained, was “manager in the record department of the United Dollar Store in Kinston,” North Carolina. When Sam Bryant “entered the store and asked Mr. Long to arrange for him to record some original blues singing, accompanied on his own guitar,” Long listened to Bryant and immediately “induced him to forget blues singing—here was the bass who could hold up his end with the amazing voices in the Christian singers.” As Hammond tells it, the story rewinds the Lomaxes’ narrative of Black Sampson, the prison inmate strong-​armed by the warden into singing for the folklorists’ field recordings (and the Library of Congress archives) over protests that he had forsworn blues singing when he joined the church. In Hammond’s account of Sam Bryant’s Dollar Store discovery, the bluesman willingly meshes his bass with the now Mitchell-​less Christian Singers, whose gospel sound took shape under Mitchell’s direction in Kinston’s Free Will Baptist Church. The group’s ignorance of “most of the spirituals popular in the north” satisfied Hammond that their “repertoire is completely representative of the true religious singing of the South. This is their first concert {  42  } 

religion around billie holiday

appearance outside of a few trips to Negro churches in neighboring southern states.”63 To consider the hands-​on management of black authenticity in “From Spirituals to Swing” is also to consider the complex and varied responses of the managed. The erstwhile bluesman Sam Bryant, who performed the requisite sacred feeling to secure his place in Mitchell’s Christian Singers, told Time magazine that he secretly cherished an ambition to star in movies.64 “Spirituals to Swing” was Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s springboard to crossover fame; Tharpe contributed the term “rock and roll” to the lexicon by way of Billboard’s description of her Holy Roller hymns, including her signature “Rock Me,” performed at Carnegie Hall.65 The Golden Gate Quartet, jubilee singers who joined Sister Tharpe in Hammond’s lineup, went on to assume the decorous mantle of civil religion in performances at the Roosevelt White House and as Cold War–era ambassadors on the U.S.  State Department’s tours. Blues singer Ruby Walker agreed to appear in “From Spirituals to Swing” as the niece of the recently deceased Bessie Smith. The concert program reported that ruby smith, “the niece of the greatest luminary in blues,” was “discovered recently by John Hammond” and is “fully prepared to take Bessie’s place in the jazz firmament.”66  Walker had signed off on the name change, Walker to Smith, at Hammond’s urging. “He made me walk like Bessie and wear those kind of old-​fashioned dresses that she had worn when they was modern,” Walker told Bessie Smith’s biographer Chris Albertson, “and he wanted me to sing like Bessie did back then, not like she did before she died.” A record contract promised by Hammond never materialized, and after being slotted into her appointed space in “Spirituals to Swing,” Ruby Walker was returned to obscurity.67 Billie Holiday did not appear in the concert at all. Her only mention in the program comes in a note saying that vocalist Helen Humes “stepped into Billie Holiday’s shoes as feminine singer with the [Count Basie] orchestra and has been at the peak ever since.”68 Holiday was touring with Basie on Hammond’s payroll earlier in the year when Hammond dropped her; he would later say it was her drug use that made her unmanageable. Basie’s drummer Jo Jones said it was R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

43  }

because Hammond wanted Holiday “to sing the blues. He wanted her to be a colored mammy,” like the version of Bessie Smith he enlisted Ruby Walker to be. “But Billie wasn’t going to be ‘Yassah, Boss,’ ” Jones said, “so John Hammond fired her from the band.”69 Composer Irene Kitchings said she and Holiday attended the Carnegie Hall concert together. “John wanted everybody to do the blues, John did,” Kitchings recalled. “That’s the reason he went down there and brought back Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He brought these people right out there from Florida. . . . John wanted them to be pure southern boom-​boom. Lady and I attended the concert, and Lady said, ‘Uh-​uh.’ ”70 The year that “From Spirituals to Swing” was first produced in New York, Nazi officials in Germany organized a traveling exhibit called Entartete Musik, “Degenerate Music.” Entartete Musik vilified jazz as a black-​Jewish hybrid, symbolized in the exhibit poster by a dark-​ skinned and simian-​featured saxophonist with a Jewish star on his lapel. The image was meant to refer to the protagonist in Jonny Spielt Auf (Jonny Strikes Up), Austrian composer Ernst Krenek’s 1927 opera about a black jazz musician. The opera’s eponymous “Jonny” served the organizers of Entartete Musik as shorthand for black musicianship, and Jonny’s enabling fan base as a marker for Jews. As the exhibit’s program put it, “A people that nears hysteria in its praise for ‘Jonny,’ who has already shown off much too long for that people, has grown spiritually and mentally ill, and is internally confused and unclean.”71 As an instrument of propaganda, Entartete Musik was a testament to American jazz’s global reach and a backhanded benediction on Café Society, the integrated Greenwich Village nightclub that former shoe salesman Barney Josephson, a second-​generation Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, opened that year with Hammond’s backing. Café Society was where Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit.” Hammond described the club as “an  extension of my Spirituals to Swing,” a  venue “where known and unknown performers could be heard, where jazz and blues and gospel were blended,” and where “Negro patrons were as welcome as whites.”72 Because many of the artists Hammond brought to New York in 1938 for “Spirituals to Swing” stayed on to play at Café Society, the concert was reprised at Carnegie {  44  } 

religion around billie holiday

Hall a year later. Benny Goodman and Arthur Bernstein joined the 1939 lineup, making a roster of black and Jewish talent to which the Nazis could point in confirmation of their screeds. For all that Hammond and Josephson sought to lift the racial barrier, audiences at Café Society and both Carnegie Hall concerts were mostly white; the black musicians they sponsored, meanwhile, needed daily to navigate the indignities of segregation that structured everyday life in the North as well as the South. As “Spirituals to Swing” neared production, Billie Holiday was performing with Artie Shaw’s all-​white band at New York’s Lincoln Hotel, where she was forbidden to drink at the bar or sit on the stage, made to enter and exit through the kitchen, and directed to wait by herself in “a little dark room” between numbers.73 In the following year Holiday began to close each of her sets at Café Society with “Strange Fruit.” It was a delicately orchestrated ritual, and a trademark she retained for the rest of her career. Waiters stopped serving and stood still; the lights were cut but for a pin light trained on Holiday’s face. When the room had quieted to the requisite anticipatory hush, her accompanists started in on the muted opening chords. A reviewer for the New York Post described the sound: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit . . . blood on the leaves and blood at the root,” begins Billie, and the long, mournful melody on the horns, which introduced her, instantly takes on the quality and remembrance of a dirge. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Then there is Sonny Whit[e] on the piano before she takes up again, playing softly as death. “Pastoral scene of the gallant South . . . the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” She sings with a curious lack of emphasis, dropping each word slowly and without accent. . . . The result is a desperate and dreadful intimacy between hearer and singer. “I  have been entertaining you,” she seems to say. “Now you just listen to me.” The polite conventions between race and race are gone. R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

45  }

In their place, “a terrible explosion of sincerity” has “occurred within the confines of a set and rigid and meaningless form,” and has “blasted it to bits.”74 “Strange Fruit” had had its start as a poem (“Bitter Fruit”) by Jewish teacher and labor activist Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the name of Lewis Allan. “When [Meeropol] showed me that poem,” Holiday explained of “Strange Fruit,” “I dug it right off,” because it “seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop”—jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, who died at age thirty-​nine after falling ill on tour in Texas— and because “the things that killed him are still happening.”75 Holiday believed her father’s lungs had been damaged by exposure to poison gas when he served overseas in the First World War. When he was finally admitted to a hospital in Dallas, his lungs had hemorrhaged; Holiday said the shirt of his bandstage tuxedo was stiff with blood when she collected his body. In an interview, Holiday described her father’s death for want of care as “being murdered by race prejudices, by the cold of heart. . . . It was another typical ‘pastoral scene of the gallant South.’ ”76 Two years after Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” a black soldier, Felix Hall, was found bound and hanged in a ravine near Fort Benning, Georgia, where he’d been training to fight overseas.77 In January 1942 the African American Pittsburgh Courier published a pointed letter from a reader. “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?” asked the writer, James G. Thompson. “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?” These questions, Thompson said, “need answering.” In the meantime he made a proposal. The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-​called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny. If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here

{  46  } 

religion around billie holiday

are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.78 With Thompson’s letter the Double  V campaign was launched. Double V clubs, Double-​Victory gardens, Miss Double V contests, and Double V hairstyles all contributed to the effort. The nation’s largest union, the United Auto Workers, unanimously endorsed the Double V campaign “for a victory over the forces of Fascism and reaction and oppression both within this nation and in the world at large.” The National Baptist Convention urged members to make Easter Sunday 1942 Negro Double V Day, and the Courier obliged with an artist’s rendering of the risen Christ holding a V in each hand.79 The Double V campaign was a delicate balancing act. It was in the first place a bold setting forth of terms: If we are asked to fight for the nation’s freedom, we will accept nothing short of full equality. Otherwise, as a Courier editorial put it, “it does not make a great deal of difference what happens abroad.”80 The Double V was at the same time a plea for more combat assignments for black soldiers, and so in effect an offer of blood sacrifice in the cause of still tentative and incomplete citizenship. Subtle weighing of the terms of the deal might erode conviction. What was needed, said a columnist for the Courier, was spirited music about the Double V that would give black Americans “a chance to sell our selves to our citizenry via the radio.”81 Enter the formidable pairing of Andy Razaf and J. C. Johnson, who separately and together contributed memorable songs to Billie Holiday’s oeuvre: “Trav’lin’ All Alone” (Johnson), “Blue Turning Grey over You,” and “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” (both Razaf). Holiday recalled that a “fellow named Razaf” helped her with the lyrics for “Don’t Explain,” which the sheet music credits to Holiday and Arthur Herzog  Jr.82 Johnson also wrote signature tunes for Bessie Smith (“Empty Bed Blues”), Ethel Waters (“You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did”), and Fats Waller (“The Joint Is Jumpin’,” co-​written with Razaf). Razaf secured his place in the American Songwriters Hall of Fame with “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” (co-​written with Fats Waller), and “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” which

R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

47  }

shows up as the protagonist’s interior soundtrack in the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Two of the very best in the business, Razaf and Johnson teamed up to write “Yankee Doodle Tan” for the Double V effort not long after Thompson’s letter was published. Lionel Hampton, his band renamed the Double V for the occasion, played it for an estimated two million listeners who heard it broadcast from the Savoy Ballroom by NBC radio that May. The Courier began selling the sheet music for “Yankee Doodle Tan,” billing it as the “most thrilling masterpiece ever set to words and music” and the noted songwriting duo’s “best work.” “The feeling and meaning that they have injected into ‘Yankee Doodle Tan’ comes forth with a clarity and brilliance that beggars description. Everything is in the song.”83 You can see the Double V emblem on the sheet music for “Yankee Doodle Tan” in a photograph of the Ink Spots at the Savoy Ballroom in Pittsburgh sometime in 1942. Someone must have handed them the music to read a few moments before the picture was snapped. Half of the men in the group are laughing; the others look bewildered or annoyed, as though they were missing the joke. Ev’ry time I see a dusky soldier man / With that rhythm in his step and skin of tan, the lyrics begin, I could build a monument up in the sky On it I would carve these words that cry He’s a Yankee Doodle Tan A Yankee Doodle Tan When others can’t that’s just the time he can He’s a Yankee Doodle Tan A Yankee Doodle Tan A gay and plucky happy-​go-​lucky Yankee Doodle Tan.84 James Baldwin observed that among the subtlest and cruelest effects of racial panic, “that terror which activates a lynch mob,” is to declare “it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial.” Hence the fate of so many earnest representations of blackness mounted against racism, which is to remain “fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental,” “trapped and imprisoned in the sunlit prison of the American dream.”85 {  48  } 

religion around billie holiday

Remarkably, given its historical provenance, “Yankee Doodle Tan” has slipped almost entirely from the archives of sheet music and recorded sound. A lone, partial version survives in the movie Hit Parade of 1943, a wartime formula musical. Hit Parade of 1943 features in its final scenes a live concert broadcast on radio, with listeners phoning in requests along with their pledges to purchase war bonds. A request for “Yankee Doodle Tan” comes over the wires from a “Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln” of New York City, who pledge a $10,000 bond to hear the song performed by the Golden Gate Quartet, erstwhile singers of Holiness hymns whom Hammond recruited for “Spirituals to Swing.” Onto the stage they stride in the full military dress of various units and ranks, marching in step to the vocal’s swoony homage to dusky men in uniform. It’s a jaunty shtick, the Andrews Sisters meet the Village People. There’s no ache in the music, no intimation that wartime sacrifice, tendered in the name of still elusive freedoms, might call on psychic investments beyond the register of good cheer. Gay and plucky, happy-​go-​lucky. Elsewhere in the film the quartet—Willie Johnson, William Langford, Henry Owens, and Orlandus Wilson—play a cook, a driver, a handyman, and a delivery boy, flunky roles typically given to black enlisted men. Of the half-​million black American soldiers serving at the beginning of 1943, only about eighty thousand were stationed overseas; of these, the vast majority labored to transport, feed, and bury other soldiers.86 In addition to the Golden Gate Quartet and the Count Basie Orchestra, the film’s black musical artists include Dorothy Dandridge, who was twice tapped to play Billie Holiday in separate film versions of Lady Sings the Blues. The production starring Dandridge was never made, though Dandridge went on to play a heroin-​addicted jazz singer based on Billie Holiday in the 1962 TV crime drama Cain’s Hundred.87 Hit Parade of 1943 recruits several characters as foils to the Golden Gate Quartet’s spic-​and-​span embodiment of black potential: the step-​ and-​fetch-​it janitor who inspires the hit song “Harlem Sandman”; a work-​averse little kid whose pretense of heading “the junior colored commandoes” translates black wartime service into minstrelsy (“we work at night on account of when the enemy see us, he think we just ain’t there”). Even the dancing Harlem Sandman in Basie’s stage R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

49  }

show is a proto-​rapper in a pimpmobile who blankets uptown in narcotic dust. The real Harlem, meanwhile, was swimming with cops: “on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere,” James Baldwin remembered of the summer of 1943, “always two by two.”88 The trouble had started in April, just as Hit Parade of 1943 was released. The Savoy Ballroom, where Lionel Hampton and Billie Holiday had recently played a “Miss Victory” benefit for the American Women’s Voluntary Services, was deemed the vector for 164 cases of venereal disease among mostly white servicemen and shut down. A tense spring and summer turned violent on August 1 when a white policeman shot a uniformed black soldier. The soldier, Robert Bandy, had tried to stop the cop from arresting a black woman in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel, where Holiday lived off and on in the 1940s.89 Riots and looting spread with the news of Bandy’s shooting. Within twenty-​four hours, six thousand additional police officers were stationed in Harlem, hundreds of people were wounded, and six lay in the morgue, five of them killed by police. A volunteer with Harlem Hospital’s U.S. Ambulance Corps Unit remembered the emergency room floor that night as ankle-​deep in blood.90 Robert Bandy became the anti–Yankee Doodle Tan, a reminder of injustices heaped on African Americans in and out of uniform and an embodiment of the Double V’s remoteness from their lived experience. Langston Hughes put a point on it in “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”: Looky here, America What you done done– Let things drift Until the riots come. ...................... I ask you this question Cause I want to know How long I got to fight both hitler—and jim crow.91

{  50  } 

religion around billie holiday

Eleanor Roosevelt would compare the structural oppression of African Americans in her lifetime to “the kind of thing the Nazis had done to the Jews in Germany.”92 Hughes and Roosevelt were among those who voiced a damning contradiction in the nation’s postwar diplomacy: America stood for freedom on a global stage yet sustained vicious racial discrimination at home. Segregation was this America’s Achilles’ heel, and a fixture of Soviet propaganda as early as 1946.93 Between 1945 and 1960, forty nations gained independence from former colonial powers, and Soviet and U.S. forces vied for their allegiance. A decade into the Cold War, a headline in the New York Times announced that Americans had at last perfected a “secret sonic weapon” in the fight against communism—jazz.94 The broadcast arm of the U.S. Information Agency, Voice of America, had begun transmitting jazz to all corners of the world in 1953, and jazz records in the thousands slipped behind the Iron Curtain. In 1956, a panel of experts was appointed under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to choose musicians to tour abroad as goodwill ambassadors. The State Department’s stipulation was that ensembles be integrated or all black, since all-​white delegations would fall short of demonstrating American racial equality to the world. Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and the Golden Gate Quartet would all tour abroad on the State Department’s dime.95 According to Willis Conover, the host of Voice of America Jazz Hour, listeners the world over “love jazz because they love freedom.”96 How did government-​sponsored black artists come to represent freedom abroad when the same government denied these artists’ civil rights at home? Jazz might stand for freedom in the sense given by Ralph Ellison: “the art—the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom.”97 American cool as defined by black musical artists was more than beatnik affectation, more than Ernest Hemingway’s grace under pressure; it meant dignity, calm, and self-​possession in the face of relentless existential threat. To be cool was to act as if one were not under threat, as if the freedom struggle were not so much won in the long game as it was spiritually redundant in the present.

R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

51  }

In a more roundabout way, jazz could be made to stand for American freedom in the 1950s insofar as many who heard jazz heard something like religion. In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s oft-​quoted words, American freedom is rooted in every citizen’s “deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-​Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” Eisenhower’s faith in faith was, inseparably, a faith in freedom, with “freedom of worship,” the only one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms to get its own float in Eisenhower’s inaugural parade, this faith’s guarantor and demonstration.98 The 1958 debut issue of the Jazz Review asserted that the “influence of the Negro church on traditional jazz is obvious in the very sound of the music,” and that to “study the history of jazz is to take the church background for granted.”99 The audible fervor of black Christian worship, its emancipatory stirrings, and its denominational fluidity made it a fitting idiom for a nation whose faith in faith testified to its faith in freedom, and in America as freedom’s beacon to the world. The Golden Gate Quartet, the jubilee singers who’d performed the Double V song in Hit Parade of 1943, made an African tour with Louis Armstrong in 1962. An embassy report noted that the quartet’s repertory included “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” and that the “name ‘Joshua’ can be considered as a real symbol in America where the trumpet of Armstrong, Gillespie and others has brought forth from the depths of the suffering Negro people the heartrending tones which, under the name of jazz, have caused several walls of racial discrimination to break down.”100 That African American music was sent behind the Iron Curtain and into Europe’s former colonies as a testament to freedom in Jim Crow America is a paradox as deep and knotted as all men are created equal. The genius of the State Department’s jazz ambassadors program was to make the Double V campaign a success in retrospect, and to make the music of “the suffering Negro people” the victor over tyranny and injustice the world over. For many listeners, jazz did sound forth undreamed-​of freedoms, musical and otherwise; Stanley Crouch has said that jazz artists didn’t join the black freedom struggle so much as the struggle joined them in a fight for civil rights that the music itself had already begun to wage.101 Transposed into a Cold War context, jazz {  52  } 

religion around billie holiday

could be heard to broadcast a larger, triumphal story of American freedom and to plot the fight against slavery and Jim Crow seamlessly within it. Tuned to the sound of jazz, the Cold War soundtrack could take on the black freedom struggle’s heroics, preordain its victory, mute its frequencies of particularity and dissonance, and conscript its spiritual energies to the cause of America’s greatness. If Billie Holiday had been handed a script when she arrived on the historical stage, it might have read something like this. Come from nothing, in testament to the trying, obdurate circumstance your native pluck and inborn gifts transcend. Accept the holy charge of advertising freedom; embody a tested faith in the American way of progress and opportunity and project that faith to the world. Be uplifting. Offer communion with sacred depths—as naturalness, as sexiness, as untutored genius—that casts a saving benediction on all who feel their pull. Preach a gospel of race in which all is forgiven. Make it look easy. Holiday’s rise fit the script in some of the details. She could line up with its imperatives when it suited her or others who had power over her; she could also call foul. “Louis [Armstrong] made people happy with ‘Sleepy Time Down South,’ ” William Dufty observed just after her death. Holiday “made people miserable with ‘Strange Fruit.’ It was as simple as that.”102 Always she improvised, to stunning effect and sometimes at great cost. “When I was thirteen,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything or say anything unless I meant it. Not “Please, Sir.” Not “Thank you, ma’am.” Nothing. Unless I meant it. You have to be poor and black to know how many times you can get knocked in the head just for trying to do something as simple as that. But I never gave up trying.103

R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

53  }

2 true confessions

When Lady Sings the Blues appeared in 1956, the reviewer for the New York Times, Gilbert Millstein, heralded it as “the autobiography of a woman who is probably the foremost living singer of the blues.”1 Fans of Billie Holiday’s singular renditions of “St.  Louis Blues,” “Long Gone Blues,” or “Billie’s Blues” might well concur with his assessment of her stature in the genre. But Holiday resented being called a blues singer, as though being black had landed her in that company by default. She told William Dufty that she’d like to be known as a jazz singer, failing to add that “jazz singer” was a category she pretty much invented, at least as a role a woman might fill.2 Other women who sang with the great swing orchestras in the 1930s were known as songbirds or canaries—put on display, but also viewed as less skilled than the instrumentalists in the pit. Billie Holiday was with the band. She was a “musicians’ singer,” Teddy Wilson remembered, one of the “giants of the jazz scene,” at home in the Valhalla of accompanists—Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Lester Young—“on par with herself.”3 Basie told Linda Kuehl that when Holiday, then twenty-​two, fronted his band on

a tour in 1937–38, the musicians’ after-​hours recreation was listening to her records. lk: Her records? cb: Yeah. lk: Anybody else’s? cb: No. lk: Her records? cb: Sure. lk: I mean, her singing? cb: Yeah.4 Holiday’s oeuvre was vast: in addition to a few true blues, she sang Tin Pan Alley baubles (“Me, Myself, and I,” “A Sailboat in the Moonlight”), show tunes from Broadway and Hollywood (“Summertime,” “April in Paris”), through-​composed art songs (“Gloomy Sunday,” “Strange Fruit”), and torch songs in the chanson réaliste tradition of European cabaret (“My Man,” “Don’t Explain”). The orchestra of strings that backed her on the slow and dreamy “Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?)” marked a production level typically reserved for white hit-​making crooners like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Even so, the record’s sales were tallied on the rhythm & blues charts—R&B having become the catch-​all category for black musicians once the “race” label was retired. Lady Sings the Blues, the title, was Holiday’s publisher’s idea. She had wanted to call her autobiography Bitter Crop, the extinguishing syllables of “Strange Fruit”—which was not a blues song, whatever its tired-​of-​ this-​mess blues sensibility.5 (Blues are seldom scored through with a narrative beginning, middle, and end; most are played with a handful of repeated chords and lines sung AAB in each twelve-​bar stanza, with a small jazz ensemble or a lone guitar for accompaniment.) Millstein, the Times reviewer, described Lady Sings the Blues as a “skillful, shocking and brutal” catalog of wounds in proof of two propositions: one, that “the position of the Negro artist in America” is generally “a degraded one”; two, that “the treatment of drug addicts in this country, when it is not merely misguided, is vindictive.”6 The book’s packaging as the {  56  } 

religion around billie holiday

druggy reminiscences of a lady blues singer, its tacit insistence that a black singer of artistry and range was still at bottom a blues singer, seemed only to cap its litany of injuries and slights. Then again, Lady was Billie Holiday’s royal title, Lester Young’s regal term of endearment that stuck.7 And the Blues was the difficult life she lived and told. And Sings was the mode of joining teller to tale in the carefully crafted persona that was Billie Holiday. Like its title, Lady Sings the Blues is inaccurate, exploitative, and in important ways true. Holiday owned and interpreted the stories told in Lady Sings the Blues in the way of signature songs in her repertoire, indisputably hers whether penned by herself or another. Whatever it offered those who wrote about, used, pursued, or adored her, the story of Billie’s blues was a creation in which she collaborated, and relied in doing so on particular conventions for telling difficult truths. The account of Holiday’s childhood in Lady Sings the Blues reads like a Gothic comic book, all lurid shapes and garish color. Serially abandoned by ad hoc custodians. Raped at age ten by one Mr. Dick. Sentenced to a Catholic girls’ reformatory torn from the pages of convent porn, where sexual attentions, tender and violent, were the inmates’ currency and legal code, where the punishments meted out by the nuns included being made to sleep with a corpse. Stock horrors aside, the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls provided one stable habitation during Holiday’s Baltimore years, otherwise lived under multiple roofs near the dockside edges of hard and glittering Fell’s Point, the part of the city, a childhood associate recalled, where “you could get everything.”8 “Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, lots of trade through here,” Holiday’s cousin Johnnie Fagan told Linda Kuehl. “This is a seaport town. We actually have a waterfront. When Billie Holiday got famous singing ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ that song had a certain meaning for us, and for her too. She knew where she came up.”9 Lady Sings the Blues serves up suggestive short takes of Holiday’s apprenticeship on the waterfront, where she sang and drank in good-​time houses and stole from the sailors and the other johns who ventured into the Point for the trade. She was not the first, she said, to receive her musical education in a brothel. A second rape, this time T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

57  }

by a musician, meets with her mother Sadie’s admonishment against following in her own, Sadie’s, footsteps, lest she end up abandoned, unwed, and stuck with a child as trying as she was. When Billie alights from a train in New York to join her mother, who had moved there, she finds her way first to a shelter for homeless children, a not disagreeable adventure (slides and swings and “nothing to do but play”)10 that ends in being sprung from the facility by her mother’s new employer and sent soon after to live in a brothel uptown. A judge reunites mother and daughter in a workhouse on Welfare Island, where they jointly serve time for vagrancy and prostitution. “Fifty girls were packed together in one awful ward,” Holiday recalled. “We got the kind of garbage to eat you wouldn’t feed your dog” (29). Lady Sings the Blues dates Holiday’s arrival in New York to 1927, the year she turned twelve. In “about 1928 or 1927,” remembered a Harlem comic Clarence “Pops” Foster, “she was singing at the Hot Cha [club] and this was when people began to notice her, and from then on it was Billie Holiday!”11 On census records, leases, police logs, and the like it was Eleanora or Elenore Harris or Fagan or Gough or Monroe or McKay, the surnames of makeshift husbands or fathers. The record of her birth lists her parents as Sadie Harris and Frank DeViese, the latter disappeared from history.12 Holiday identified the luminous white film star Billie Dove as her stage name’s inspiration, but she’d been Bill or Billy in fleeting childhood exchanges with her acknowledged father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, who played next to no role in her upbringing, maintained concurrent marriages to at least two different women (neither of them Sadie), and died in 1937 at the age of thirty-​nine. “Fannie seemed nice,” Clarence’s bandmate Walter Johnson recalled of Fannie Holiday, with whom Clarence lived when he wasn’t with a blowsy blonde named Atlanta, whom Fannie called her wife-​in-​law. “Both his wives were nice.”13 After moving in with her mother in New York, Billie would occasionally call herself Bill again, sometimes William or Mr. Holiday. Sadie encouraged her daughter to choose women companions for fear a man would come between them.14 Billie Holiday’s voice is always recognizable, even when at the end it had frayed and fallen out of pitch. (Songs on her 1959 Last Recording were the earliest studio tracks to be digitally corrected and enhanced in {  58  } 

religion around billie holiday

production.)15 But in photos Holiday could be a dozen different women: gorgeously fat or alarmingly gaunt, stunning or plain, African American, Asian, Spanish. Maybe Jewish: when trumpet player Max Kaminsky brought Holiday home to meet his family in Boston, his mother gathered Billie in close and said she and Max looked like brother and sister.16 Classy or louche, schoolmarm or diva. Cool behind cat-​eye shades or open-​faced and laughing. It was as though she were always on the lam. Holiday’s career was in fact shadowed by the law at every turn. The pursuit of Billie Holiday under the zealous direction of the nation’s first and longest-​serving drug czar, Harry Jacob Anslinger, landed her at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, at the height of her fame. Anslinger had been trailing Holiday for years and caught up with her finally in a sting in Philadelphia, where she and Louis Armstrong shared a bill at the Earle Theatre. Returning from the show, Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, she saw the entrance to her hotel thick with cops, so she grabbed the wheel from her driver and gunned the engine, speeding away “through a rain of bullets” (142). She made it all the way to New York, where federal agents waited until she finished out a week of appearances on Fifty-​Second Street to arrest her on the charge that she, “Billie Holiday, did receive, conceal, carry and facilitate the transportation and concealment” of illegal drugs (146).17 Holiday waived her right to a lawyer and pleaded guilty on the promise of treatment for addiction, which at Alderson amounted to an arrangement where the authorities “just throw you in the hospital by yourself, take you off cold turkey, and watch you suffer” (154). Holiday’s intake form at Alderson lists her occupation as singer, her religion as Catholic, and the upper limit of her schooling as the seventh grade. It appraises Holiday’s intelligence as low average and notes that she has poor factual knowledge, seems inconsistent in her reasoning, and rates best in language and vocabulary. She attends religious services regularly. She has done singing and housework. She has needle marks and bruises on both arms.18 At Alderson, inmates lived in Jim Crow “cottages,” fifty or sixty women in each. Holiday was made “Cinderella of Cottage No. 6,” where her job included carrying buckets of coal to the furnace every morning (156). Prison officials remembered her as tidy and reserved and said she never sang a note. Her T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

59  }

self-​effacement in prison, and her cooperation with authorities who regularly dragged her back to a Philadelphia jail to be questioned about her associates, trimmed three months from her original sentence of one year and a day (154–61).19 Concert promoter Ernie Anderson said that on seeing Holiday soon after her March 1948 release, he “got the distinct impression that she was clean and was going to stay off drugs,” that she wanted to “keep away from Harlem thus avoiding drug pushers who knew her and ex-​husbands, who sometimes provided drugs to keep her in line.”20 Anderson arranged for a comeback performance at Carnegie Hall, which broke every record for ticket sales at that august venue. Her appearance fell on Easter Saturday; Time described it as a resurrection to new life, urged on by a “crowd of Holiday cultists whose hysterical applause gave the event the quality of a revival meeting.”21 A lasting consequence of Holiday’s drug conviction was the suspension of her cabaret card, which made it impossible for her to work in New York clubs that served liquor. (Cabaret cards were required of performers in New York City until 1967 and could be revoked by officials for any documented or imputed offense, which was the case not only for Holiday but for Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and too many other black musicians to mention.)22 Instead, she played concert halls, outdoor stages, even movie theaters—when Key Largo played at the Strand Theatre on Broadway in July and August 1948, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Billie Holiday shared marquee billing, but only Holiday was there in person, Count Basie’s Orchestra backing her in the pit. She performed a set before each screening of the film, five shows a day, seven days a week, for overflow crowds undaunted by the summer heat. Holiday supposed it was her prison notoriety that brought them. “They come to see me get all fouled up,” she told Barry Ulanov. “They’re just waiting.” But “I’m not going to get all fouled up. I’m not! I’m not.”23 After she left Alderson, her accompanists say, everyone in the business knew she’d returned to using heroin almost immediately. The novelist Françoise Sagan reported that when she saw Billie Holiday for the last time in Paris, in 1958, the singer predicted she would die very soon, “between two cops.”24 Anslinger’s pursuit of Holiday {  60  } 

religion around billie holiday

continued until her death and led to serial arrests and detainments, the last at Metropolitan Hospital in New York in July 1959, where she spent the final weeks of her life in police custody. The liquor she’d periodically consume in vast quantities was likely a DIY heroin detox undertaken when she knew herself to be in Anslinger’s sights and looking at cold-​turkey withdrawal on a cement prison floor. Both the heroin and the alcohol ravaged her body, which gave itself up at the end to their combined assaults: failing liver and kidneys, malnutrition, congestion of the heart and lungs.25  She was forty-​four. Not precisely a suicide, with little about it either of valediction or surrender, Billie Holiday’s death seems more on the order of larceny, the defiant parting gesture of the life she managed, in the end, to get away with. Much of Lady Sings the Blues tells of wear and tear on the road: the broken bottles and racist taunts hurled from the floor when Holiday fronted Artie Shaw’s all-​white band in 1938, a  tour on which, she recalled, “I hardly ever ate, slept, or went to the bathroom without having a major NAACP-​type production” (84). The more diffuse indignities of the southern fairground and cotillion circuit with Basie’s all-​ black band the year before, touring in sweltering buses and lodging in dilapidated colored hotels to play for white audiences made up largely, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s unsparing remembrance, of “drunken teen-​ agers” and “nodding teacher-​chaperones” for whom the “black musicians, with their cumbersome instruments, their tuxedos, were simply there to beat out time.”26 The theater owner who insisted she black up in greasepaint, because he judged her unacceptably lighter than the men in the band (68). (John Hammond recalled a light-​skinned alto sax who had toured in Kentucky with a white band getting into a legal scrape when he returned with Basie’s band. The deputy sheriff recognized him from the earlier gig and tried to run him out of town for being a white man in a black band, or a black man in a white band, or one and the other on different occasions.)27 The husbands or lovers who, acting as managers and handlers, beat her up, took her money, and generally behaved as though playing their assigned roles in the songs she sang onstage. He isn’t true / He beats me, too / What can I do?28 Touring Europe with husband Louis McKay in 1956, she blacked up in greasepaint again, this time to hide her bruises (207). T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

61  }

Every Holiday biographer has grappled with the reliability of Lady Sings the Blues. The book appeared with two names on the cover, Holiday’s and ghostwriter William Dufty’s. Lee Barker, the editor who shepherded the book into print at Doubleday, said that “Dufty’s work was terrific,” because he’d taken Holiday “down very simply in her own language and that’s what made it such a damn good book.” Doubleday signed the book on the basis of its famous opening lines—“Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three” (3)—which improvised on the facts four times over. (Sadie and Clarence Holiday never married; she was his elder by a year and gave birth at nineteen.) In addition to his own conversations with Holiday, Dufty relied on other journalists’ interviews, themselves inconsistent. The book was quick work, from conception to press in three months. Dufty once claimed to have written the first three chapters in a single fevered night.29 Among his sources Dufty leaned heavily on Holiday’s 1949 first-​ person account in Ebony, “I’m Cured for Good.” The Ebony staff writer who penned that piece was probably Frank Harriott, a minor figure on the Harlem arts scene, who four years earlier had published an essay called “The Hard Life of Billie Holiday” in the left-​wing newspaper PM. (Harriott began a novel about Holiday in 1947; it was unfinished when he died in 1955.)30 The point of the Ebony piece was that Holiday had served her time in prison, hadn’t so much as looked at dope, so why wouldn’t the feds leave her alone? As Lady Sings the Blues went to press in February 1956, Holiday was arrested in another sting in Philadelphia. This one made the front page of the Philadelphia Tribune, which reported that a raid on the hotel room Holiday shared with Louis McKay “netted the raiding officers nearly $2000 worth of heroin and paraphernalia used by dope addicts” and “followed several days of watching at the hotel site and clever undercover work.”31 “Sure, I’d been busted again,” Holiday says lightly in a coda tacked on to Lady Sings the Blues after her arrest. “It might look like just old times, but it wasn’t” (216). She insists that she is or will be clean again, and that once you’ve really kicked the habit, “no jail on earth can worry you too much” (224). Doubleday meanwhile shredded or altered episodes involving Tallulah Bankhead, Orson Welles, and Holiday’s former companion/ {  62  } 

religion around billie holiday

manager John Levy for fear of lawsuits. Louis McKay, whose threats to murder Holiday (or send a hit man to do it) were secretly taped by Dufty’s then wife Maely, comes out as a suspiciously benign figure on the page. “God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody,” Holiday says in the book, “and I believed in Louis” (217). (McKay lived on Holiday’s earnings and pocketed all of her royalties after she died.) Publicity photographs show Holiday at the typewriter, or in reading glasses, examining proofs—Doubleday insisted she initial every page— but Holiday would later claim she hadn’t so much as read the book. Faced with legal action from figures of note who recognized themselves in its pages, Dufty blamed an avaricious McKay for the book’s being written at all.32 For all of its shortcomings as documentary evidence, Lady Sings the Blues nevertheless offers a useful register of the forces that bent Holiday’s life to the shapes it assumed. Dufty was a talented hack who devoted his considerable gifts to tabloid journalism, managing to win the prestigious Polk Award for his New York Post reporting on police brutality even as he churned out underworld exposés and celebrity fluff in the self-​help mode. As Holiday lay dying, Dufty jotted a first-​person piece from her bedside, “I Needed Heroin to Live,” that brought $1,500 from Confidential magazine to divide between them. In addition to his newspaper work, Dufty wrote, translated, or ghosted some forty books, of  which the most successful, after Lady Sings the Blues, was Sugar Blues, a broadside on the scourge of addiction to sweets. Dufty had a tabloid writer’s interest in religion—another ghosted autobiography was Gabriel Longo’s Spoiled Priest, billed as the ex-​cleric’s “frank and shocking confessions”—and said that he and Holiday saw eye to eye because both were Irish Catholic at the core.33 It was thanks to Dufty’s tabloid-​ready dispatches from Holiday’s hospital room, including a three-​thousand-​word obituary written on the spot, that Frank O’Hara saw the front-​page news of her death in the New York Post and made it the occasion of the most famous of his Lunch Poems, “The Day Lady Died.” It was indirectly thanks to the tabloids too that Holiday found herself in Anslinger’s crosshairs. Prohibition had made celebrities of criminals—Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde—and pulp magazines like True Detective, True Crime, and their T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

63  }

many imitators chronicled criminal adventure in the public interest. True Detective published original essays by Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover, Senate reports on teenage delinquency and the “pornography racket,” and Vargas-​girl renderings of underworld women with captions like “Jail for the Jezebel,” “Scarlet Sinner’s Final Exit,” and “Bad Woman.”34 Billie Holiday’s bad-​girl celebrity-​junkie cachet was a boon to Dufty—he’d told producer Norman Granz that the truth of Holiday’s heroin addiction was the “gimmick” for selling readers on Lady Sings the Blues—and equally so for Anslinger, inaugural commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who made Holiday trophy prey.35 “All the cops have to do is find a celebrity,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, “and it’s page-​one stuff” (193). Celebrity quarry would put Anslinger in the headlines by feeding a national appetite for what he called the “glamorous entertainment characters who have been involved in the sordid details of a narcotic case.”36 In 1946 Charles Henri Ford wrote that Billie Holiday was hip “as a gangster,” “exciting as a holdup,” “disreputable as pleasure,” and “popular as crime.”37 By then the stories of her exploits were legion, and they clung to her like drunken ghosts. “They frighten me,” she told Frank Harriott in 1945. “A lot of the Negro papers have been carrying them, too. The Amsterdam News said I’d gone crazy on a train and that I tried to tear all my clothes off.”38 The stories in the press brought notoriety, which brought money she badly needed because—well, you’d heard the stories. Holiday continued to worry in print that people only showed up for her performances to see what drugs and jail had done to her. “I’ve got no understudy,” Dufty reported her saying a few weeks before her death. “Every time I do a show, I’m up against everything that’s ever been written about me. I have to fight this whole scene just to get people to listen to their own ears and believe in me again.”39 She was always playing herself. The poet Alexis De Veaux describes Holiday’s art as “paint[ing] folktales for her audience.”40 Certainly, Holiday told stories, on and off the stage; certainly, these stories, like folktales, participate in mythic structures larger than their plots. “When you got to know Fern Williams well—as I did after several months of being around her,” begins Frank Harriott’s unfinished roman à clef of Billie Holiday, “you became what {  64  } 

religion around billie holiday

she called ‘a real good friend.’ This label, flattering in itself, meant you were entitled to know her life story. For Fern, in a way characteristic of many insecure people, felt you’d never really know or like her until she’d revealed everything about herself.”41 Her accompanist Carl Drinkard said that Holiday “was a pathological liar and she’d repeat herself and change the details, and she’d tell a story so many times a certain way that she’d begin to believe it herself. She’d tell it the way she’d think was most impressive and, even if it lost all semblance of truth, that didn’t seem to worry her at all.” The lawyer Earle Zaidins, whom Holiday met when both walked their dogs at night on the Upper West Side, described her as a “brilliant conversationalist” who could talk about anything. “There were some things she might not have wanted to remember and she did have a fantastic imagination. Not that she’d make up stories, but to repeat what happened yesterday, she’d completely fantasize.” Her arranger Bobby Tucker portrayed the same habit as a kind of truthfulness: “She’d be honest even if it meant she had to lie. You’d ask her the same question and twenty minutes later you’d get an entirely different answer, but it would still be her. It was how she felt at a particular moment that mattered.”42 The stories Holiday and others told about her life were formulaic, embellished, and often at odds with the record, but collectively they cohered in the persona that audiences came to know as Billie Holiday. “The Hard Life of Billie Holiday,” the 1945 PM piece by Frank Harriott, supplied Dufty with several iconic early scenes of young Eleanora Fagan: here scrubbing white steps in Baltimore for pennies, there stealing stockings from the stores that wouldn’t sell them to her even if she’d had the money, now waking in the paralyzing grip of a beloved grandmother who’d died in her sleep, her arms locked around the girl in rigor mortis and needing to be broken at the bone. Holiday remembered that this grandmother “used to tell me how it felt to be a slave” (7). “When I’m in the South,” Holiday told Harriott, “I know better and stay on the right side of the tracks—in all the stinking little hotel rooms—because I’m not white. It’s such a little thing too. All you need is a white face to be treated like a human, to be a little more happy.” Harriott asked Holiday if she’d found anything like happiness. “Happy is a word they should have left out of my dictionary. Sometimes people T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

65  }

ask me if I feel cheated out of anything in life. What can I answer them? I practically raised myself from a kid.”43 Six years earlier, a Down Beat interview with Holiday concluded that she “doesn’t expect any happiness—she is used to taking hard knocks, tough breaks.” Maybe someday, “she thinks, she’ll get a real break. But she’s not very optimistic about it. Billie Holiday is convinced the future” will be a repeat of her past.44 Already in 1939 Holiday’s life, all twenty-​four years of it, was a package, a story. And it was hard. Lady Sings the Blues was a confessional narrative in several senses. It was in the first place what Dufty called a “Baltimore ghetto translation” of “To thine own self be true.” The New Yorker called it a “bitter and uncompromising” social document, “largely authentic, if almost indigestible.” According to Dufty, Holiday “flipped” in response to that one. No account of her life could be both palatable and true. “I am sick of the whole goddamn thing,” she wrote to Dufty after reading a prim review in the Baltimore Afro-​American. “You tell people the truth and you stink.” In a eulogy he stretched out over six installments in the New York Post, Dufty said that “truth was [Holiday’s] habit,” more taxing than any drug. “If you didn’t know that before you met her, you found out by getting bruised, blinded or burned.”45 Whatever its sui generis candor, Holiday’s autobiography was also a genre piece, a gritty tell-​all by a jazz musician who’d known the underside of things. It was a form that a segment of fans were being schooled to appreciate. By the 1950s swing had effervesced into pop, and jazz that hadn’t gone the way of pop persisted as something else, something more elusive than big band, or blues. Its standing in the industry relied on parlaying that elusiveness into a certain urban hipster cachet. “African American performers have frequently been caught in a bind with respect to self-​presentation,” Ingrid Monson suggests of jazz lives, written and otherwise, “for the image of ‘unabashed badness’ and sexual transgression has sold extremely well in the twentieth century, thanks in part to white fascination with it.”46  What sold jazz to audiences susceptible to that image was what some in jazz called simply “the lifestyle.” “It’s the difference between day people and night people,” jazz guitarist Danny Barker explained. The Harlem music scene was made of “all kinds of night things,” what “people do at night.” Call girls, {  66  } 

religion around billie holiday

drug runners, gangsters and racketeers. “Night people, they busy as day people, but they doing things that happen at night.”47 Jazz made a night world, and “the lifestyle” was its lawless ritual habitus. Heroin was its talisman, shimmering and brutal. According to trumpeter Red Rodney, heroin was “the thing that made us different from the rest of the world. It was the thing that said, ‘We know. You don’t know.’ It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club.”48 Pianist Hampton Hawes recalled that the B-​G-​D of Charlie Parker’s “Parker’s Mood” was known on the street as “a kind of hipster’s Morse code” you whistled when you wanted to buy dope late at night.49 Making heroin the “gimmick” of Lady Sings the Blues played to Holiday’s fan base in the clubs where Charlie Parker and Miles Davis played, where Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac hung around to translate what they heard into new beatitudes. Holiday makes a real-​time appearance in Kerouac’s On the Road: “It’s not the words [of “Lover Man”] so much as the great harmonic tune and the way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man’s hair in soft lamplight.”50 At the same time, Holiday’s insistence in Lady Sings the Blues that she had licked drugs (or would as soon as she beat this latest rap) settled her life into storytelling conventions geared toward audiences who would never set foot in Minton’s Playhouse or the Open Door. In pulp magazines like True Story and True Confessions that targeted a largely female, white, working-​class readership, the bad woman or scarlet sinner of the detective serials shows up in the more sympathetic guise of survivor. Her story follows a formula: “A simple, trustful human is faced with a complex, real and brutal world.” In her battle against the evils waged against her—crime, addiction, no-​good men—“the heroine first sins, then suffers, then repents.” She lives on, scarred but standing. Her fragile resilience offers a consoling mirror to readers, most of whom, a postwar survey of True Story subscribers revealed, believed in the truth of her tale and tried to apply its lessons to their lives.51 What ramped up Holiday’s appeal to both urban hipsters and the True Confessions demographic was her way of styling a song, particularly the torchy, chanson réaliste form she favored from the 1940s onward in numbers like “Lover Man,” “Don’t Explain,” “Gloomy Sunday,” and T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

67  }

“My Man.” Torch singers in the chanson réaliste tradition—think Édith Piaf, who perfected the role—were or projected themselves as women of a certain age, hardened by wear and intimate with human frailty. The singer’s persona made her song believable as self-​disclosure, a sad confidence shared over cigarettes in the cabaret’s low light. Offstage troubles with men, drugs, liquor, or law reinforced the impression she cultivated onstage.52 Billie Holiday first assumed the role of confessing, in song, the grim details of a wounded life when she stepped into the wan light of a streetlamp and sang “The Saddest Tale” in Duke Ellington’s 1935 short film Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. My man’s gone I feel so alone I’ve got those lost my man blues He didn’t treat me fair It’s more than I can bear I’ve got those lost my man blues.53 Anguished, wronged, brought low: it was a persona Holiday showed her mastery of in Symphony in Black and moved in and out of for the entirety of her career. This was her project and not simply her burden; the early, swinging sides she recorded on Brunswick and Vocalion—“I Wished on the Moon,” “Pennies from Heaven,” the buoyant “No Regrets”—float free of it entirely. (Listen to Holiday and wonder “what proposed such tragedy, such final hopeless agony,” says Amiri Baraka. “Or flip the coin and she is singing, ‘Miss Brown to You.’ ”)54 Throughout her career, Holiday continued to record new versions of the lighter songs and to introduce material that was anything but dolorous: “Mandy Is Two,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Laughing at Life.” But her indelible way with songs of injury and heartbreak and the image she cultivated to match would forever nurture the perception of Holiday’s artlessness, the notion that she, with no apparent musical training, simply sang her singular, difficult life. Whatever Holiday’s exquisite care for each breath, each bend in each phrase, the view of her art as natural—that is, not art—persists even in adulation; as John Szwed has {  68  } 

religion around billie holiday

recently remarked, “the focus on the emotional power of her interpretations has tended to reduce her artistry, creativity, and enormous influence on the history of jazz to merely her ability to express feelings though music.”55 Support for the view that Holiday’s art was no more than a transparent rendering of personal history came in the organization of Lady Sings the Blues, each chapter bearing the name of a familiar Holiday song: “No-​Good Man,” “Good Morning, Heartache,” “Trav’lin All Alone.” Lyrics took on biographical weight. (The movie version of Lady Sings the Blues that finally got made in 1972 manufactured a scene in which Holiday stumbles on a lynched body in the woods: How else to explain “Strange Fruit”?) Billie Holiday was telling you her life, the sad and sorry all of it, voiced from the precarious edge of improbable survival. The publication of Lady Sings the Blues brought forth an album, a song, and a concert by that name. The album featured re-​recordings of the older, chapter-​heading songs together with the new title song. “Lady Sings the Blues,” the song, offered a weary apologia as the book’s précis and promotional blurb. The Carnegie Hall concert to promote Lady Sings the Blues was weirdly staged. Soon after Gilbert Millstein’s New York Times review appeared, the show’s producers tapped him to lend a bookish cachet to the event. (Millstein’s Times review of Kerouac’s On the Road—“the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named”—would soon secure its renown.)56 It was decided that Millstein would appear alongside Holiday and read from the book between numbers, not stinting on the harrowing episodes. Onstage the spotlight shifted back and forth between them, the white Jewish book critic reading in a hard-​boiled narrating voice and Holiday performing the song that illuminated each passage: “Lady Sings the Blues,” “I Cried for You,” “Body and Soul.” What Millstein read of Holiday’s life on the page sent up audible gasps from the crowd.57 More than tabloids, rap sheets, and torch songs formed Billie Holiday as a confessional subject. Lady Sings the Blues’ closest precursor in the True Story, sin-​suffering-​redemption mode was the 1949 Ebony piece T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

69  }

“I’m Cured for Good,” which details the program of improvement she undertook after her release from prison. Determined to remake my entire life, I sought spiritual guidance from the Catholic Church to which I belong. My priest was extremely helpful to me in those first weeks and helped me chart the course I should travel in order to build my life upon new strong foundations. Some of the things I have done: I spent some $30,000 on new clothes, gowns and a wonderful fur coat. I  bought a new Cadillac, sleek and pea green. I bought a little piece of land in Morristown, New Jersey, and started to build my “dream house” there.58 That the life makeover took the form of high-​stakes shopping might raise eyebrows as to the quality of guidance received. But the particular structure of renewal on view—the penitent sinner granted shining new life under priestly direction—had in fact been a part of Holiday’s spiritual formation since childhood. The Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, the “Catholic institution” mentioned a handful of times in Lady Sings the Blues, notes in its files the conditional baptism of ten-​year-​old Eleanora Gough in August 1925.59 It was conditional because it was not known whether the girl had been baptized previously, and baptism was necessary for admission to the sacraments, including the sacrament of penance, or the confession and forgiveness of sins. The book of Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious of the Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes addresses many aspects of the sisters’ teaching office, with their role of imparting “the proper manner of confessing” an object of special care. The children should be taught how to examine their conscience, excite themselves to contrition, and present themselves at the holy tribunal to accuse themselves of their sins. . . . We should not be too quick to tax with scrupulosity and self-​seeking those who [confess often], nor {  70  } 

religion around billie holiday

appear surprised or scandalized. Neither should we reprimand those who make long confessions. It is a very difficult and delicate thing to conduct souls; we should dread injuring them.60 Among the ways in which her fellow Catholic William Dufty established rapport with Holiday was to ask when she started telling lies in the confessional. “I been questioned by all kinds of fuzz,” Dufty recalled Holiday saying in reply. “Some of those feds are pretty sharp.” A grand jury in New Jersey once “asked me all kinds of things. But nobody ever asked me a question like that.” Dufty volunteered that as a boy in Michigan he’d lie about how often he masturbated, a sin rumored to elicit a lighter penance from the worldlier priests in neighboring Illinois. The omission weighed on him to the extent that he plotted to ride the bus from Detroit to Chicago, make a clean breast of it in confession, and take in a Cubs game. Once, during the writing of Lady Sings the Blues, Dufty met Holiday in a Chinese restaurant where, he recalled, she waved the waiter over and asked him to remove a jar of mustard from the table. She explained to Dufty that she couldn’t stand the smell of it since she’d sat for hours in a mustard bath to bring on a miscarriage years before. Dufty asked if this was the sin she had lied about in confession and she said no. “I wouldn’t mind confessing that. Everyone was doing that. I stopped going to confession long before that.”61 Dufty’s exchanges with Holiday on the topic of confession help illuminate his process for ghosting an autobiography and her own contributions to that process. Both Dufty and Holiday were drilled in the Baltimore Catechism, the text that American Catholic schoolchildren were enjoined to commit to memory from its first use in 1885 until it was phased out in the late 1960s. Forty-​four of the Baltimore Catechism’s 421 questions concern the conduct of one’s confession. 216. Q. Is it a grievous offense willfully to conceal a mortal sin in Confession? A. It is a grievous offense willfully to conceal a mortal sin in Confession, because we thereby tell a lie to the Holy Ghost, and make our Confession worthless. T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

71  }

217. Q. What must he do who has willfully concealed a mortal sin in Confession? A. He who has willfully concealed a mortal sin in Confession must not only confess it, but must also [confess] all the sins he has committed since his last worthy Confession. Dufty’s design in probing Holiday’s youthful omissions in the confessional, it appears, was to elicit from her a fuller and more transparent accounting. 212. Q. When is our Confession sincere? A. Our Confession is sincere, when we tell our sins honestly and truthfully, neither exaggerating nor excusing them. 227. Q. What must we do when the confessor asks us questions? A. When the confessor asks us questions we must answer them truthfully and clearly. 229. Q. How should we end our Confession? A. We should end our Confession by saying, I also accuse myself of all the sins of my past life, telling, if we choose, one or several of our past sins.62 The recitation of sins in the confessional was followed by a priestly blessing that added more past life to the record. Quidquid boni feceris, et mali sustinueris, sint tibi in remissionem peccatorum, augmentum gratiae, et praemium vitae aeternae: “May whatever good you have done, and whatever evil you have endured, achieve for you the forgiveness of your sins, the increase of grace, and the reward of eternal life.” In the ordering of a life, lived or written, confession was a way of organizing your materials.63 Holiday’s biographers have had relatively little to say about her time at the House of the Good Shepherd, where most of her formal schooling between the ages of nine and eleven took place and where it appears to have ended. Before the House of the Good Shepherd, Holiday had been an on-​again, off-​again pupil in Baltimore public schools and at

{  72  } 

religion around billie holiday

St. Frances Academy for Colored Girls, a private Catholic school she attended for two years after being pulled from a district kindergarten in 1921. St. Frances Academy was run by the Baltimore-​based Oblate Sisters of Providence, one of two orders of African American women religious in the United States (the other is the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans). St. Frances students were boarders or “day scholars” who studied Latin and French, embroidery in “cotton, silk, chenille, or gold,” and music for piano, violin, and voice in addition to their catechism.64 Good Shepherd students were “inmates” committed in most cases by the state, and their instruction focused less on the graces of leisured accomplishment.65 Billie Holiday was sent to the Good Shepherd Sisters twice. On January 5, 1925, an Elenore Gough was placed in their custody as “a minor without proper care or guardianship” by a Judge Williams of Juvenile Court, and was released to her mother ten months later.66 On Christmas Eve 1926, Elenora Gough was ordered again to Good Shepherd as a “state witness” in a rape proceeding. In the report of the Baltimore Afro-​American, Mrs. Sadie Gough charged that a Cora Corbin had abducted her eleven-​year-​old daughter and brought her to the Fell’s Point lodgings she shared with twenty-​six-​year-​old Wilbert Rich, with whom Sadie found the girl in bed. Corbin’s story, reported in the paper, was that Elenora Gough had been put out of her house, and had come to Corbin’s door asking to stay with her and Rich. Another party in the incident, identified as a forty-​year-​old blind man named James Jones, was charged with carnal knowledge of a minor on the basis of Elenora Gough’s statement to police that before ending up at the house of Corbin and Rich, she had run away to stay with Jones “after her mother had threatened to put her in a home.”67 The form used by the City of Baltimore to commit Elenora Gough to Good Shepherd this time was the same “Commitment to Jail” directing the city warden to detain one of the accused, Wilbert Rich (remembered by Holiday as Dick), without bail. On the form used for Elenora Gough, “Warden of Baltimore City Jail” is crossed out as custodian of the accused and “Superintendent of House of Good Shepherd” is scrawled above it. On February 2, 1927, the girl was released to her

T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

73  }

mother by order of habeas corpus, perhaps to testify against Corbin or James, since Rich had already been sentenced. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd retained her file and marked it “Did not return to us.”68 Holiday’s experience at the House of the Good Shepherd was something she shared with her mother, Sadie, during a period of her life when the two of them may have shared little else. Her second release, in February 1927, put Holiday at roughly the age Sadie had been when she was committed to the same House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls in May 1908. Sadie Fagan remained an inmate there until her release in 1913, and gave birth to her daughter two years later.69 Until Holiday moved to New York to join her, Sadie appears to have been present only sporadically in the life of her daughter. Sadie’s half sister, Eva Miller, the abusive Cousin Ida in Lady Sings the Blues, is listed as Eleanora’s guardian on her kindergarten registration in Baltimore city files.70 Sadie’s father, Charles Fagan, was light enough to pass for white, had steady work through the 1920s as a waiter with the B&O Railroad, and helped Sadie buy the house she lived in when she married Philip Gough. Charles Fagan may also have paid the lawyer who got his granddaughter Eleanora out of the House of the Good Shepherd on a writ of habeas corpus. Fagan appears, however, not to have been substantially present in Sadie’s childhood or to have intervened to have her released from the same House of the Good Shepherd at any time during her five-​year stay. Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues that her mother’s family “gave Mom and me a hard time because we were Catholic” (21). Dufty and others assumed that Holiday and her mother were Catholic by way of Sadie’s Fagan ancestry, but Charles Fagan does not appear in Baltimore parish records; after Sadie was born to Sussie Harris, about whom little is known, Charles married a Mattie Dixon in an African Methodist Episcopal Church.71 It appears that Sadie’s Catholicism was largely or wholly a product of the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, to which the state assigned girls without regard to their own religious upbringing. And that Billie Holiday’s Catholicism was likewise nurtured in the context of the House of the Good Shepherd, both as the primary site of her own religious formation and as the fragile, conflictual tie to a mother who {  74  } 

religion around billie holiday

for much of her childhood was present to her only in fantasy. Whatever assaults and privations were dealt to her there, the House of the Good Shepherd was where Billie Holiday learned to arrange the jagged pieces of her life as matters of eternal consequence, where her wounded spirit was made the subject of confessional performance, and where, in the course of this self-​culture, she received dedicated practice and instruction in singing. A 1910 directory of benevolent institutions compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau lists two separate Houses of the Good Shepherd in Baltimore. The older of the two, on Hollins Street, is described as a refuge for “fallen women and neglected children” where “colored persons [are] not received.” The newer facility, the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls on Calverton Road, specifies as its inmates “fallen women and delinquent girls,” with perhaps a more faintly observed demarcation between them.72 A  volume on the Catholic Church in America published to mark the 1908 Jubilee of Pope Pius X describes the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls as a “commodious, well-​built dwelling house, surrounded by three acres of ground.” It was established in 1892 with a bequest from Mother Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress who brought $7 million with her to the convent when she made religious vows in 1891.73 The Jubilee volume notes the special contribution “of the Josephite Fathers, who are untiring in the labor and zeal they manifest in the spiritual welfare of the inmates” of the Good Shepherd House to which Holiday and her mother were sent.74 The Josephites are a Baltimore-​based order of priests whose founding mission was defined by the Negro Oath handed down by Pius IX in 1871. The Negro Oath bound each member of the order to “vow and solemnly declare that I will make myself the father and servant of the Negroes; nor shall I ever take up any other work which might cause me to abandon, or in any way neglect the special care of the Negroes.”75 Father Charles Borromeo Carroll, the longest serving of the Josephite priests at his death in 1971, served as chaplain at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls during Billie Holiday’s tenure. Carroll was also the choir director at the Josephites’ preparatory academy, a public T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

75  }

speaker whose campaign for Negro missions was covered by the Associated Press (“Without the Catholic Church, Says Father Carrol[l], the Negro Is Doomed, ‘Body and Soul’ ”), and the author of a book on vocal technique, The Priest’s Voice: Its Use and Misuse.76 By the time Holiday’s second commitment to Good Shepherd made it into a Baltimore newspaper—“Girl, Eleven, Accuses Blind Man and Woman”— the girl in the headline was already in the tutelage of pimps and madams. After her first, ten-​month residence at Good Shepherd, Eleanora Gough lived door to door in East Baltimore or Fell’s Point, staying for stretches in a boarding house run by a Miss Lou. Her friend Pony Kane said that Billie/Eleanora would stay put when her mother was in town—Sadie’s sometime companion Wee Wee Hill was Miss Lou’s son—but that as soon as Sadie was gone, Billie “would be gone too.” Wee Wee Hill said that Sadie moved to New York to spite him when he wouldn’t marry her, and that Billie was more or less alone in Baltimore for “maybe two years. She hung in there with Ethel Moore.” Moore was a madam, Hill said, a “hustling woman,” and “Eleanora looked to her like she was a mother. She hung in there with Alice Dean and them girls so she had to be doing what they was doing.” Billie moved from one good-​time house to another—“Take a trick, smoke, drink, play records,” an associate named Skinny “Rim” Davenport remembered—where she would sing along to the Victrola or the piano or without accompaniment if there was none to be had. “She liked to sing and she used to sing every night, and every night she’d go to different places”—George’s, Carter’s, Snapper’s Big House—“and she’d tell people where she’d be and they’d follow her.” Soon she was the “big attraction” on the Point and more than Miss Lou could handle, so Sadie was summoned to take her away. It might have been then that the girl, age eleven, told police she’d run away because her mother “threatened to put her in a home.” Wee Wee Hill said his mother, Miss Lou, tried to talk to Eleanora “when she’d come to the house to spend a night and get a meal,” and that Eleanora would “listen but she never did give a damn.” Sometime after her second stint at Good Shepherd, “she left Baltimore and that was that. Her last night she stayed in our house,” Hill said. “I took her to Pennsylvania Station. She was glad to go. I imagine she got tired of bumming around.”77 {  76  } 

religion around billie holiday

As much as it discounts a taxing apprenticeship on the streets of a jazz-​loving city, the myth of Holiday’s untutored genius also neglects her musical training in the institution where being a street kid landed her. Good Shepherd inmates who show up on the record in the early decades of the century often show up singing. When Cardinal Gibbons visited the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls in December 1911, a choir of inmates, dressed in white dresses and red ribbons, welcomed him with a repertory of hymns and popular numbers, among them “Dixie” and “Old Folks at Home.” A 1934 grand jury report on the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls notes that girls “possessing musical talent are given special instruction,” and that an “orchestra composed of inmate girls” entertained the inspection committee with a Christmas concert the visitors “enjoyed very much.” In January 1939 fifty Good Shepherd girls, billed as the “largest colored female choir in the city,” sang at the Baltimore Basilica. Police who arrived to quell a rebellion at the House of the Good Shepherd in October 1927 found “some of the girls fighting, some singing, and some dancing.”78 Good Shepherd pupils sang the parts assigned to choirs in the Liber Usualis, the common book of Gregorian chant used in the Mass, in daily and seasonal devotions, and in all celebrations in the liturgical year. A 1903 directive from Pius X sought to keep girls and women from singing in church on the grounds that singing the Mass was “a real liturgical office” and that women are “incapable of exercising such office,” but the ban was unpopular and roundly ignored.79 At the House of the Good Shepherd, Holiday came under the sway of Father Carroll, the choir director who wrote The Priest’s Voice. Carroll’s manual of vocal instruction is premised on the point that the liturgical “voice carries a divine power which gives life to the world.” Its sacred office is no less than to incarnate “the voice that could raise the dead, cure the sick, drive out devils, soothe the sorrowing, still the storm, and [be] heard by the multitude.”80 Carroll stressed that the liturgical voice channels divine power whether speaking or singing, and that the development of flexibility, resonance, and “soulful” qualities in one carries naturally into the other. The Priest’s Voice devotes sections and asides to “words and diction,” “the charm of inflections,” and above all the beauties of T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

77  }

“phrasing.” Whatever its intended audience of fellow clerics, Carroll’s book is filled with examples suggestive of lessons to children. Feeling is appealed to through the imagination, and the imagination seeks pictures, whole and entire, not mere words, nor detached fragments of mental images. Here is where the master of phrasing wins. He does not utter words solely as such, but as each an inseparable pal one of another banded together for a worthy cause, each to do its part that none other can do, but inert and incapable for that part if separated from its sympathetic and helpful companions.81 Appreciations of Billie Holiday’s voice suggest that Carroll’s pedagogy had found in her a receptive pupil. Or perhaps the teaching went both ways. (The Priest’s Voice was written in stages between 1933 and 1939.) Holiday’s “diction was exceptional, whatever she sang,” writes John Szwed, voicing a broad consensus. “She was very aware of the importance of phrasing in her songs, the grouping of notes and words in ways that would make musical and verbal sense of them or give them emotional weight.”82 Shirley Horn said that Holiday “made music out of speech, or speech out of music, it’s hard to separate the two.”83 “I had never heard a girl with a sound like Billie’s,” pianist Teddy Wilson recalled. “She could just say ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’ and it was a musical experience.”84  Szwed describes Holiday’s delivery as “a kind of speech-​song in which sliding pitches that convey emotions like surprise, happiness, or sorrow occur as they do in speech.”85 Carroll wrote portions of The Priest’s Voice in the style of a catechism. Q. Will you please explain the phrase “glide of the voice”? A. There must be a climb of the voice, a soaring, an ascent upon whole phrases of words or sentences, and a corresponding descent of the voice, according to the sense and feeling to be expressed. . . . An example of natural speech is the smooth glide of very young children’s voices, before they become self-​conscious and imitative of the cold and soulless expression of adults. {  78  } 

religion around billie holiday

Q. Why do children’s voices always please us? A. Because they are fresh as spring flowers, light as morning breeze. They suggest life and joyousness. As the passing of years carries us into adult age and beyond, the vocal cords become harder with the sterner things of life, the voice holds its milder, sweeter, pleasing qualities for a time, as though loath to part with that beauty.86 Practice in voice at the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd took place in a setting devoted to the structuring or restructuring of a young woman’s life along a particular narrative arc. The Good Shepherd Houses of this period distinguish between “preservate” and “penitent” inmates. Preservates were those who, “though innocent and pure, have been sent by legal authority to the Sisters in order to remove them from evil surroundings and bad parents.” This is grade one, as it were. “The second class is called the ‘penitents,’ or children who have been wayward and who are either committed to the institution to be reclaimed or voluntarily enter to lead a life of virtue.” If the distinction was observed at the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, Billie Holiday would have entered first as a preservate and the second time as a penitent. “The third class is called ‘the Magdalens,’ who typify the converted Mary Magdalene, who knelt at the cross of Christ. They persevere throughout their term of commitment and then willingly enter the Magdalen house to lead a more severe life of penance to expiate their own sins and the sins of the world.” The Good Shepherd sisters’ “arduous task,” according to the Jubilee volume, is to “regulate the lives of these poor children so as to fit them to lead holy and respectable lives if they return again to the world or to enable them to persevere in their good resolutions if they decide to tarry among the Sisters until death.”87 The Good Shepherd’s rules anticipate movement through the ranks, with the expectation that many who enter as preservates will sadly but inevitably return as penitents, and that of the penitents some fortunate few may be reclaimed as Magdalens. In effect, the order’s highest aspiration for its charges was that they never leave. “The greater number of our children we know desire to return to the world. The thought that they will be once more exposed to the danger of going astray—and in T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

79  }

truth few persevere in the Christian practices they had adopted in the Good Shepherd—is a sorrow for a Religious. We should then make every effort to induce them to remain in the asylum opened to them by Divine Providence, where they are assured of the grace of a happy death.”88 One of forty-​five Houses of the Good Shepherd in the United States in 1925, the Baltimore institution on Calverton Road was home during Holiday’s tenure to the order’s sole community of “colored Magdalens,” established there in 1922, who electively led a “cloistral life in a very strict form.” The Josephite publication Colored Harvest ventured that the “saintly lives of the Sisters Magdalens in this little community” were “an inspiration to the millions of negroes in this country who are seeking the true fold.”89 A surviving photograph of Baltimore’s colored Magdalens taken sometime in the 1920s shows fourteen women, some of whom appear to be still in their teens. A few look winsome, even radiant, others sullen and sad.90 They are perhaps uncomfortably warm in their heavy dark habits, which carefully adhere to the 1901 Rules and Observances of the Sisters Magdalens of the Good Shepherd of Angers. Over the girdle the Sisters Magdalens shall have a cord of white wool, having a tassel at the ends; the rosary shall be of large black beads strung upon a cord, with a crucifix in the middle; it is worn on the right side and the cords on the left. Let the choir mantle, which they receive at their Clothing, be black, of coarse stuff, as long as the robe in front and twenty-​four centimetres (6½ inches) longer at the back; let the shoes, as far as possible, be of very common black leather.91 A Magdalen—a reform-​school lifer—would seem on its face a constricted and unhappy calling. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd were assured by their foundress, Mother Mary St. Euphrasia Pelletier, that the Magdalen’s career was both a venturesome and a holy one, lived out in imitation of storied saints and martyrs. The prospect that a penitent might be saved for the Magdalen class fortified the teaching sisters against discouragement. “What may not this poor penitent remitted to your hands, become?” Mother Euphrasia asked her novices. “She {  80  } 

religion around billie holiday

may become a true Magdalen, a Thaïs, a Pelagius. How beautiful is your mission, my beloved children!”92 Thaïs was a fourth-​century Egyptian saint, a courtesan converted to an ardent and reclusive faith by a cenobite monk who remained vexingly in thrall to her glamour. Anatole France popularized her life in his 1890 novel Thaïs, from which Samuel Goldwyn made the 1917 film of the same name, starring opera diva Mary Garden, whom he paid a headline-​making $15,000 a week. Pelagius might refer to the closely parallel Saint Pelagia of Antioch, also called Margaret, a third-​ century courtesan who chose a life of penitential solitude after securing baptism from a bishop she’d persuaded to relent in his scrupulous avoidance of a woman’s touch. Or it may refer to the tenth-​century boy martyr Pelagius of Cordova, patron saint of the abandoned, who was ransomed by an uncle to a Muslim caliph, rejected the caliph’s sexual advances and offer of freedom in exchange for conversion to Islam, and died tortured but spiritually unbroken at thirteen. Pelagius had a cult of followers among nuns as well as monks, both of whose venerations, notes medievalist V. A. Kolve, focused “as intently on Pelagius’s beauty as did the caliph.”93 Pelagia of Antioch lived out her enclosure as a man, a “beardless monk,” which might explain a slippage from Pelagia to Pelagius in the devotions of either. “Let them [the Magdalens] strive to walk in their footsteps,” enjoin the Good Shepherd Order’s Rules and Observances, “often asking themselves: Why should I not do what so many saints have done?”94 “In choosing books” for pupils, say the Good Shepherd’s Practical Rules, “we should seek the very best. In the first rank we should place the lives of the Saints.”95 Billie Holiday was versed in at least a part of the life of Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), whose canonization took place with great fanfare in May 1925, five months into Holiday’s first commitment at Good Shepherd. According to her spiritual biography L’histoire d’une âme, published in the United States as The Story of a Soul, the youthful Thérèse declared as she lay dying, “After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses.”96 Jazz singer Thelma Carpenter remembered driving with Holiday to a club date in New Jersey when her brakes gave out just as they turned onto the turnpike in Newark. Billie “said ‘Brakes gone’ and I said ‘Yep,’ so I figured I’d hug the highway and we T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

81  }

sort of prayed real good and finally we made it. And she turned and said about Saint Theresa, she said ‘She let some of those rosebuds fall down on us.’ ”97 The stock of holy women’s lives at the House of the Good Shepherd included the life of Mother Euphrasia Pelletier (1796–1868), the order’s foundress, who was declared venerable in 1897, beatified in 1933, and canonized in 1940. According to the biography produced for her cause in 1898, Mother Euphrasia, born Rose Virginie Pelletier, passed a restive girlhood in the French port city of Noirmoutier-​en-​ l’Île. Her widowed mother’s death left Rose Virginie an orphaned boarder at her school in Tours, lonely, excitable, and short on options. Disturbed and inflamed by the “mischief produced by an objectionable book which one of the elder pupils” had obtained and circulated among “every one who would read it,” Rose Virginie took shelter in the nearby Refuge of Our Lady of Charity, where wayward girls were housed as penitents. On  her walks at school she had sometimes peeked into the refuge when its heavy gates were left ajar. From such glimpses seventeen-​year-​old Rose Pelletier “felt and understood how sublime a vocation it is to devote oneself to the salvation of sinners.”98 She soon joined the convent of Our Lady of Charity as a vowed sister, became mistress of penitents there, and eventually founded her own order of nuns to conduct the souls of wayward girls, one of whom became Billie Holiday. Because girls at Good Shepherd were encouraged to model their own lives after those of the saints, it is unsurprising that fragments of Saint Mary Euphrasia Pelletier’s biography should have found their way into Holiday’s. Pelletier’s written life includes a tale “inscribed in the annals of the Order” and “handed down from generation to generation” in the communities of the Good Shepherd. A beloved nun had died, leaving those who kept vigil over her body so bereft that they wished to have her heart cut out and preserved, “surrounded with lilies and violets.” The surgeon summoned to the dead woman’s side found her arms locked protectively around her ribs in rigor mortis, keeping him from retrieving the holy relic without needing first to saw through her bones, as Holiday claimed was the case when she herself needed to be pulled from her dead grandmother’s arms in Lady Sings the Blues.99 {  82  } 

religion around billie holiday

Beyond the stiffened corpse and the chronological scaffolding of adventures, trials, and sorrowful mysteries it shares with Pelletier’s biography (“Life at School,” “Time of Trial,” “Labors and Sorrows,” “Glimpses of Many Lands”), Holiday’s written life enfolds Pelletier’s desire to live among the bruised and abandoned as burden sharer and consoling presence. Mother Euphrasia counseled the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to “show ourselves to be truly Mothers,” citing the words of Exodus 2:9: “Take this child and nurse him for me; I will give thee thy wages.” “To you [the Holy Church] confides the charge of her children, those children on whom the world turns its back, and whom she therefore clasps with all the more tenderness to her maternal bosom.”100 “Look at my big dream!” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues. It’s always been to have a big place of my own out in the country someplace where I could take care of stray dogs and orphan kids, kids that didn’t ask to be born; kids that didn’t ask to be black, blue, or green or something in between. I’d only be sure of one thing—that nobody in the world wanted these kids. Then I would take them. They’d have to be illegit, no mama, no papa. I’d have room for twenty-​five or thirty, with three or four big buxom loving women just like my mom to take care of them, feed them, see to it the little bastards go to school; knock them in the head when they’re wrong, but love them whether they’re good or bad. (195–96) The Good Shepherd Magdalens survive in the present as the Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd. No longer named for Mary Magdalene, they nevertheless retain identification with women who have fallen out of the world’s care. “We choose to stand” with “women and children cast off to the peripheries of our aching world,” the Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd today affirm, and “humbly join our own to their cries for deliverance to a God who saves.” In a recent iteration of the Contemplatives’ origin story, Mother Euphrasia established the community of Magdalens in the hope that these “sisters would pour out their lives to God and to others. She urged them to seek T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

83  }

the one thing necessary—listening to the words of Jesus in true discipleship.”101 The image of pouring out one’s life to God comes from the Gospel story of the woman, identified with Mary Magdalene in Christian tradition, who pours out balm on Jesus’s feet and dries them with her hair (Matt. 26:6–13; Mark 14:3–9; Luke 7:36–50; John 12:1–8). The image of the one thing necessary comes from the story of Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha, Mary listening to Jesus’s words, Martha wearying herself in serving. When Martha points out the difference to Jesus, she receives his gentle rebuke: to be present to him, not to labor in drudgery, is the one thing needful (Luke 10:38–42). Yet for most of the order’s history, the Magdalens did labor in drudgery, and were regarded as inferior to the “real” Sisters of the Good Shepherd. No matter “their gifts and graces, or the possible value of their services, they may not aspire to the white habit of the nuns,” observes an early chronicler. “The Magdalen has all the subjection of the religious life” with none of its modest entitlements. “Prayer, penance, and manual labor, with just enough of recreation to prevent discouragement or morbidity,” order each of her days.102 Suspicion that a Magdalen’s lot might well confirm a morbid susceptibility would not be allayed by consulting the chapter of Mother Euphrasia’s biography that focuses on the Magdalens’ beginnings under her direction. Soon after Mother Euphrasia established the first community of Magdalens, the order records, God manifested to her, “by unmistakable signs, His approval of her zealous exertions,” namely, that when four of the entering Magdalens “begged of our Lord the grace of a speedy death,” their “prayer was heard and quickly answered.”103 Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues that inmates also died during her stay at the House of the Good Shepherd, among them a “real wild one” made to wear the shaming red dress assigned to lawbreakers. “When you did something against the rules at that place, at least they didn’t beat you, like Cousin Ida had.” Instead, “you got a raggedy red dress to wear. When you wore this dress, none of the other girls were supposed to go near you or speak to you.” The first girl Holiday saw in the red dress, ostracized and alone in the recreation yard, stood up on a swing and started “shouting and hollering,” defiantly “swinging

{  84  } 

religion around billie holiday

higher and higher.” When the other pupils looked up in wonder at the swinging girl, the mother superior told them, “God will punish her. God will punish her.” In Holiday’s telling, what happened next was a “terrible jerk” as the swing broke in two at its arc’s highest point and sent the offender sailing through the air, then a “terrible thud and then nothing” (17). It may have been her corpse Holiday recalled being made to sleep with or it may have been another girl’s; she didn’t remember.104 What would explain the decision of any girl who found herself an inmate of the House of the Good Shepherd to remain indefinitely as a Magdalen? Stockholm syndrome, maybe: the recompense of broken spirits who capture-​bond with their abusers. Or a species of gate fever, the homing instinct of recidivist prisoners who find no place in the world for the persona they’ve built up behind bars. Perhaps no more than a clear-​eyed appraisal of what trials lay in wait for her beyond the convent’s walls. Or else a genuine call to cloistered religious life, no more or less mysterious than another. Or, in possible combination with any of these, the desire to fashion a life that coheres from the privative, baffling, and wounding materials at hand. The point is that arrivals to the House of the Good Shepherd were being formed for the Magdalen class and the romantic sainthood of the sensuous and lost from the moment they walked through the gates. The Order of the Good Shepherd would not doom a young girl to whatever injuries and missteps had delivered her into its care. “Our poor penitents when they arrive, are, in general, crushed and despondent or reckless. The best means of bringing them to good, is to make them understand that the past is quite past, that with a new name they are to commence a new life”—wrenching and difficult, perhaps, but beautiful.105 Their new saints’ names recalled for arrivals “the example of the holy penitents who have preceded them.”106 In the House of the Good Shepherd, Eleanora Gough was originally given the name of Madge, probably an abbreviated form of Margaret or Magdalene.107 In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday remembered that she “drew the name of St. Theresa” (17) —perhaps a confirmation name taken later, or a second new name given at her second commitment. She never entered

T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

85  }

the Magdalen class after leaving the class of penitents in 1927; still, she took in short order a third new name, Billie. Billie Dove appeared several times on the covers of True Confessions and True Story in the years when Billie Holiday began to perform in New York. Holiday told Our World magazine that Dove was her favorite movie star, “whose name ‘Billie’ I started using because I wanted to grow up and be like her.”108 Like the stories in True Confessions, Dove’s movie roles were formulaic. A hard-​drinking flapper in Sensation Seekers (1927), steadied by marriage to a minister. A captured princess in The Black Pirate (1926), ransomed by the undercover duke who offers her his hand. A southern belle in The Love Mart (1927), sold into slavery on calumnious rumors of African ancestry and vindicated by the noble adventurer who buys her, exposes the lie of her blackness, and makes her his bride.109 “The model for white women is the Virgin Mary,” Richard Dyer suggests of racial representation in early Hollywood, “a pure vessel for reproduction who is unsullied by the dark drives that reproduction entails.” In this respect, says Dyer, Hollywood underwrote the southern religion of the Lost Cause, which “etherealised white women to the point that” any hint of sexuality was “scandalous and virtually sacrilegious.” Dyer’s case in point is D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, released in Holiday’s birth year, which standardized the lighting techniques that gave gauzy haloes and a wraithlike, silvered pallor to Hollywood actresses in the silent era. The point of such effects was to endow white actresses with a visible spiritual aura, to make them disappear as flesh and blood in the vaporous sheen of their own translucency.110 An example is Birth of a Nation’s diaphanous, lanternlike Lillian Gish, whose attempted rape by a mulatto carpetbagger mobilizes the heroic night-​riding Klan. Another is Billie Dove in the photo her Hollywood studio circulated to fans: ivory skin in velvet outline, a shimmering halo of light around her hair. Yet what transcendence Holiday may have looked for in the promise of a new name—Madge, Theresa, Billie—appears never to have been a transcendence of race, or of the body’s appetites, capacities, and frailties. Nor was it the lesson of her convent education that it should necessarily be so. In the annals of the Good Shepherd, the lives of the {  86  } 

religion around billie holiday

“Magdalens of a sad past,” like those of the saints they emulate, merge downfall and vocation in an unbroken narrative thread.111 Rosemary Clooney recalled that when she was pregnant with her daughter Maria, Billie “looked at me and said, ‘I think you’ve got a girl child in your belly this time. And I think I should be her godmother, because it takes a very bad woman to be a good godmother.’ ”112 There’s more than an Auntie-​Mame rakishness to this remark. When Holiday was baptized at the House of the Good Shepherd, her own godmother, Christine Scott, was drawn from the ranks of its permanent residents. A woman in her thirties who had been at Good Shepherd since Holiday’s mother served time, Scott may have been a Magdalen, or she may have been among the penitents who, “conscious that they had no vocation for the Magdalens,” nevertheless by choice or necessity “remain always within the walls of the Good Shepherd, and consecrate their lives to help and serve those who had been their companions.”113 Good and bad women were formatted into the same system, a spiritual company of kindred souls who “have not ceased to do penance,” and who render “themselves by this means the friends of God, and the powerful protectors of souls who walk in these paths, so difficult, in truth, but which lead to eternal life.”114 The task of the Good Shepherd penitent was more than expiation, the putting of trouble behind. It was the building of a beatific life from the raw material of delinquency and despair, a story “stranger than any romance.”115 No matter how long their tenure at Good Shepherd, penitents were enjoined to convict themselves anew of one or more past sins each time they said confession. This prevented the ritual from getting stale when fresh sins inside the convent walls were constrained by discipline and surveillance, and kept each penitent in conscious contact with the circumstances of her arrival. Since sexual experience was what most often marked girls as delinquent and in need of spiritual correction, their confessions likely made for serial retellings of abandonments and bruising intimacies, attachments warped by feeling or severed by fate. Your heart has an ache; it’s as heavy as stone. You’re a good gal, but your love is all wrong. You get a bad start; you and your man have to part. He isn’t true; he beats you, too. (Abbey Lincoln banished “My Man” from her own repertoire on the grounds that “a song is a T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

87  }

prayer . . . it will manifest in my life one way or another.”)116 The words are voiced over and over, and the repetition delivers you to something, some new shading or shape or inflection of your suffering. The discipline of confessing doesn’t free you from suffering so much as it makes a sturdy narrative of the loose and broken pieces of your life, all of them. Leave nothing out. “I’ve been told that no one sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do,” says Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. “Or the word ‘love.’ Maybe I remember what those words are all about. Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island and the Catholic institution and the Jefferson Market Court, the sheriff in front of our place in Harlem and the towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and scars, Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and San Francisco—every damn bit of it” (195). The blues, says Ralph Ellison, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain.”117 Whatever their spiritual fortitude and zeal, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd were unpaid women who operated crowded facilities to relieve the state of caring for girls whose families could or would not.118 Pony Kane, who also spent time at the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, said the older inmates were a toughened lot, and included some who waited out sentences of a decade or longer. A delinquent girl could be committed until the age of twenty-​one or until a satisfactory guardian came forward to claim her. Some girls lied about their age at admission so that they could leave sooner—Holiday’s file at Good Shepherd listed her birth date exactly one year earlier than it was—so they went in pretending already to a worldliness beyond their years. Pony Kane said the older girls made it their business to initiate the younger girls sexually, often in predatory ways.119 Holiday seems to have held her own in this company on the reputation of her own sexual knowledge. Most of the girls were there “for stealing and hooking from school,” she says in Lady Sings the Blues, but “they knew I was there on account of a man, so they all looked up to me as some kind of big shot” (17). The House of the Good Shepherd was not the canvas for Holiday’s ambitions, sexual or spiritual. Her story about being locked up with {  88  } 

religion around billie holiday

a corpse is probably apocryphal, but it communicated her feelings about enclosure. “I couldn’t stand it. I screamed and banged on the door so, I kept the whole joint from sleeping. I hammered on the door until my hands were bloody” (18).120 According to Mother Euphrasia’s biography, some penitents, “accustomed to a life of reckless gaiety and undisciplined self-​will,” exhausted even the “marvellous powers” of the sainted foundress “before she could succeed in breaking in these wild, wilful creatures, and inducing them to run in harness.”121 After her release from Good Shepherd, Pony Kane remembered, Billie wanted always to be out, wherever she was. “She was getting a meal, missing a meal getting a trick or two.” She’d come back to her room on Durham Street, where Kane also boarded with Miss Lou, “take off a pair of stockings, wash ’em out, put ’em on half dry and go out to where the happenings is.”122 Kane said that sometimes she and Billie would go to the back door of St. Michael’s Church to get holy water the priests dispensed in jelly jars, like moonshine. Or they’d go to a Miss Laura’s for reefers, “real skinny ones” rolled for them in the shop. (Marijuana was legal until 1937, when it was classed with heroin as an addictive drug with no medical use.) Some days they’d go listen to records on someone’s Victrola, maybe Alice Dean’s, who ran a good-​time house full of color and music and gave them jobs to do. “Oh, Alice Dean have everything,” Kane said, and she would do “anything to be in there. Just to be in there.” Kane said she was the sidekick, stout and plain where Billie “was tall, shape pretty nice, and by her being so young and singing so good different fellas liked her.” But Billie was “rough in her way,” Kane said. Always she “went out and done what she felt like ’cause she was just don’t care-​ish.”123 Still, she brought the convent with her. Many who knew her remarked on Holiday’s elegant bearing and aura of inborn nobility, even as she carried a blade and cussed like a sailor, even as she followed dealers into alleyways for dope. Her accompanist Bobby Tucker insisted that Holiday’s regal persona “was not an act. She was not trying to prove anything to anybody. She was just being herself.” Ruby Helena, a dancer who lived with Billie and Sadie off and on, said that what some criticized as putting on airs was instead “something inside of her—some decency.”124 T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

89  }

Holiday’s cousin Johnnie Fagan dated that quality of decency to childhood. “Sure, naturally,” Billie turned tricks as a kid, he said. “What else was she going to do in them times?” Still, she was “not like a slut.” “No, she just live fast. The difference is this: some people are goodtime people but they have their principles about theirself. They have their after-​hours but the next day you see them and they’re together. Eleanora had that pride and respect for herself. Eleanora had that.”125 “Lady Day” stuck as Holiday’s regal title not because she had a publicist but because she had a way about her, a “presence” Charles Mingus described as “elegance in dress and manner and mind.”126 It was “the way she handled a fork,” pianist Bobby Henderson said. Henderson began working with Holiday when she was fifteen. “She was very dainty and Billie was what could you say, a full-​bodied woman, and she was very graceful in everything she did.” Henderson and Holiday would be out somewhere together. “Somebody would say, ‘Hey Bobby, what’s the matter with you?’ I’d say, ‘Nothing.’ But deep in my mind I’m looking at her and saying, ‘You do things in a beautiful way.’ ”127 Outside their religious exercises, girls at Good Shepherd were taught to do things in a beautiful way in the practice of graces befitting their station. The end of training students “to refinement and polite manners” was not to give them “ideas beyond their position” but rather to allow them “to fulfill that position in the most perfect manner possible.” In their religious devotions, however, including sung and spoken prayer, learning to do things in a beautiful way was the path not of right-​sized ambition but of spiritual aspiration, boundless in reach. William Dufty wondered how Holiday came by the conviction that she was singing in sacred time. “Billie had a sense of history that makes Toynbee look nearsighted. She knew in her bones that a thousand years from now, as long as the language endures, people will still listen to her singing and be moved by it. Call it arrogance, serenity, hallucination, there it was.”128 At the House of the Good Shepherd, Holiday would have learned diction and comportment befitting vocalized prayer. “We should take care that the prayers be properly said,” that the children pronounce correctly, “without shouting, or taking a high fatiguing tone, and that they have a modest exterior. Nothing contributes more to devotion than {  90  } 

religion around billie holiday

to hear a prayer piously said.” Unless it was to hear prayer piously sung: “if we wish that our children have zeal for the chant of the Church,” the Good Shepherd’s rules enjoin, “we must ourselves show great affection for it and cause it to be loved, by executing it well. We should try to learn the best methods of plain chant and habituate ourselves to the simplicity of its melodies, very different, it is true, from ordinary music.”129 Q. How do you describe a good voice? A. It is clear, intelligible, resonant, refined, expressive. Q. How do you describe a bad voice? A. It is indistinct, unintelligible, hard, colorless, monotonous. Q. What is the remedy? A. Persevering practice.130 Singing at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls took place at six o’clock Mass each morning and during special celebrations throughout the liturgical year. The Josephite publication Colored Harvest reported that Good Shepherd girls celebrated a Marian devotion in May with “offerings of flowers, song, and verse . . . by little girls in white dresses and veils” who were conducted in their exercises by Father Carroll. A group baptism of some of the girls may also have been a part of the festivities; the Colored Harvest reports during Holiday’s tenure “the baptism of thirteen girls, followed the next day by their reception of First Communion.”131 Christine Scott, the older inmate who stood as Holiday’s godmother at her baptism, spoke with Linda Kuehl from a convent nursing home in the 1970s. “Everyone in the place knowed how much she wanted to be baptized,” Scott said of Billie/ Eleanora. “She expressed herself.” She “was so happy, poor child. She was in there with the rest of the girls, all of them in white dresses and veils; she was grinning from ear to ear, you could almost see her back teeth. She was just as light as a feather.” Not long after that, the little girl put on a white voile dress, Pony Kane remembered, and departed by train for New York.132 Sometime around 1953 Billie Holiday returned to the House of the Good Shepherd for her baptismal certificate, which she needed to T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

91  }

obtain a passport. She arrived with manager-​boyfriend John Levy and showed him the chapel where she was baptized, the dormitory with beds in neat herringbone rows, and the wardrobe where she’d kept her clothes. Someone invited her to sing, and before she left with Levy she treated the Good Shepherd girls to a performance of “My Man.” Christine Scott was feeding chickens in the yard and missed the song, but she must have understood its appeal to the newer inmates. All my life is just despair / but I don’t care. Scott had a ready sympathy for the way Billie Holiday’s life unfolded. “She got off track,” Scott told Linda Kuehl. “You see things and you know how it is; how a young girl feels.”133 Her education at Good Shepherd gave Billie Holiday both bad-​girl cred and an apprenticeship in radiance. These two sides of Holiday, the one regal and iconic, the other streetwise and bruised, were on display at the Carnegie Hall concert where Holiday sang and Gilbert Millstein read from Lady Sings the Blues. In those years Holiday might show up for rehearsal drunk or heroin-​sick, and she was ill and out of temper during a desultory run-​through of the evening’s performance. Millstein feared she wouldn’t return for the concert. But precisely on cue that night, he wrote, “Miss Holiday stepped from between the curtains, into the white spotlight awaiting her, wearing a white evening gown and white gardenias in her black hair. She was erect and beautiful; poised and smiling.”134 Alternating performances of white-​gowned, beatific rectitude and reform-​school brio present themselves also in a surviving visual relic of the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd, a grainy 16mm movie made in 1965. The film records a ceremonial closure of the Hollins Street location, which signaled the racial integration of the Calverton Road facility where both Holiday and her mother had lived. As the film opens, a graceful nun pulls shut and locks an exterior door. The scene cuts to a dozen nuns descending the building’s front steps in stately cadence, white habits billowing. Taking every rhythmic liberty behind them come as many loose-​limbed teenaged girls, black and white, in festive ladylike drag: shirtwaist dresses, white gloves, hats with tiny netted veils. Both sets of women project a joyful restraint, but they move differently, as though to different music. The nuns keep {  92  } 

religion around billie holiday

their upright composure as they wave daintily for the camera. Two girls who follow directly behind them, one white, one black, touch shoulders and rock a little from side to side. One swings her hand at the elbow, laughing.135

T r u e C o n f e s s i o n s   { 

93  }

3 the story of jazz

The Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, where both Billie Holiday and her mother Sadie passed formative time, was not the first institution of its kind purchased with a bequest from Mother Katharine Drexel. In  1892, the year the Baltimore house opened, the wealthy foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People also financed an “Institution for the Reformation of Colored Girls” in her native Philadelphia, the city of Holiday’s birth. The Philadelphia Times took note of its establishment in a former historic mansion deeded to the Philadelphia Archdiocese by Mother Drexel. With “nicely-​appointed apartments” and “prettily laid-​out grounds,” the convent of St. Magdalene, as it came to be known, would be run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.1 The notice in the Philadelphia Times was reprinted in full as the coda to Secrets of the Convent, a stab at the sensational genre of convent exposé published by Hudson Tuttle later that year. A minor if industrious figure in the annals of American religious writing, Hudson Tuttle (1836–1910) penned many books in addition to Secrets of the Convent. They include The Origin and Antiquity of

Man, a friendly parsing of Darwin; Mediumship and Its Laws, one of several volumes on spiritualism; and a study of the evolution of religious thought with the venturesome title Career of Religious Ideas: Their Ultimate: The Religion of Science. A self-​educated Ohio farmer, Tuttle turned in his youth from doctrinal religion to more eclectic spiritual pursuits after his prayer to the Almighty to mend a pitchfork he had broken went smitingly unanswered.2 Tuttle appears to have harbored no singular animus against Catholics; his Career of Religious Ideas chides Protestants and Catholics alike for bowing to the fetishism of Negroes and savages, “encouraged by Catholicism in Holy relics, the cross, rosaries, and amulets, and by the Protestant in holy days and books.”3 He achieved a modest renown for inventing and marketing the cardboard Psychograph, an early type of Ouija-​board planchette. “There is scarcely a family in which at least one sensitive or mediumistic person may not be found,” Tuttle wrote of his device, “and the discovery of such sensitive members, and their development, is the desirable office of the Psychograph.”4 Let us say he channeled the zeitgeist. The convent captivity narrative enjoyed a righteous heyday decades before Tuttle’s contribution to the genre, with Maria Monk’s 1836 Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery launching an earnest procession of imitators and sequels.5 Some convent tales were offered as fiction and others as true confession. The formula in either case centers on a Protestant innocent seduced by the convent’s promises of refinement and spiritual renewal. She might enter the nunnery as a pupil sent by well-​ meaning parents or as a duped convert embarked on the path of religious life; the particulars, like the plot of an X-​rated film, are quickly dispensed with in delivering us to the taboo interior. A convent is “the sepulchre of goodness, and the castle of misery,” reports George Bourne’s Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents. Its show of good and useful works amounts to a “theatrical exhibition” mounted “to conceal from the world at large, the secrets which appertain to the direful prison.”6 The convent narrative typically recounts its protagonist’s narrow, protracted escape from the lecherous priests and sadistic superiors who see to it that brutality, morbidity, and sexual humiliation are her daily fare. The spate of learned treatises that followed Lyman Beecher’s 1835 A Plea for the {  96  } 

religion around billie holiday

West in warning of Catholicism’s conspiratorial designs on American institutions broadened the convent exposé’s appeal, supplying a vision of democratic obligation toward which its cultivation of salacious taste might bend. Tuttle produced a convent narrative according to script, complete with requisite, shuddering glances at the “half [that] cannot be told.” His Secrets of the Convent tells of a wealthy industrialist’s daughter lured to convent life by the promise of musical instruction from a “Sister Magdalene, with a voice like an angel from heaven.” The story begins in the bishop’s residence, a “villa in the Moorish style” appointed in elegance and decadence. Paintings “adorned the walls;—some of the more pronounced of a type condemned by the Anti-​Vice Society, and the carpets were like thick moss.”7 The scene-​setting passage invokes Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, which famously shut down cabarets, booksellers, and theatrical exhibitions deemed offensive to respectable taste. For appearing in the 1926 Broadway show Sex (“a certain wicked, lewd, scandalous, bawdy, obscene, indecent, infamous, immoral and impure exhibition, show, and entertainment,” according to the grand jury indictment),8 Comstock’s anti-​vice society would have Mae West sentenced to ten days’ labor in the same Welfare Island workhouse where Billie Holiday and her mother were sent on prostitution charges not long after. In the spirit of Comstock’s reforms, the New York City Board of Aldermen had decided some months before West’s arrest that “there was altogether too much running ‘wild’ ” in the city’s jazz clubs. The legislation that resulted ultimately required that all performers in New York City establishments where liquor was sold be fingerprinted, photographed, and issued cabaret employee identification cards as a condition of employment.9 A performer’s cabaret card could be denied or revoked for any criminal infraction, real or imputed, which is why Billie Holiday continuously petitioned, unsuccessfully, for the reinstatement of hers from the time she left Alderson Women’s Prison in 1948. The Catholic Church of Tuttle’s Secrets of the Convent is not in tension with the world that produces altogether too much running wild in cabarets. It  is that world, all languor and seduction and smoky T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

97  }

ambiance. “Now, my dear Frantz,” says Tuttle’s “dark-​complexioned” Bishop Lopez to a young visiting priest, “allow me to fill your glass with wine mellowed with age, since the grapes hung in the sun of old Spain, and grew purple in the breeze from the Mediterranean.” In its disinhibiting glow, “secrets of a social character” pass between the two men, and the true purpose of the convent is revealed. “A celibate priesthood necessitates the nunnery. Why, we have the example of our Lord and Master. Who was his bosom friend? Mary Magdalene!” The nuns “must have some recreation” besides, “and that kind of romance is what they are there for.” The two men repair to the nearby convent, where the “exhilarating influence of the wine on the nerves of the sisters, unused to stimulants, was at once apparent. They grew wild in manner and speech, and met the advances of the boisterous priests.”10 Having wrested itself from this spirited company and seen its worn but unbroken protagonist home to the Protestant hearth, Secrets of the Convent turns in a final expository chapter to the newest of the Catholic Church’s velvet schemes for dominance, its “capture of the colored population.” “The public have no idea of the efforts of that Church converting the colored people,” Tuttle warned, “and still less of [its] success.” In proof, Tuttle pasted in the Philadelphia Times report on “the new Convent of St. Magdalene, which is to be a reformatory for colored girls, established through the generosity of Sister Katharine Drexel for the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.” Secrets of the Convent ends with a call to arms: Is it not clear to every one who gives the subject a moment’s thought that the colored population is quite unassimilable enough without becoming the subjects of a theocratic despotism alien to American institutions? The intensely excitable and superstitious nature of the negro is attracted by ceremonial pomp, and the priestly assumption of power is consonant with the hodoo worship which clings by heredity to the colored race. The colored Protestant ministry have not discerned, or  have been negligently silent. They should sound the alarm, which cannot be too soon.11 {  98  } 

religion around billie holiday

Why would the resolutely forward-​looking Hudson Tuttle resort to so retrograde a device as the convent exposé to voice his sense of encroaching racial and spiritual menace at century’s end? Perhaps this alien faith’s vaunted kinship with the primitive and reprobate was itself the danger: the problem of the Catholic Church was the problem of hoodoo was the problem of the colored population was the problem of vice was the problem of jazz, or what was on its way to becoming jazz. When Secrets of the Convent was published, ragtime pianist Scott Joplin (b. 1868) was playing itinerant gigs from Texarkana to Chicago, where he stayed on to perform at the 1893 World’s Fair. Composer W. C. Handy (b. 1873), who would bring the blues to Tin Pan Alley, went up from the Mississippi Delta to join him. Jazz trombonist Kid Ory (b. 1886) was playing on homemade instruments in LaPlace, Louisiana; when he’d saved up enough money for a horn, he made his way to New Orleans to look for Buddy Bolden (b. 1877). Bolden’s fusions of blues, ragtime, military marches, and church sounds on the cornet earned him credit in New Orleans circles for inventing jazz, and continue to anchor a clamorous narrative of jazz’s Crescent City origins. Bolden, Kid Ory, and Louis Armstrong’s one-​time mentor Joe “King” Oliver (b. 1881) all found work in Storyville, the red-​light district of New Orleans that flourished between 1897 and 1917 and offered black musicians some of the best steady, nonitinerant gigs outside of churches. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton (b. 1890) came up in Storyville; like many New Orleans Creoles, he was baptized Catholic but also spoke in the hoodoo vernacular. “Some say voodoo,” Morton told Alan Lomax. “But we . . . it’s known in New Orleans as hoodoo.”12 In the section of Secrets of the Convent that warned of the “capture of the colored population,” Tuttle read out alarming statistics on the number of black Catholic children in New Orleans in 1892—3,537 baptisms, 1,769 pupils in convent schools— as testament to the scope of his worry.13 Louis Armstrong was baptized “according to the rite of the Roman Catholic Church” in the late summer of 1901 at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church at 139 South Lopez Street in New Orleans. His baptismal certificate records his birth as “niger, illegitimus.”14 The Colored Waifs’ Home where Armstrong famously received his formal musical training T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

99  }

shared an institutional history with the House of the Good Shepherd in that city; in both places, black children without means were sheltered for their protection, guided in their development, and sentenced for their purported crimes.15 An item in the city’s Daily Picayune in May 1913 reported that a band of “black imps” from the Waifs’ Home, “each bearing a criminal record” and “equipped with every wrinkle that goes to make up a brass band,” had “paraded the streets of New Orleans” on Decoration Day, led by a youth named Louis Armstrong.16 Turn-​of-​the-​century New Orleans had intricately graded classes of African American people, including some who’d owned slaves and many who spoke French and identified as Creoles in acknowledgment of their colonial ancestry. Creoles famously looked down on Americans, and Creoles of color looked down especially on dark-​skinned blacks like Armstrong, with whom they resented being classed tout court as Negroes after Reconstruction. This may help to explain why Armstrong embraced his Cold War role as America’s musical ambassador—“He wasn’t French” was his wife Lucille’s pithy response to the question of whether he preferred to hear his name pronounced Louie or Lewis—and why he made much of having been born, as he believed, on the Fourth of July.17 His real birth date, August 4, 1901, is celebrated annually in New Orleans with a jazz Mass at St. Augustine’s Church in his honor. Louis Armstrong Park now sits at the edge of the city’s French Quarter. It encloses the area known since the early 1800s as Congo Square, where slaves whose owners permitted it made a Sabbath day of holy noise. As the eponymous Mister Jazz explains in a libretto by Langston Hughes, “Sunday—the slaves’ one day for fun and dancing—the juba dance in Congo Square. In those feet, those hands, those drums—the roots of jazz.” The famously lax Catholicism of French and Spanish slave owners overlooked or otherwise fostered a range of sacred and profane expression in black New Orleans, from juba dancing to African drumming to hoodoo or vodun. “Mix it with a Blue note,” continues the genealogical Mister Jazz, “like a lonesome moan / Add a lot of laughter / Plus a jiving tone.” Then “Tell me, tell me Daddy, / What’s that note I hear? /. . . Bessie Smith and Billie / Whispering in my ear.”18 In Billie Holiday’s Baltimore, as in Armstrong’s New Orleans, neither Catholicism nor blackness was entirely other to the civic norm. {  100  } 

religion around billie holiday

Although Baltimore had passed unusually restrictive zoning ordinances to keep the city’s neighborhoods dependably white or black, Holiday’s Colvin Street neighbors are listed in the 1920 census as Negro, Jewish, Russian, and Italian.19 It was the kind of neighborhood in which musicianship could function as a rebuff to respectability or a means to it. Billie’s father, Clarence Holiday, played guitar, the instrument above all others that moved black vernacular music into urban spaces. Guitars appear in black recorded music early in the century and quickly caught on among itinerant musicians, David Evans points out, because they were portable, because they carried an aura of upward mobility in being store-​bought rather than homemade, and because they lacked “residual associations with slavery, minstrel music and its demeaning stereotypes, or even with the South.”20 Black Catholics in Baltimore had roots in the slave systems of British Catholics in Maryland or French Catholics in the sugar colonies of the West Indies. As in New Orleans, gradations of color and status shaded the city map. In 1785 Bishop John Carroll counted three thousand black Catholics in Maryland. By the early nineteenth century, hundreds more would dock at Fell’s Point, many of them light-​ skinned, French-​speaking property owners and house servants who fled the slave revolt in Saint-​Domingue alongside retreating whites. St. Frances Academy, the private school that Billie Holiday attended for two years in Baltimore, was founded by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, of black Caribbean provenance, to offer the children of these “well-​bred families” of color an alternative to “the rough primary training of the promiscuous school.”21 Louis Armstrong came up in neighborhoods where black people who would never have been house servants went to live after Emancipation, and found what poor or disreputable work they could. He remembered his block between Gravier and Perdido Streets as a gathering of “churchpeople, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children. There were bars, honkytonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their ‘pads,’ as they called their rooms.” Of his mother, Mayann, Armstrong recalled that she “always held her head up” and that “everybody from the churchfolks to the lowest roughneck gave her the greatest respect,” and she T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

101  }

was “glad to say hello to everybody,” no matter who. For stretches of time Mayann lived apart from her son on a block of Perdido “filled with cheap prostitutes who did not make as much money for their time as the whores in Storyville,” the more upscale red-​light district in the French Quarter. “Whether my mother did any hustling,” he added, “I cannot say.”22 Armstrong’s paternal grandmother and great-​grandmother were Catholic, and he recalled attending church in deference to their wishes. “I  was going to church regularly for both grandma and my great-​ grandmother were Christian women,” he reported, “and between them they kept me in school, church and Sunday school. In church and Sunday school I did a whole lot of singing. That, I guess, is how I acquired my singing tactics.”23 Some years later Armstrong’s mother, who had come to New Orleans from a rural plantation, joined the Sanctified Church and was given a river baptism. The Sanctified Church, which shared spiritual terrain with the disfellowshipped Baptists and camp-​ meeting Methodists who formed the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, offered a refuge from black Baptist and Methodist projects of uplift and a haven for worship forms deemed by those congregations too steeped in slave religion to advance the cause of respectability. Its music—“closest to the ring shouts of slavery,” says Thomas Brothers, with a “communal focus on a direct experience of the Holy Spirit” that “made your body move” and “your heart pour out”—was an enduring influence.24 “It all came from the Old ‘Sanctified’ Churches,” Armstrong recalled, of “good music,” in a 1967 letter. “I can remember— way back in the old days in New Orleans, La—My home town. And I was a little Boy around ten years old. My Mother used to take me to Church with her, and the Reverend (Preacher that is) used to lead off one of those good ol good Hymns. And before you realized it—the whole Congregation would be Wailing—Singing like mad and sound so beautiful. I being a little boy that would ‘Dig’ Everything and everybody, I’d have myself a Ball in Church, especially when those Sisters would get So Carried away while ‘Rev’ (the preacher) would be right in the Middle of his Sermon.”25 In 1955, in response to an interviewer’s question—“Are you a religious man?”—Armstrong replied, “Yeah. I’m a Baptist and a good friend of the Pope’s and I always wear a Jewish star.”26 Armstrong’s {  102  } 

religion around billie holiday

early bandmates, writes biographer Laurence Bergreen, discerned in addition “a voodoo ethos about him; it was nothing they could put their finger on, exactly, just a sense that he was in touch with something deep and spiritual that spoke through him and his music, especially his singing.”27 Harlem vaudevillian Stump Cross said that Billie Holiday called Louis Armstrong the Landlord: “like he owns jazz and any room he’s in, that’s jazz!—so he’s the Landlord. She’d say, ‘Come on Stump Daddy, let’s go see the Landlord! . . . And she would interpret what he played on trumpet into her thing. She would do any tune that he did. She said he had more soul than any singer.”28 In one of its early notices of Holiday, the Baltimore Afro-​American reported with fanfare that the hometown favorite had recently appeared with Louis Armstrong at the Cotton Club.29 Dancer Mae Barnes said that by the early 1930s Billie Holiday “was changing Louis’s style to her own, only she used his numbers to do it . . . she’d do that Louis br-​r-​r-​rmmm kind of thing, and she’d do her own thing right behind it. Louis would be her kick-​off kind of thing.”30 You hear some of their birdcall back-​and-​forth in the scenes Armstrong and Holiday share in New Orleans (1947), Holiday’s only full-​ length film, in which she reluctantly took the part of a singing maid. That path had been traveled by blues singers like Ethel Waters and Hattie McDaniel, who weathered the decline of race records in the Depression by accepting servant roles on offer in Hollywood.31  Sometime after her arrival in New York, Holiday recalled in Lady Sing the Blues, she did voice roles on radio in “daytime soap-​opera serials, True Love Story or True Romances or something like that,” where she’d sometimes “double as the wife and the maid” (57). But after “making more than a million bucks establishing myself as a singer who had some taste and self respect, it was a real drag to go to Hollywood and end up as a make-​ believe maid.” She told Joe Glaser, both her manager and Armstrong’s at the time, that there was no way she was “going to play Topsy, not for all the Bank of America’s loot” (137). Glaser nevertheless prevailed. Billie Holiday’s name appears in the opening credits for New Orleans alongside Louis Armstrong’s and ahead of the roster of other musicians who play themselves in the film, including Woody Herman, Kid Ory, T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

103  }

and Meade Lux Lewis. Holiday’s thinly drawn character is a housemaid named Endie who moonlights in the band and speaks each of her simpering lines—yes Miz Miralee, no Miz Miralee—like a slightly stoned pupil in detention.32 The plot is unmemorable. The narrative falls away in any case around Holiday and Armstrong, even as several of their scenes were cut in the end to accommodate the film’s supposed star, Dorothy Patrick, who complained in production of being upstaged. By the time it reached theaters for an unremarkable run, New Orleans had fallen far from more venturesome beginnings. The film had been the long-​ago brainchild of Orson Welles, who planned to make a musical feature starring Louis Armstrong as himself. The film would be loosely based on Armstrong’s 1936 autobiography, Swing That Music, which Armstrong offered as a twinned history of himself and jazz. “This book isn’t supposed to be so much about me as about swing; where it came from, how it grew and what it is,” Armstrong wrote. “It is just an accident that swing and I were born and brought up side by side in New Orleans, travelled up the Mississippi together,” and by the 1920s “were there in Chicago getting acquainted with the North—and the North getting acquainted with us.”33 Musicians who were important to Armstrong or to the history of jazz would play themselves, or be impersonated by other musicians. Duke Ellington was put in charge of the music. Billie Holiday was tapped to play Bessie Smith.34 The plot followed jazz from New Orleans to the urban North and from there into the wide, wide world: King Oliver discovers the boy Louis Armstrong in the marching band of the Colored Waifs’ Home and brings him to Storyville, where the music played in brothels—some blues, some ragtime—blossoms into jazz. Then in 1917 the federal government moves to shutter Storyville to protect U.S. soldiers from the red-​light district’s temptations to enervation and vice. Exiled from the Crescent City, Armstrong takes a riverboat up the Mississippi to Chicago, where jazz becomes a modern, big-​city music that permeates the nation and eventually the globe. The film would end with scenes of Armstrong, and jazz, given a hero’s welcome abroad. The Welles production was to have been titled The Story of Jazz. For his follow-​up to Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles planned to package a series of freestanding vignettes, The Story of Jazz {  104  } 

religion around billie holiday

among them, under the title It’s All True. Production on It’s All True began in late 1941 at RKO studios and abruptly stalled after Pearl Harbor was bombed and Hollywood fell into line with wartime directives. Earlier in 1941 the Roosevelt administration had called for a ramping up of U.S. cultural diplomacy in Latin and South America as a means of “furthering the spirit of cooperation between the Americas in the interest of hemisphere defense.”35 Before getting any of The Story of Jazz on film, Welles was named a goodwill ambassador by the Office of Inter-​American Affairs (OIAA) under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, who was also on the board at RKO and a major backer of It’s All True. The head of the Motion Picture Division of the OIAA, John Hay Whitney, urged flattering representations of Latin and South America in Hollywood as a soft deterrent to Axis powers’ gaining ground in the South Atlantic, and dispatched both Walt Disney and Orson Welles to Brazil. Welles arrived in Rio without a script. By February 1942 he was shooting scenes of the Afro-​Catholic Lenten festival of Carnival, with the idea of adding the footage to It’s All True. The new material was to document parallels between New Orleans jazz and Brazilian samba music, with voodoo and Mardi Gras as connecting threads. After seeing the Brazil footage, RKO scuttled the entire project: it was over budget anyway, and so much happy and sexually charged mingling of races in the Carnival scenes promised boycotts in the South and the heartland that would keep the studio from ever recouping its losses.36 The idea for a film centered on Armstrong and Storyville was picked up again by United Artists after the war, without Welles or his samba footage, but with a screenplay by Elliot Paul, whom Welles had earlier put under contract for The Story of Jazz. This is the film that became New Orleans. The studio gambled on securing both white and black audiences for the film in separate movie houses. Black audiences would presumably flock to a full-​length, big-​budget movie about jazz and black musicians. So would white audiences if the film were given the scaffolding of a racy coming-​of-​age story with a swinging soundtrack. In a scene reminiscent of John Hammond’s conversion to jazz, the wealthy Miss Miralee Smith (Dorothy Patrick), the daughter of Holiday’s employers and a budding opera singer, demands that Holiday T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

105  }

bring her to a nightclub in Storyville. There she watches, rapt, as the singing maid and Armstrong’s band perform a mysteriously compelling music. The nightclub’s owner (Arturo de Cordova) explains the sound as a blending of “work songs, the Gold Coast of Africa, little Christian churches, riverboats.” (In its snub of a review, the New York Times said de Cordova “plays the merchant of blues as though he were hearing far-​off voices and seeing visions like Joan of Arc.”)37 The sheltered young woman is made a fan of jazz, which a white Symphony Hall audience also comes around to applauding in the polite orchestral arrangement of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” featuring a trilling Miralee, that closes the film. A nod to Welles’s original conception for the film comes in a shot of Miralee anachronistically holding a copy of Armstrong’s Swing That Music. Bessie Smith is nowhere to be found. “Goodbye to Storyville,” Holiday and Armstrong’s penultimate number in New Orleans and the soundtrack to its dispersal of jazz musicians to points north, condenses a larger if still overtidy story of musical migration. Jazz (in the person of Armstrong, its wandering Aramean) is birthed in New Orleans, makes its way to Chicago, finds a home in New York, and takes on the world. In New Orleans, the dirgelike exodus from Storyville happens in a single night, with the reunion of Armstrong, Holiday, and their band deferred until they’re rounded up in Chicago by a Hammond-​like impresario later in the film. In reality, Storyville didn’t close all at once, as the exodus sequence in the film suggests, nor did its musicians move on only when forced to go. Sometimes Storyville’s so-​called sporting life was flush for jazz artists, and sometimes they fared better on the tent circuit or as riverboat entertainment. These itinerant gigs connected New Orleans musicians with sounds heard throughout the South and all along the Mississippi from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s this ghost of jazz’s deep South and diasporic past that made the swinging 1947 soundtrack of New Orleans entirely at home in the film’s 1917, mouth-​of-​the-​Mississippi setting. Asked by a reporter in 1955 whether jazz originated in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong replied, “All up and down the Mississippi— and old blues, and things like that. But it was the sound at all times . . . it’s a hymn, and it comes from the brass bands playin’.” “We never did {  106  } 

religion around billie holiday

worry about what it was in New Orleans,” he added. “We just always tried to play good.”38 Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” concert had told its own story of jazz, in which black musicians didn’t create a modern art form so much as they were pulled from the primordial maw of unrecorded history by John Hammond. Kathryn Lofton points to the figure of the “perpetual primitive” in the American religious imaginary, a figure whose implicit habitus is the mythic well of spiritual depth conjured by the term “Black Church.” This Black Church, says Lofton, imbues those who embody it with “certain spiritual credentials, a certain shared history of suffering,” and “a shared rhetoric of trial, endurance, and triumph.” So recognizable is this shorthand for earnest and authentic religious experience, Lofton observes, that a popular historical atlas of American religions could signal as its alpha and omega the mood evoked by the anonymous figure on its cover, “a black woman, arms outstretched, mouth agape, apparently singing” of suffering and deliverance.39 In the spiritual economy of American cultural production, the black churchwoman who sings of injustice and triumph over injustice performs a sacred labor of reassurance: whatever the actual damage wrought by slavery and racism, her preternaturally resilient spirit, at least, overcomes. Billie Holiday was not that woman. As Lady Sings the Blues would confirm, her history of race-​based injury amply qualified her for Hammond’s lineup of representative Negro artists. What she refused to offer was redemption from that history for the listener, to make her hard-​won survival a blanket benediction on all who could appreciate the truth of her achievement and its costs. Hammond “never liked ‘Strange Fruit,’ ” he admitted, and refused to record it. “Columbia felt the lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit’ were too strong for its distributors to handle, particularly in the South—the fruit, of course, being the body of a lynch victim hanging from a tree”—so Holiday “was released to record with my full approval for Commodore,” a different label. The result was what Hammond described as a “bizarre and successful” record that “hurt Billie as an artist, although there is no doubt that its shock value helped her career.”40 T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

107  }

What Hammond had in mind in the way of a perpetual primitive to ground his spiritual genealogy of jazz could be seen in his packaging of Bessie Smith, whose smiling visage, mouth open in song, floated like an ectoplasm over the words “From Spirituals to Swing” on the cover of the 1938 program. “It seems that Bessie was riding in a car which crashed into a truck parked along the side of the road,” Hammond had reported the year before in Down Beat magazine of Smith’s death. “One of her arms was nearly severed, but aside from that there was no other serious injury.” Hours passed before an ambulance was summoned, Hammond wrote, and when Smith was finally taken to the hospital, “she was refused treatment because of her color and bled to death while waiting for attention.” Hammond’s Down Beat obituary for Bessie Smith ended with a plug for Columbia Records’ reissue of her recordings—“the best buy of the year in music”—which he had recently produced.41 Hammond repeated the story (with record plug) in the program for “Spirituals to Swing.” “In this story you have an example of the cruelties Negro musicians share with their fourteen million brothers in America.” Yet Bessie Smith’s “triumph can be found in her records.” Her triumph was a spiritual defeat of the uncomprehending. “They could dress Bessie in old and wrinkled evening gowns,” “make clumsy jokes about her size,” “cheat this colored girl of her wages,” turn “her away from the white folks’ operating table” as she lay dying. But “Israel in Egypt had no greater victory over the little, mean people than Bessie who is dead.” Her image graces the concert program “in the hope that music lovers will listen to her voice on records and mark in their own conscience the sense of guilt that such great music was neglected.”42 Bessie Smith’s death appears not to have come by way of barred entrance to a white hospital; her biographer Chris Albertson determined that she was taken directly to a black hospital, was treated by a trained physician who amputated her arm, and died the next morning of internal injuries sustained in the crash.43 However careless and botched, Hammond’s story of Smith’s 1937 death was plausible; Billie Holiday blamed her father’s death the same year on the fact that he knew better than even to seek admittance at a white hospital, and put off care until he was past saving. “Strange Fruit” still “reminds me of {  108  } 

religion around billie holiday

how Pop died,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, “because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South” (95).44 Holiday likely knew of Hammond’s account of Bessie Smith’s death; hers was not quite so bald a sales pitch. Hammond explained in his 1977 memoir that the “end of [his] association with Billie’s career” came about because Holiday, by 1940 “heavily involved in narcotics,” had “hired as her manager a woman from a distinguished family” he himself knew well.45 The unnamed woman was Hammond’s blue-​blood associate Louise Crane, who appears in Lady Sings the Blues as Brenda, the “rich white heiress from Fifth Avenue.” In Holiday’s description Crane was not a manager but an amorous fan for whom Holiday herself “had become a thing” (98). “It’s a cinch to see how it all begins. These poor bitches grow up hating their mothers and having the hots for their fathers. And since being in love with our father is taboo, they grow up unable to get any kicks out of anything unless it’s taboo too. And since Negroes in America walk around with big ‘Do Not Touch’ signs on them, that’s where we come in” (99).46 Louise Crane’s family literally printed money, since the Crane stationery company had supplied the U.S. Treasury with its rag paper since winning an exclusive contract during the Hayes administration. Her parents were Winthrop Murray Crane, a former Massachusetts governor and U.S. senator, and Josephine Porter Boardman, a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. According to Irene Kitchings, Crane would take Holiday “to buy anything she wanted in Bonwit Teller and all those stores downtown,” and that “was the beginning of her getting really nice things to wear,” furs and “lovely evening gowns and things.”47 A series of “Coffee Concerts” Crane set up at the Museum of Modern Art brought Holiday into contact with the MOMA crowd and with Crane’s overlapping circle of writers and intellectuals.48 The New York Times reported of the final concert that “the warmly approving audience could not get enough” of Holiday, who “sang ‘My Man Don’t Love Me’ [‘Fine and Mellow’], ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ [‘Strange Fruit,’ the flip side to ‘Fine and Mellow’ on the 1939 Commodore release], some early ‘blues,’ and her own composition, ‘God Bless the Child,’ a spiritual in swing.”49 T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

109  }

Crane’s bid for Holiday’s devotion strained her relationship with her companion Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote her haunted, ambivalent “Songs for a Colored Singer,” published in 1944, with “Billie Holiday in mind.”50 Hammond meanwhile set about saving Crane from “unsavory gossip” and the risk of being strong-​armed by the “gangsters and dope-​pushers Billie knew.” His scheme to dissolve their relationship was to meet with members of Crane’s family to tell them “what I knew and what I feared.” The result was that “the manager and Billie broke up, and Billie never worked at Café Society again.”51 Instead, Holiday headed west to Los Angeles and met up with Orson Welles, who’d come to hear her at “a new joint in the San Fernando Valley” (104) that called itself Café Society for the duration of Holiday’s run. The idea to cast Billie Holiday as Bessie Smith in Orson Welles’s film might have been Duke Ellington’s, whom Welles approached after seeing Ellington’s stage revue Jump for Joy in Los Angeles in 1941. Or it might have been something Holiday and Welles cooked up when they “started hanging around together” in Hollywood the same year. Largely cut from Lady Sings the Blues in legal wrangling at the editing stage, Holiday’s account of their affair survives as a telling scrap: “After we’d been seen together a few times I started getting phone calls at my hotel telling me I was ruining Orson’s career by being seen with him” (106). The “early ‘blues’ ” Holiday sang at MOMA might have included two songs she recorded the previous year as part of a tribute to their composer, W. C. Handy, “Loveless Love” and “St. Louis Blues,” both of them made famous by Bessie Smith.52  Smith recorded “St. Louis Blues” with Louis Armstrong when Holiday was still a child in Baltimore, working in waterfront good-​time houses like Alice Dean’s. “When it came time to pay me,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, “I used to tell her she could keep the money if she’d let me come up in her front parlor and listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on her victrola” (9). Upscale brothels like Alice Dean’s, Holiday recalled, “were the only joints fancy enough to have a victrola and for real enough to pick up on the best records,” but if “I’d heard Pops and Bessie wailing through the window of some minister’s front parlor, I’d have been running free errands for him” (10).

{  110  } 

religion around billie holiday

Holiday said of her influences that she’d “wanted Bessie’s big sound and Pop’s feeling” (43), but since she didn’t have Smith’s big voice she copied Armstrong’s horn. Still, Holiday could “do” Bessie Smith in her own voice’s register, which Duke Ellington, Welles’s would-​be collaborator on The Story of Jazz, either knew or discovered when he cast nineteen-​year-​old Billie Holiday in the lone singing role in his Symphony in Black. Welles may have gotten his idea for a film comprising four loosely linked vignettes from Symphony in Black, whose musical chapters—“The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm”—correspond to movements in the “Rhapsody of Negro Life” that Ellington, playing Ellington, composes onscreen. Holiday’s voice in the film is Bessie Smith’s voice as you might have heard it on an old Victrola in a tufted parlor, muted and a little metallic, the scratches in the sound etched in. In the flesh, Smith’s voice was washtub-​deep and capable of ear-​splitting volume without amplification of any kind. Her distinctive sound was its own bullhorn, rattling the rafters at a tent show or cutting knifelike through the clamor of a dirt-​floor roadhouse, the crowd lit up on corn liquor. When night-​ riding Klansmen raided one of Smith’s shows, her great bellowing voice, it’s said, held their violence at bay. Records were not her natural medium. Though highly paid for a blues singer in the 1920s, she was still paid a flat fee per side, not much, to record what mostly served as advertisements for the live performances her audiences lined up to see.53 Holiday portrays a spurned and beaten woman in Ellington’s Symphony in Black, a studied riff on the spurned and beaten woman Bessie Smith played in St. Louis Blues, her only film, produced by W. C. Handy himself in 1929. In Lady Sings the Blues Holiday describes the part she played in the Ellington film as a “chippie” (58), which sounds like one of the words Doubleday insisted on substituting for those they chose to strike from the book. (Holiday suggested they were welcome to take out the word “bitch,” which she uses as a generic term for woman, and replace it with the word “whore.”)54 In both films, St. Louis Blues and Symphony in Black, a sharp-​dressed man abandons the protagonist for a lighter-​skinned, better-​dressed, more diminutive rival. In both

T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

111  }

films the rejected woman—Bessie Smith in Handy’s film, Billie Holiday in Ellington’s—confronts the pair and gets thrown by the man to the ground, where, on hands and knees, she begins her song. Bessie Smith drags every phrase out deep and long, slowing “St. Louis Blues” to a dirge. My man. Got a heart. Like a rock. Cast in the sea. Holiday pulls on the notes and lingers in the pauses of Ellington’s saddest tale on land or sea, each plaintive word a moan. Ellington’s on-​camera notes for this part of the film read, simply, Blues. It’s as eidetic a performance of her childhood idol as Holiday ever gave. “Chippie” might describe a kind of Good Shepherd girl, streetwise and bruised, and a thousand versions of the saddest tale surely passed among its inhabitants during Holiday’s tenure there. But Holiday was never wholly the tragic figure she projected in Ellington’s film, no matter how various and practiced her tellings of the saddest tale became. In 1935, the year that Symphony in Black won the Academy Award for best musical short subject, Holiday recorded some of her most liltingly joyful sides with the elegant Teddy Wilson, including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “If You Were Mine,” and “Miss Brown to You.” When she went on to record Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” in 1940, the result was at once languid, resigned, and nearly triumphant, as though by the end of the song she’d come out ahead, herself the St. Louis woman with diamond rings and store-​bought hat, and not, or no longer, the woman left behind when the evening sun goes down. Her “Miss Brown to You” creates an even stronger double effect: in singing the part of the jealous suitor, Holiday slips entirely into the ebullient title role. The mystery of it lay at the heart of her style. Holiday famously sang to a beat that almost always floated over or stayed behind that of her accompaniment, which required her to inhabit two temporal registers at one time. The result for the listener, say musicologists Hao Huang and Rachel Huang, could be an “intoxicating confusion”: a “sense that truth is elusive” and “certainty is ephemeral; and this sense, perhaps, is one key to the Billie Holiday experience.”55 Bessie Smith’s example puts a useful lens on the way that segments of black religion and black music carve themselves out and away from each other in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jazz guitarist {  112  } 

religion around billie holiday

Danny Barker, who played some famous sessions with Billie Holiday and whose Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band graduated a generation of New Orleans musicians, remarked that the blues Bessie Smith sang “had a church deal mixed up in it.” “The South had fabulous preachers and evangelists,” he explained. “Some would stand on corners and move the crowds from there.” Bessie Smith “did the same thing on stage.” She “was like people like Billy Graham are today. Bessie was in a class with those people. She could bring about mass hypnotism.”56 When Smith was born in 1894, her father, William Smith, worked as a laborer and a part-​time preacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His preaching career spanned several decades—at the time of Bessie’s birth he operated a Baptist mission near the family’s single-​room home—and appears to have been an itinerant one. He died in 1897, when Bessie Smith was three. After the death of her mother, Laura Owens Smith, nine-​year-​old Bessie and her younger brother Andrew busked on the streets for tossed coins, he on guitar, she singing, dancing, and cutting up in the manner of the black minstrel performers who passed through the city. A local remembered the pair singing in front of Chattanooga’s White Elephant Saloon. “She used to sing ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?’ and when someone threw a fat coin her way she’d say something like, ‘That’s right, Charlie, give to the church.’ ”57 Sometime after their mother’s death, an older brother, Clarence, left Chattanooga for a career as a traveling minstrel. In 1912 Clarence Smith was touring in the Moses Stokes Traveling Show with the extraordinary Ma Rainey, who some years earlier had introduced to tent and stage shows a new kind of music, rhythmic, earthy, and plangent. She called it blues. It had been sung in name and otherwise throughout the South, usually by men who came and went and took their guitar or banjo with them. Rainey was among the first to make blues into theater and to make blues a women’s medium. On their way through Tennessee, Clarence Smith arranged for the owners of the Moses Stokes troupe to give his sister Bessie, now eighteen, an audition. Bessie was hired and developed her early stage persona under Rainey’s wing. Like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey was a belter, her lyrics bold and often raw, her sound T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

113  }

throaty, loud, and low. On retiring from the road in the early 1930s, she brought her powerful, moaning style to the Friendship Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia, where she sang sacred songs in the choir for the rest of her days.58 Black music beyond church walls at the turn of the twentieth century came from juke joints, buskers, and brothels, dance orchestras and marching bands, pianos in tenements and the parlors of upscale homes, and the tent circuits of minstrelsy and revival. To preachers like W. C. Handy’s African Methodist Episcopal father, who was “bent on shaping [his son] for the ministry,” musicians in general “were idlers, dissipated characters, whisky drinkers and rounders.” To join their ranks, Handy said, “would be like selling my soul to the devil.”59 Many artists did manage to integrate a life in church with blues careers, undercutting the dualism implied in the idea of blues as devil’s music and its forcing of a life-​defining choice at the crossroads. Musician Ida Goodson, interviewed at the piano in 1981, recalled that her mother and father liked music, but they liked church music. They didn’t like jazz like we does. And, of course, we could not even play jazz in our home while they were there. But just the moment they would turn their back and go to their society, or church—somewhere or another—we’d get our neighborhood children to come in there, you know. And we’d get to playing the blues and having a good time. But we still had one girl on the door watching. . . . And by that time, whenever we’d see my father or my mother coming back home, the girl’d be, here come Mr. Goodson them, and they’d be so close up on her, we used to change the blues, singing, Jesus, keep me near the cross. Then after that, my mother and father get in and join us, and we all get to singing church songs right now. [Plays:] Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on.60 The sacred-​secular fluidity Goodson performs—“[Baptists] got this rhythm from this hand clapping [demonstrates] . . . you’d do this in {  114  } 

religion around billie holiday

the church, but in the cabaret you’d do this. It’s the same beat, but it’s a different atmosphere”61—was also internal to churches and not only to cabarets and other worldly venues for black musicianship. New Orleans bassist George “Pops” Foster, who arrived in Harlem in the 1930s, recalled ending late sets on Saturday in time to catch the morning service in a Holiness church. “Their music was something. They’d clap their hands and bang a tambourine and sing. Sometimes they had a piano player, and he’d really play a whole lot of jazz. . . . We used to hurry to finish our theater job so we could go listen to them play. They really played some great jazz on those hymns.”62 As even the most profane blues carried a jolt of the spirituals’ sacred charge in implicit demonstrations of deliverance from slavery, so the churches of the early blues era and beyond, Josef Sorett reminds us, were never purely religious spaces. Every black church was a secular institution as well as a sacred one insofar as it remained a place where congregants brought problems in search of this-​worldly solutions. This was particularly the case after Reconstruction, when seeking betterment, being “uppity,” could incite a lynching. “The Negro’s Church, to borrow the title of Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson’s seminal study, could not afford the illusion of being concerned solely with sacred matters, whatever those might be. Indeed, sacred-​secular fluidity was the forced hand that ‘The Negro’ was dealt.”63 If the distinction between the church and the devil’s music stuck, perhaps one reason is that blues came into being in murderous times, among those for whom church was still a place of relative safety. To reject the church’s spare autonomies and comforts for the dangers that awaited blues travelers on the open road must have struck many as a death wish. Bury my body down by the highway side, Robert Johnson sang, so my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride. Adam Gussow points out that the black Protestant southerners who remained “humorlessly Manichean” on the split between blues and holy living in the 1920s and 1930s were mostly an older generation who bore in living memory the collapse of Reconstruction’s promise. To them, as Benjamin Mays observed, “a burning hell and a golden-​ streeted heaven” might be every bit as “real as their farms,”64 as real as the power of the Baptist or Methodist or Holiness preacher’s art. T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

115  }

Their children born nearer or after the turn of the century tended by contrast to be “skeptical, mocking, playful” in matters satanic and divine—and to be moving. Blues artists who flouted “parental and ecclesiastical strictures,” says Gussow, often one and the same, were “Delta-​style freethinkers” who riffed and revised on the sermons of their elders with “heretical boldness.”65 The “church has got ’em brainwashed to death, the ministers, the preachers,” John Lee Hooker, another preacher’s son, told an interviewer. “I believe in a Supreme Being, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe that there’s a hell that you’re gonna be tortured in. I believed in all of that, then I grew up and realized, and I wrote the song: ‘Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell.’ ”66 As blues altered the soundscape of the urban North, a  blues-​ infused urbanity sustained the allure of migration for black southerners, particularly young people keen to experience firsthand what big-​city sounds that reached them in the South conveyed: “a generalized attitude of youthful rebellion and devil-​may-​care sophistication,” in Gussow’s description, “propagated by both the white bohemians of the so-​called Lost Generation and the black bohemians known as New Negroes.”67 Even as New York City’s economy, including its music business, collapsed in the Depression—the balance sheet of Columbia Records plunged from $104 million in 1927 to $6 million in 1932—the freedoms that beckoned in Harlem, particularly, promised a world unlike what most black southerners had ever known.68 Roughly 24,000 black New Yorkers in 1890 became 152,000 in 1920 and 328,000 in 1930, with perhaps two-​thirds of them crammed into Harlem’s three and a half square miles. Of Harlem’s 1930 population, Judith Weisenfeld reminds us, fully one-​quarter had come not from the rural South but from the French, Spanish, Dutch, British, and Danish Caribbean. They were Roman Catholic and Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal; like arrivals from the black South, their practices around religion, food, and music “emerged at the intersection of the deprivations of slavery and the cultural creativity of enslaved people.”69 To Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton, the Caribbean presence might have made Harlem sound more like New Orleans than, say, Chicago, where both had made stops on their way to careers in New York in the 1920s. In a show of what Alan Lomax remembered as {  116  } 

religion around billie holiday

Morton’s “almost insane Creole pride,” Morton insisted on bringing musicians up from New Orleans to Chicago to get the sound he wanted when he made records there as Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. Once in New York, however, Morton managed to pull together a band of session musicians that suited him from the local pool of talent.70 Jelly Roll Morton’s self-​identification not as black or white but as Creole made a version of the “religio-​racial theorizing,” as Weisenfeld calls it, that insisted that “black people were not uniquely or singularly raced.”71 In nineteenth-​century New Orleans, the term Creole was claimed by both whites and persons of color with French or Spanish colonial roots to distinguish themselves from “Americans,” that is, from Protestant Anglos. Since then, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explains, “Creole has come to mean the language and the folk culture that was native to the southern part of Louisiana,” a port for slave ships and for European, Caribbean, and Latin American arrivals, “where African, French, and Spanish influence was most deeply rooted historically and culturally.”72 Like a number of jazz musicians in the 1920s, Jelly Roll Morton performed for stretches of time in Tijuana, a hot spot for music and gambling during Prohibition. When Billie Holiday toured with Artie Shaw, who’d recorded at least once with Morton, she sometimes succeeded in getting a “nice room and no back talk” in whites-​only hotels when she, Shaw, and his band signaled to the management that she was Spanish (81). The ruse may have been inspired by Morton’s companion and muse Anita Gonzales, née Bessie Johnson, a mixed-​race Creole who came from a family of New Orleans musicians and who chose at some point to identify as Mexican for the remainder of her life. In 1938 Morton met with Alan Lomax for a series of taped conversations about jazz. It was in these sessions, recorded for the Library of Congress, that Morton told Lomax that jazz wasn’t jazz without “these little tinges of Spanish in it.” Demonstrating on piano, Morton told Lomax that “the Spanish tinge” he’d hear in “New Orleans Blues,” the composition he was about to play, “has so much to do with the typical jazz idea.” Morton liked to say that jazz was a form he invented. If you “can’t manage a way to put these tinges of Spanish in these tunes,” Morton said, you’ll “never be able to get the right season[ing], I may T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

117  }

call it, for jazz music.”73 By Spanish tinge Morton meant some mix of rhythm and melody known to him from his own Creole heritage (Morton came from a family of French-​speaking Catholics in Haiti who fled to New Orleans after the revolution in Saint-​Domingue), the Gulf city’s various Latin strands of music and talk, and the Caribbean-​seasoned soundscape of New York, where he assembled his Red Hot Peppers to record with shortly after his arrival in 1928. What each brought to Harlem made Caribbean immigrants and southern arrivals strangers, allies, and sometime competitors driven alike by what Alain Locke described as the “spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions.” It was in the urbane, progressive North that Billie Holiday was heckled by white patrons who wanted their black girl singers loud and bawdy, made by Joe Glaser to black up with greasepaint when a club owner insisted her skin was too light, and directed by the management of the Lincoln Hotel to wait by the toilets between sets when she fronted Artie Shaw’s all-​white band. Black Harlem dwellers lived in white-​owned apartment buildings, bought food from white-​owned groceries, and were forbidden to try on clothes in the white-​owned department stores where they shopped. Black dancers deemed light-​ skinned and lovely enough to meet the Cotton Club’s rigid standards for its “tall, tan, and terrific” chorines performed suggestive numbers for audiences of white pleasure seekers with whom they were strictly forbidden to mix. Locke observed nevertheless that “with each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and more democratic chance . . . a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.”74 The mass movement, in Locke’s terms, was a sloughing off of the Old Negro for the New. New Negroes were new by dint of deliverance or distance taken from white control, thug or genteel, from lives staked on wariness. Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the original Little Rock Nine, recalled the “fear and apprehension” of black elders who had stayed behind in the Arkansas of her 1940s childhood. “I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken {  118  } 

religion around billie holiday

rules and step out of ‘their place,’ to cross some invisible line. And yet lots of discussions in my household were about how to cross that line, when to cross that line, and who could cross that invisible line without getting hurt.”75 African Americans who had made Locke’s “deliberate flight” dared to leave the terrible mystery of white expectation to one side, to detach from whiteness as a ruling presence. This movement beyond the power wielded by whites to determine the Negro’s place was both a spatial and a psychic shift. “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem,” Locke wrote in his epoch-​making New Negro anthology, African Americans had arrived at a “spiritual Coming of Age.”76 The New Negro coincided with The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises and documents with them a Jazz Age and its Lost Generation, lost in the sense of uprooted and untethered from the generational line. To depart from Jim Crow terrorism in the South, said Locke, was to “hurdle several generations of experience at a leap.” More “important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-​attitudes and self-​expression of the Young Negro,” the “Younger Generation” to whom The New Negro was dedicated. For “generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down’ or ‘in his place’ or ‘helped up.’ ” But the New Negro “simply cannot be swathed” in “formulae,” Locke insisted, “for the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology.”77 For Locke, the African American past really could be hurdled at a leap, a detachment enacted in The New Negro’s near silence on religion. What “the reader interested in religion quickly discovers from The New Negro,” Cooper Harriss observes, is that “the structures, beliefs, and practices of religions, churches, and church people” have next to no place in this defining document of the Harlem Renaissance, their centrality to black survival after slavery notwithstanding.78 Tenant farming might have kept former slaves alive too. The New Negro registered a decided loosening of black cultural life from the church’s talismanic and defining hold, from identification with sacred power as its sole distinction and raison d’être. In this context, reliance on the church as what secured one’s dignity and right to flourish was a marker of T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

119  }

oppression. As Richard Wright would put it in his 1937 “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” the black church, like other segregated institutions, was forced upon black people “from without by lynch rope, bayonet and mob rule.” It was a place you could go to work out the terms of your survival when “all other channels [were] closed.”79 The problem was that too many remained within their churches’ straitened and stunting environs even after other channels had opened to them. “When I think of the warped and narrow beliefs and teachings Christianity rammed down our Negro throats,” Locke wrote in a 1932 letter, “I really feel like burning the churches.”80 If there is little of the church in Locke’s New Negro, there is even less of the devil’s music. An essay that gingerly takes up jazz as its subject, J. A. Rogers’s “Jazz at Home,” notes that the “Negroes who invented it called their songs the ‘Blues,’ and they weren’t capable of satire or deception.”81 A new arrival to Harlem in Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The City of Refuge” opens the window of an apartment “half the size of his hencoop back home” and leans into an airshaft, a “sewer of sounds and smells” channeling holdover funk: “cabbage and chitterlings cooking; liver and onions sizzling, sputtering; three player-​ pianos out-​plunking each other; a man and woman calling each other vile things; a sick, neglected baby wailing; a phonograph broadcasting blues.”82 Locke offered the hope that New Negro poets would be guided more by the spirituals than the blues—a call not for more religion but rather for more classicism and restraint.83 Locke was a proponent of the scored and arranged spirituals performed by the touring choirs of black universities, the music Zora Neale Hurston would deride as neo-​ spirituals. For Locke, the disciplined imposition of form on the spirituals’ “broken words, childish imagery,” and improvisatory excesses of feeling made them fitting monuments to black musical culture’s survival and not to the warping ills it survived: “the contempt of the slave owners, the conventionalizations of formal religion, the repressions of Puritanism, the corruptions of sentimental balladry, and the neglect and disdain of second-​generation respectability.” Their resilience, in Locke’s formulation, both confers and subtly cancels the spirituals’ distinctiveness; it grants them “the immortality of those great folk expressions that survive not so much through being typical of a group {  120  } 

religion around billie holiday

or representative of a period as by virtue of being fundamentally and everlastingly human.” In this, Locke continued, Negro spirituals were the existential analogue of the “experience of the Jews” and the formal analogue of the Psalms.84 It’s a grudging acknowledgment of the spirituals’ religious content, defined as what transcends the experience of slavery rather than what rises to meet it. Jazz in The New Negro is interchangeable with “jazz craze,” as though, like pop-​up examples of old-​time religion in Harlem storefronts, it were a momentary efflorescence of primitive vigor on the path of being sublimated by those wise enough to “lift and divert it into nobler channels.”85 The distinction between Old and New Negro tracked a putative religious shift away from what W. E. B. DuBois famously named the “frenzy” of black southern worship: sensuous, heated, and noisy, at  once mysteriously spirit-​driven and excessively embodied. The vaunted progression from primitive frenzy to urbane (un)belief sustained a spectrum of identifications whose implications extended well beyond religion. Billie Holiday’s music shared a racial habitus with a tradition of performance that traded in black racial primitivism as fantasy, nostalgia, or desire: Duke Ellington’s Jungle Band; Louis Armstrong in leopard skin and Josephine Baker in a banana skirt; the plantation-​themed, Dixie-​to-​Broadway reviews in which Baker, Florence Mills, and Ethel Waters got their start and which Baker and Sidney Bechet would bring to Paris in the Revue Nègre. “Everything we’ve ever read flashes across our enchanted minds,” enthused a Parisian fan of the Revue Nègre, “plantation landscapes, the melancholy sound of Creole nurses, the Negro soul with its animal energy, its childish joys, the sad bygone time of slavery.”86 Lena Horne recalled that floor shows at the Cotton Club “had a primitive naked quality that was supposed to make a civilized audience lose its inhibitions. The music had an intensive, pervasive rhythm—sometimes loud and brassy, often weird and wild. The dances were eloquently provocative; and if they were occasionally stately, that stateliness served only to heighten their abandon.”87 The primitive Negro persona entered into professional black entertainment in the latter nineteenth century as black performers took over the minstrelsy circuit from white performers pretending to be black. The changes that black entertainers introduced into T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

121  }

minstrelsy’s performance of blackness were often subtle. Some black troupes added jubilee songs whose spiritual critique of slavery offset the minstrel image of comic plantation lassitude—itself a blackface masking of the fact that those enslaved for life were literally worked to death.88 But Old Negro stereotypes—dandy, coon, mammy, sambo, wench—persisted and even deepened in black minstrelsy, dandy into pimp, coon into hoodlum, wench into whore. Here, after all, was the putative reality, blacker than any imitation of black. Such performance nevertheless opened a critical distance between the performer and the primitive stereotype, even when the latter was played so adroitly as to seem natural. The many hundreds of artists who worked the black entertainment circuit under the aegis of the Colored Actors’ Union and later the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA, parsed by Ma Rainey as Tough on Black Asses) included Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Count Basie, all of whom consorted with minstrelsy’s ghosts on and off the stage. The primitive Negro stereotype clung to Holiday in the persistent imputation to her of criminality and unwholesomeness—particularly after the suspension of her cabaret card marked her as too dangerous to play New York’s liquor-​serving nightspots—and in the frequent explanation of her art, like Lead Belly’s, as natural, not art. That she was not above nurturing these projections is evident in two songs she sang in homage to Bessie Smith: “Gimme a Pigfoot,” Smith’s down-​ home rejoinder to Harlem highbrows, and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” which Holiday often performed as a kind of apologia pro vita sua after her release from prison. But more characteristic is Holiday’s refusal to black up in Old Negro imagery and intonation, as when she drops black southern vocal inflection from her renditions of “I Loves You, Porgy” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” two songs that cue it in their very titles. (How do we discover that Julie, who passes for white in Show Boat, is really black? She can sing all the words to “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which Queenie the cook, played by Gone with the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel in the film, winkingly declares only colored folks know.) A different take on jazz in The New Negro and a counterpoint to Locke’s art-​as-​uplift strategy came in Langston Hughes’s poem {  122  } 

religion around billie holiday

“Jazzonia,” which revels in the silky eroticism of Harlem cabaret, and which reappeared as the lead poem in Hughes’s debut collection The Weary Blues. The book arrived in 1926 with an introduction by the complicated Carl Van  Vechten, music critic, trust-​fund heir, self-​ appointed switchboard between black and white bohemia, and author of the divisive Harlem novel Nigger Heaven. Van Vechten was in addition a photographer whose portraits of black artists and musicians suggest an interest in them that was largely that of a collector. Van Vechten posed Bessie Smith with a Sambo head and Billie Holiday with an African tribal sculpture, neither woman less regal for the pairing. Nigger Heaven appeared in the same year as Weary Blues to criticisms that it set back the New Negro’s cause by figuring Harlem as the white psyche’s dark continent, a primitivist fantasy of sexual desublimation whose soundtrack was jazz. The novel takes its name from the balcony in theaters where black audiences were allowed to sit. “Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra.” The novel’s black protagonists are intellectual, artistic, unabashedly secular, and keen for sensual pleasures. “We are, for the most part, pagans, natural pagans, but when we were slaves we turned naturally and gratefully to a religion which promised joy everlasting.” Now black Harlemites are given to “losing themselves” as much “in a burst of jazz” as in “the glory of an evangelical Spiritual, recognizing” in either, “no doubt, in some dim, biological way, the beat of the African rhythm.”89 Nigger Heaven put reviewers in a bind. Rejecting Van Vechten’s portrayal of Harlem life—all “colour and noise and rhythm,” “passionate instinct,” and “warm, sexual emotion”90—risked tagging one a fusty critic of that life. Embracing it played to fears, suspicions, and hopes that it was entirely accurate. Either response ensnared one in primitivist assumptions about black sexuality and the pursuit of pleasure: that these were liabilities, or that these were all there were. Alain Locke experienced a similar bind in relation to jazz. He greeted Hughes’s blues poetry with restrained and wary applause. “Poetry of a vitally characteristic racial flow and feeling,” Locke said, “is the next step in our cultural development. Is it to be a jazz-​product? T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

123  }

The title poem and first section of the weary blues seem superficially to suggest it. But let us see.”91 In an essay published in the Nation, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes answered back that black modernism did not require the refusal or sublimation of vernacular music, secular or religious, as fatal to its spiritual, political, or artistic coming of age. On the contrary: “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” The “low-​down folks, the so-​called common element”—the majority, “Lord be praised”—“do not particularly care” about the perceptions of white people, nor do they “tell the artist what to do.” Their “joy runs, bang! into ecstasy,” their “religion soars to a shout,” and they matter for the project of black self-​determination insofar as they “hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations.” They “are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”92 In a career that spanned six decades, Hughes wrote poems that appeared wholly to dismiss religion (“Goodbye, Christ!”) and others that celebrated black spiritual striving at various proximities and removes. Hughes’s poetry gave a jazz cadence to religion, and the need of it, and the absence of the need. Weary souls in “Judgment Day” go “flyin’ to de stars an’ moon / A shoutin’ God I’s comin’ soon!” In “Madam and the Number Writer” a woman swears off playing numbers for a shot at heaven’s “golden streets,” where her number wins every time. “Sylvester’s Dying Bed” centers on a good-​time lover who boldly lays claim to renegade pleasures even at the hour of death: “Then everything was darkness / In a great . . . big . . . night.”93 Death as lullaby, a blues version of Goodnight Moon: there’s a velvet darkness, a whispered hush, a restoration of nighttime soul to nighttime element, infinitely capacious and forgiving. Death in “Sylvester’s Dying Bed” brings neither retribution nor reward on the church’s terms, but seems instead to cradle the very shape of lives lived at deliberate distance from them. The poem Hughes wrote for Billie Holiday struck a different tone, “sorrow . . . dusted with despair.” “Song for Billie Holiday” ends in haunted absence (“sound that shimmers— / Where?”) and opens like {  124  } 

religion around billie holiday

a wound, its stanzas repeating like a record worn to crumbling on the spindle of memory: What can purge my heart   Of the song   And the sadness? What can purge my heart   But the song   Of the sadness? What can purge my heart   Of the sadness   Of the song?94 The record Hughes listened to most often, according to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, was Holiday’s “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own),” which he “spun in his bachelor suite late into the Harlem night,” a soundtrack to his “years of nomadic loneliness and furtive sexuality.” For the lover or child he denied himself, Rampersad speculates, Hughes substituted “a relationship with his family’s past,” “a relationship with history, so intimate as to be almost sensual.”95 John Hammond supposed that “God Bless the Child” was based on Holiday’s family’s past, principally on her great-​grandmother, who, like Langston Hughes’s, bore the children of the Virginia planter who claimed her as his property.96 “She couldn’t read or write, but she knew the Bible by heart from beginning to end,” Holiday says of this great-​ grandmother in Lady Sings the Blues, “and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures” (7). The original sheet music for the song, for which Holiday shares songwriting credit with Arthur Herzog, says that “God Bless’ the Child,” a “swing-​spiritual,” is “based on the authentic proverb ‘god blessed the child that’s got his own.’ ” But “God Bless the Child” is generically neither spiritual nor swing, no authentic proverb relays its title, and the Bible never preaches its news, although the parable of the talents offers a distant approximation. Musicians have sometimes used “the languages and practices of ‘religion,’ ” Jason Bivins suggests, in ways that “confronted or evaded or jazzed the languages and practices of authenticity”97—including T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

125  }

the assumption that African American musical art is always rooted in the spirituals of the church, or that it comes naturally, or that it will necessarily be redemptive. Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” might be described as a mock spiritual based on a mock scripture, a trickster hymn to jazz the discourse of spiritual authenticity that surrounded and constrained her. According to Holiday, the song was really about hustling money; she wrote “God Bless the Child” to “gas the Duchess”— Sadie—who’d said no when Billie wanted cash from the till of her afterhours club, even though Billie had financed the operation by way of the stream of favors she received from Louise Crane (101). It remains among the most covered and beloved of Holiday’s songs—Hammond allowed that it might be “one of the very few for which Billie Holiday will always be remembered”—and has entered the sacred performance repertories of gospel choirs, black and white, throughout the world.98 As northward movement tracked a new spiritual mobility in black expressive culture, worship and the arts increasingly took on each other’s sound and feeling. For some, the movement from South to North, Old Negro to New—the spatial and psychic movement beyond the power wielded by whites to determine black America’s place—entailed a consonant falling away of notions of divinity as abstract, punitive, and constraining. “Nay, I have done with deities,” wrote Countee Cullen in his poem “The Black Christ,” “Who keep me ever on my knees.”99 In their place arose more sensuous embodiments of spirit. New World religious impulses, varied and perennial, to shear the riotous world from the church were defeated in the lived theologies of the New Negro’s Harlem, musical and otherwise. Avowedly religious or not, black metropolitans between the wars increasingly described as desire or experience a divinity whose mode of appearing, in Clarence Hardy’s description, included “infusing the very bodies of the faithful.”100 The Moorish Science Temple, Father Divine’s Peace Mission, the Commandment Keepers, and other new religious communities attracted new arrivals to Harlem who found established denominations wanting. So did the independent churches that took over warehouses and storefronts, fusing the theologies and preaching styles of rural Holiness, Baptist, and Methodist churches with big-​city sounds.101 {  126  } 

religion around billie holiday

In worship as in musical and other arts, an incarnational aesthetic came to shape the call and response to new freedoms. Harlem dances like the Lindy hop, snake hips, and the big apple had deep antecedents in the watch meetings and ring shouts of black southern churches.102 And however much Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s involvement in New York nightlife may have weakened her standing among fellow members of the Church of God in Christ, the Holy Rollers’ kinetic expression of spiritual transport and delight was never far removed from what was on offer at the Savoy Ballroom. “Father was a preacher in a Holy Roller church,” recalled Harlem dancer and minister of the Gospel Bill Bailey, who was moonwalking for crowds at the Apollo Theater before Michael Jackson was born. “I guess that’s where I got my start dancing. The congregation stamped its feet and clapped its hands,” Bailey said, and “we worked up a lot of swing.”103 Billie Holiday liked to tell a story of desperately seeking a job as a dancer in a Harlem nightclub and fumbling her audition so badly that the piano player invited her to sing out of pity (37). But an autographed photo of Holiday that recently surfaced from the 1930s suggests she may not have been a stranger to exuberant Harlem dance moves; it’s signed, “To Peggy, the girl that makes the most beautiful jump i ever saw.”104 Church with backbeat and jazz piano might offer some what others took from high-​style leaps on the Savoy dance floor: a divine or spiritual presence in the apprehension of the senses and the answering there-​ness of the world. The immanence of divine presence might make itself known in the luminous abundance of Peace Mission banquets or the makeshift hospitality of the Catholic Worker movement, in whatever share of the spirit could be seen, touched, tasted, and heard, in the thumping materiality of sound and not only the meanings of words. Claude McKay observed that women at Father Divine’s sumptuous gatherings took pleasure in the festivities “with a verve and freedom that would startle a cabaret.”105 The charismatic Father Divine was a spiritual renegade who boldly claimed identity with God himself. His faithful adherents aspired to celibacy but otherwise rejoiced in an appetitive and fleshly salvation, not least as co-​celebrants in the festive, copious, and free Peace Mission meals provided by Father Divine. Like many black religious leaders T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

127  }

of the 1920s and ’30s, Father Divine identified jazz with “the underworld and the world of debauchery, of vice, and of crime.” As Leonard Norman Primiano details, Father Divine nevertheless encouraged his followers to turn jazz songs into divine praise. “The beautiful songs and praises that are put forth into expression here,” Father Divine preached at a Peace Mission banquet in Harlem, “have come through and from the world of jazz. They are expressions of the individuals and of the world of jazzism as it has been converted unto God, and it will glorify God in the fullness.”106 So faithfully did worshippers follow Father Divine’s injunction to turn popular music to divine ends that broadcasts of some Peace Mission praise songs brought accusations of copyright infringement. Among the songs the Peace Mission would poach was Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” (1942), enduring holiday favorite, consoling gift to a nation at war, and brilliant engine of Jewish assimilation in its sidestepping of belief in Christ as the threshold of national belonging. (“Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments,” wrote Philip Roth of Berlin’s art; if “schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew-​hatred,” then “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”)107 The Peace Mission version of Berlin’s classic saw no need to restore Christ to Christmas, but instead sang of the “True Christmas” lived in communion with the living, breathing Father Divine.108 Greater composers brought jazz to worship. Duke Ellington’s production was marked, Jason Bivins tells us, by a “growing compositional historicism” whose signature was a “consistent linkage of art and religiosity.” Ellington’s notion that these were “inseparable in African cultures, even when transplanted to America,” can be heard in what he called the “weird, queer effects of primitive Negro melodies” he strove for in “Black and Tan Fantasy” and other Cotton Club numbers from the late 1920s, in the spirituals and work songs of Symphony in Black and Black, Brown, and Beige in the ’30s and ’40s, and in the Sacred Concerts he penned in the last decade of his life, performed in religious and secular settings that were black and white, Christian and Jewish.109 Composer Mary Lou Williams’s 1944–45 Zodiac Suite, twelve segments dedicated each to a musical inspiration born under one of twelve astrological signs (Billie Holiday was Williams’s Aries), suggests the cosmic scope of her musical striving. A conversion experience in the late 1950s {  128  } 

religion around billie holiday

brought her to the Catholic Church and to the composition of liturgical jazz, including several masses and Black Christ of the Andes, a hymn cycle in honor of Saint Martin de Porres. Williams’s liturgical jazz incorporated blues, spirituals, Gregorian chant, and Gershwin; it has been performed in Carnegie Hall and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Harlem’s Our Lady of Lourdes Church and Alvin Ailey’s City Center Dance Theater.110 To any who voiced misgivings about jazz in church or church in jazz, the Lutheran minister who hosted Ellington’s 1965 Christmas concert at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, “jazz pastor” John Garcia Gensel, explained that “everything is a part of God’s world, and the old, arbitrary separation” between what is and isn’t sacred music “no longer makes sense.”111 Not all on the church side of the separation agreed. “If  you’re raised in a church,” says Ida Goodson, “and you went into the fast life of being a blues singer or guitar-​playing singer,” well, that meant you’d “jump[ed] from out of the church.”112 The church in question is generally a black Baptist, Methodist, or Holiness church, where the requirement for preaching is the call to it and the gift for it, where sins are policed by the community and not capitalized in the confessional. “I didn quit church,” explains bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who brought news of his spiritual awakening to Christian elders and found himself rebuffed. “Church quit me. Cause they didn want me ta play my music. An they say I was a sinner. I’m not a sinner. I been converted. An I’m got religion.”113 One might decide that a version of the church-​blues split engraved itself on Billie Holiday in the form of her parental DNA, with the difference that the church in her case was Catholic. Sadie was in Billie’s description a “Mass every Sunday” (35)  Catholic “with her candles and creeping up to the altar” (21). Sadie’s family disapproved of her pregnancy and of guitar-​playing Clarence Holiday, who, said Holiday’s cousin Johnnie Fagan, “ain’t from the Point, not from the East Side, no,” so they “treat Sadie kind of cool ’cause of the kid. They give her a hard time.”114 Clarence Holiday played in Fletcher Henderson’s band, which at different times had featured Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong. “Of course, my mother considered that type of music sinful,” Holiday told the British press of her childhood afternoons spent T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

129  }

listening to Armstrong’s “West End Blues” at Alice Dean’s. Holiday was speaking to a gaggle of reporters who’d met her on the tarmac in London and kept pressing her on the topic of drugs. “She’d whip me in a minute if she caught me listening to it. Those days, we were supposed to listen to hymns, or something like that.”115 It’s a familiar scene, almost a copy of blues artist Ida Goodson’s memory, but strange in Holiday’s telling. It contradicted all the stories she told about Sadie’s lifelong devotion to itinerant jazzman Clarence Holiday, or her hospitality to her daughter’s crowd of show people. “You could be the biggest thief and scoundrel on the face of the earth, but all you had to do was tell Mom you were a musician and give her a little story and she’d give you everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down” (48).116 It’s likely that the woman Holiday portrayed as threatening to beat her for loving blues was not her mother Sadie but her aunt Eva Miller, the “Cousin Ida” of Lady Sings the Blues. “Cousin Ida and her husband were Baptists and they gave Mom and me a hard time because we were Catholic. We were always accused of thinking we were better than the Baptists” (21). Sadie sometimes shared a Baltimore address with her daughter and the Millers, but when it came time to enroll the girl for kindergarten in 1920, Sadie was absent, and Eva Miller is listed on city school records as Eleanora Fagan’s guardian. When Eleanora was moved from public school to St. Frances Academy, the private Catholic school for black girls run by the Oblate Sisters, she enrolled there as Sadie’s daughter.117 Holiday told the Amsterdam News that as a young girl she made it a point to torment a “religious aunt” by singing over and over “an old blues tune” that sent the aunt into “a fit every time.”118 The old blues song she sang as a child, Holiday explained, “was the original tune of my record of ‘Billie’s Blues.’ ”119 Holiday composed “Billie’s Blues” on the spot as the B-​side to her 1936 studio recording of Gershwin’s “Summertime” and went on to record it on eighteen more occasions, more than any song in her repertoire, including a live performance recorded in the last year of her life. Alongside the images and phrases Holiday plucked from the blues unconscious for “Billie’s Blues”—the meanest bad man, the beckoning freedom of the road, slavery’s travails rewritten now as love trouble—was a tribute to {  130  } 

religion around billie holiday

her mother as blues inspiration and sustaining source: My mother she give me something / It’s going to carry me through this world. Holiday’s blues striving set her in collision with her family’s Baptist flank and its punitive, unavailing injunctions against her living in ways it considered sinful. But not so in regard to her own and her mother’s streetwise Catholicism. For Holiday and her mother, sin was less their church’s either-​or than it was its stock-​in-​trade. It made for a spirit of accommodation, of one another not least. Sadie “found good in the strangest places and the strangest people,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues. “She could find good in pimps and whores, even in thieves and murderers.” Because “she believed God made them,” she was sure “there had to be some good” (47–48). James Fisher identifies a midcentury “Catholic lost generation,” an American subculture whose “fugitive soul” might be spotted in the likes of Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Martin Scorsese, or Bruce Springsteen. Its members share a temperament or style Fisher describes as indifferent to the demands of either orthodoxy or apostasy yet steeped nevertheless in a certain religious imagination. Its markers include loyalty, fierce to the point of self-​destructiveness, to an unpromising cohort of hustlers, dreamers, and thieves; a worldly spirit of acceptance bordering on fatalist resignation; a “preferential option” for the marginalized and broken that expresses itself not in campaigns for change but in anonymous gestures of hospitality and compassion; and an abiding willingness to forfeit personal autonomy for the “consoling promise of self-​dissolution,” chemical or spiritual, and the forms of community that offer it.120 Women’s names might be added to Fisher’s list of examples. Billie Holiday shared with her night-​world confederate Tallulah Bankhead a history of being sent to the convent for rehabilitation and an unvanquished refusal to moderate a temperament deemed excessive by the culture at large. But in neither case was this refusal a rejection of a nominally Catholic childhood formation, any more than Frank Sinatra’s voice, in  Bruce Springsteen’s description—a “voice filled with bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world”—was lifted against the ethnic Catholic New Jersey enclaves the two of them came up in.121 T H E S T O R Y O F J A Z Z   { 

131  }

The Irish street toughs and the Italian crime bosses, the reprobate clergy, the girls who got off track: none of them were in competition with the church. The urban Catholic Church had its internal critics and reformers, its dropouts, its weak and shameless examples. But unlike southern black Protestantism in the shadow of the blues, it had no nighttime version of itself to spar with, no underworld opponent against which the narcissism of minor differences might play itself out. Billie Holiday’s Catholicism, like Louis Armstrong’s, was casual and attenuated, lived in ways that prompted neither avowal nor rebellion. But Catholicism put them both into a larger musical conversation than the relay between rural South and urban North, between spirituals and swing. The Great Migration wasn’t just south to north; it was also Old World to New. Blackness and Catholicism helped to locate Holiday on both axes of that encounter, the influx from two directions of persons tired and poor and yearning to breathe free. Already in Baltimore, Holiday’s Colvin Street neighbors who weren’t listed on the 1920 census as Negro spoke Italian, Russian, and Yiddish in the main. It was the mix and clash of arrivals over land and sea that made New York City the “hip hive of ethnicity and back talk,” in John Leland’s description, that nurtured jazz.122 The spiritual creature that was big-​city jazz wasn’t just black with a blues tail. It was Italian and Irish, Lithuanian and Cuban. It was unevenly religious in kind and degree. Its giveaway marking was a Spanish tinge. And as any list of composers’ and lyricists’ names on its roster of standards would show—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern—it was Jewish all over.

{  132  } 

religion around billie holiday

4 crossing jordan

In 1969, two years before his death, Louis Armstrong composed from his bed at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan a handwritten account of his beginnings in jazz. He called it “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” Armstrong dedicated the narrative To my manager and pal Mr. Joe Glaser The best Friend That I’ve ever had May the Lord Bless him Watch over him always His boy + disciple Who loved him dearly Louis   Satchmo    Armstrong

Beneath the title he added:​ “A Real life story and experiences at the age of seven years old with the Karnofsky (Jewish) family, the year of 1907.”1 According to the document, the Karnofsky family, Louis and Tillie and their eight children, lived in New Orleans’s Third Ward with the Negroes, some Chinese, and a smattering of other Jews. The Negroes and Chinese had it hard, Armstrong said. “But the Jewish people in those early days were having problems of their own—Along with hard times from the other white folks nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race” (5). The Karnofskys owned a wagon and made money delivering coal and collecting scrap. Armstrong rode the scrap wagon with Alex Karnofsky during the day, and when they pulled into a street or alley they’d announce their arrival on a toy horn made of tin. It was an apprenticeship in New Orleans sound. Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax that the city’s “rags-​bottles-​and-​bones men would advertise their trade by playing the blues on the wooden mouthpieces of Christmas horns—yes sir, play more lowdown, dirty blues on those Kress horns than the rest of the country ever thought of.”2 At night Armstrong and another Karnofsky brother, Morris, loaded up the wagon and “delivered buckets of Stone Coal to the Sporting girls” (19) in Storyville, another musical apprenticeship, since as he carried the coal buckets upstairs he would hear piano music sounding from the parlors of upscale brothels like Miss Lulu White’s, where customers paid fifty dollars a beer. The Karnofskys paid Armstrong a wage and sent him home nights with food for his mother and sister. They told him he had talent—“perfect Tonation when I would sing” (15)—and let him blow the horn on the junk wagon. “After blowing the tin horn—so long—I wondered how I would do blowing a real horn,—a cornet was what I had in mind. Sure enough, I saw a little cornet in a pawn shop window”—and the Karnofskys advanced him five dollars to buy it. “After blowing into it a while I realized that I could play ‘Home Sweet Home’—then here come the Blues.” You might “think that my first horn was given to me by the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys (the orphanage)”—Armstrong had said as much many times. “But it wasn’t” (12). It was the Jewish family in New Orleans. And “when I got good enough on my Cornet” (14)—is there a {  134  } 

religion around billie holiday

sweeter understatement in the annals of jazz?—the Karnofsky family came to watch and to cheer, and six decades later the Karnofsky children and their children still do. “They encourage me to carry on” (18). Most memorably, the Karnofskys invited Armstrong to join his voice to theirs as they sang baby David Karnofsky to sleep each night with Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby.” “I sang the Lullaby Song with the family,” Armstrong wrote. “And I Still remember their Phrases” (11). Armstrong copied Berlin’s lyrics to “Russian Lullaby” into the document he was writing:​ Every night you’ll hear her Croon A Russian Lullaby Just a little Plaintive Tune When Baby Starts to Cry Rock a bye my Baby Some where there may be A Land, that’s Free For you and Me And a Russian Lullaby. (6–7) The first time composer Harold Arlen’s cantor father heard a Louis Armstrong record, he asked his son how it was that this blackest of New Orleans musicians could have ended up sounding so Jewish.3 “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” surfaced after Armstrong’s death and remains a little-​remarked addition to the archive, perhaps for the challenge of its unfiltered comparisons between African Americans and Jews. “In those early days the Jewish people were catching hell. But they did not Squawk, such as a bunch of Negroes, Sing the Blues all the time” (19). The Karnofsky document alters key dates and other details in Armstrong’s earlier accounts of his childhood, changes whose cumulative effect is to move his musical formation more squarely into a Jewish setting. There is no mention in the Karnofsky document of band instructor Peter Davis, Armstrong’s legendary mentor at the Colored Waifs’ Home. No sign of the Italian named Lorenzo (or Lonzo) who took Armstrong around on the junk wagon and introduced him to the tin horn. Nowhere the “ofay fellow” named Charlie who ran Armstrong C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

135  }

and a crew of newsboys and advanced him money for his pawnshop cornet:​the Jewish family takes over all of these roles.4 The lyrics to Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby,” the centerpiece of “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” were not published until 1927, when they were written for the opening of Samuel Rothafel’s Roxy Theatre in New York in March of that year. Armstrong’s memory of singing “Russian Lullaby” with the Karnofskys was likely clouded by affection and age, and perhaps also by the illness that had landed him at Beth Israel.5 Ten years before penning the Karnofsky document, Armstrong survived a heart attack in Italy, where he’d been playing two shows a day on a U.S. State Department tour of Europe and the Middle East. Armstrong was back on tour for the State Department the following year, this time throughout Africa. For a decade he would suffer unremittingly from the ailments that accompanied a deteriorating heart:​swelling in the legs and stomach, failing kidneys, congested lungs. In the Karnofsky document, Armstrong says that “Russian Lullaby” was “donated” by Dr. Gary Zucker, whom he credits with saving his life (6). Before his convalescence at Beth Israel, Armstrong had shown up in Zucker’s office, barely able to walk or breathe, and Zucker took a knife to Armstrong’s fluid-​filled lungs to save him. In 1907, the year in which Armstrong sets his reminiscences, Irving Berlin, né Israel Baline, was still in his teens and living in a cold-​water flat on New York’s Lower East Side, where his family had fled to escape the terrorism carried out against Russian Jews under Nicholas  II. “I had a long time admiration for the Jewish People,” Armstrong says. “Especially with their long time of courage, taking So Much Abuse for so long” (8). While “Russian Lullaby” was in part traditional, with a melody cribbed from Tchaikovsky, the line “a land that’s free for you and me” is pure God-​bless-​America Irving Berlin.6 As Armstrong added pages to “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans,” it ventured afield of its title to encompass other people, places, and things. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who danced with Lena Horne in Stormy Weather the summer Harlem burned. Barney Bigard, who played with Billie Holiday in both of the films she made. Perdido Street’s Funky Butt Hall, named for a Buddy Bolden favorite, which became a Baptist church on Sunday mornings once the revelers {  136  } 

religion around billie holiday

had gone. Freddie Keppard, who refused to record for fear his sound would be stolen, and drank away his talent. Joe “King” Oliver. Jelly Roll Morton on piano at Miss Lulu’s. Where the privies were in the Third Ward. What goes into a po’ boy sandwich. What it felt like to arrive in Chicago, then what it was like to arrive in New York. The story of “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” seems always on the verge of becoming the story of Louis Armstrong, complete. Still, he never changed the title, and he returned repeatedly to the document’s primal scene, the memory of being gathered to the Karnofsky family bosom to the strains of Irving Berlin. “Speaking of the wonderful Karnofsky family” (17), he’d say, apropos of anything—and then a chorus of “Russian Lullaby” again. “This is the song that I sang when I was Seven years old—with the Karnofsky family when I was working for them, every night at their house when Mother Karnofsky would rock the Baby David to Sleep” (7). He describes the scene a dozen ways, and even copies out the lyrics to “Russian Lullaby” four separate times. Singing with the Jewish family, Armstrong recalled, “made a little Negro boy such as me feel, like a Human Being” (30). With its cinematic sweep, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” might have scripted a different version of Orson Welles’s The Story of Jazz:​ the Jewish version. Its relationship to Armstrong’s biography is as complex as the jostle of black and Jewish voices in the making of American song. On one level, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” offers itself as a large-​hearted allegory of black American musicians and the Jewish composers, agents, producers, and lyricists who put them in business. It’s a love letter not only to the Karnofskys and Joe Glaser but to the Gershwins and Irving Berlin, to the Harold Arlens, Vernon Dukes, and Jerome Kerns who made jazz, spiffed-​up and glamorous, from a New Orleans street kid with a horn, or from some low-​ down dirty blues. They “were very much concerned about my future in music,” said Armstrong of his Jewish family. “They could see that I had music in my Soul. They really wanted me to be Something in life. And music was it” (16). On another level, the Karnofsky document bears witness to traumas heretofore unnarrated in the accounts Armstrong gave of his life. However heartwarming its reminiscences of the Karnofskys, “Louis C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

137  }

Armstrong + the Jewish Family” remains difficult to square with the Louis Armstrong whom America embraced as a purveyor of joy and an ambassador of intercultural understanding. I will love the Jewish people, all of my life. The Negroes always wanted pity. They did that in places of going to work, Instead of gambling, shooting and Cutting up one another so much. But real Meek when just one white man—chase a hundred Negroes, just like Rats. (9) The Negroes always hated the Jewish people who never harmed anybody, but they stuck together. And by doing that, they had to have success. Negroes never did stick together and they never will. They hold too much malice—Jealousy deep down in their heart for the few Negroes who tries. But the odds were (are) against them. Of course, we are all well aware of the Congo Square—Slavery—Lynchings and all of that stuff. Maybe the Jewish people did not go through’ All of those things, but they went through just as much. Still they stuck together. Most of the Negroes who went through some of those tortures, they asked for it. (9) As far as us Negroes, well, I don’t have to explain anything. Am sure—you already know. At ten years old I could see—the Bluffings that those Old Fat Belly Stinking very Smelly Dirty White Folks were putting Down. It seemed as though the only thing they cared about was their Shot Guns or those Old time Shot Guns which they had strapped around them. So they get full of their Mint Julep or that bad whisky, the poor white Trash were Guzzling down, like water, then when they get so Damn Drunk until they’d go out of their minds—then it’s Nigger Hunting time. Any Nigger. (17) So near the end of his life, the end of the 1960s, the story of his colored-​ waif beginnings was a story Louis Armstrong could no longer retail in its particulars as joy. {  138  } 

religion around billie holiday

In the week after her death, William Dufty published “The True Story of Billie Holiday” in six installments in the New York Post. In the first, he describes Holiday as Louis Armstrong’s foil, she the “unrepentant sinner” and he the American saint, her “Strange Fruit” the blistering and clear-​eyed reproach to his shambling, calming “Sleepy Time Down South.”7 Armstrong performed Armstrong, an irrepressible genius and an irrepressible happiness. His contribution to the soundtrack for the year 1968 in America was an album of Walt Disney favorites from the likes of The Jungle Book and Song of the South. It was what his audiences bought and believed, what the State Department sent abroad, what he’d reliably offered to America and the world for five decades. It was why he was in the hospital with his lungs blown out now. But maybe, the Karnofsky document suggests, the production of joy for which Armstrong was revered was all along a kind of Jewish stagecraft. Looking back from his bed at Beth Israel, he might have been brought up short by the distance between the persona he crafted and what it had served him as the vehicle out of:​a childhood so materially precarious that he was supporting his family as a laborer by the age of five, so emotionally strained and stretched that his baby sister went by the name of Mama. And haunted everywhere by a quotidian racial terror:​“They [white people] wouldn’t give up until they would find one. From then on, Lord have mercy on the poor Darkie. Then they would Torture the poor Darkie, as innocent as he may be. They would get their usual Ignorant Chess Cat laughs before they would shoot him down—like a Dog. My my my, those were the days” (17). The lyrics to “Russian Lullaby” made Armstrong’s improbable flourishing believable when his recollected life experience would not. Speaking of the wonderful Karnofsky family. Just before I began to grow up and Singing with Papa and Mama Karnofsky, Morris and Alex—we all would sing this special tune, while Mama Karnofsky would have the baby in her arms— Rocking him until he would go to sleep:​ Russian Lullaby Every Night you’ll hear me Croon C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

139  }

A Russian Lullaby Just a little plaintive tune When Baby Starts to Cry Rock a bye my Baby Somewhere there may be A Land that’s free For you and Me . . . (17–18) Whistle a Happy Tune. Zip-​a-​Dee-​Doo-​Dah. Whatever awoke in Armstrong the fury and damage he wrote back into his life from his bed at Beth Israel, he could still make sense of the Louis Armstrong story by putting it inside a Jewish song. It’s sometimes said that American popular song begins in a marriage between Delta blues and Tin Pan Alley, W. C. Handy officiating.8 Blues and Jews:​it’s a reduction that leaves out other musical streams that go into the making of American song, black and European alike. But blues and Jewish songwriting do meet up at some interesting crossroads, among them a discretionary disregard or disavowal of religious lineage, and a kind of homeopathic approach to misery. “African Americans often play the blues to get rid of the blues,” says Albert Murray, just as “Jews wail to relieve their melancholy.”9 After leaving the Moses Stokes troupe in 1912, Ma Rainey and her husband, Will, formed their own traveling act; they called themselves Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. “Assassinators” made a sonorous play on ass and sass, both amply in evidence in Rainey’s oeuvre, and conveyed the proto-​ gangsta toughness of the woman who boasted in her lyrics to “Broken Hearted Blues” that she “killed everybody, Judge,” “even killed her man.” But “assassinators of the blues” was also a job description for the performers who made blues, in the affective sense of woes, both weapon and target. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive” and “to transcend it,” Ralph Ellison said, “not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-​tragic, near-​comic lyricism.”10 “Near-​tragic, near-​comic lyricism” also describes the signature piquancy and charm of jazz standards penned in the main by Jewish {  140  } 

religion around billie holiday

immigrants:​ mordant, irreverent, intimate with abrading loss, still resiliently sexual and alive. Fresh. (When Louis Armstrong, spiritual son of Jews and blues, met Pope Paul VI in 1968, the pontiff asked whether Armstrong and his wife had children. “No, Daddy,” Armstrong is said to have replied. “But we’re still wailing.”)11 What makes the American songbook so Jewish, David Lehman suggests, has to do with both the words and a “plaintive undertow” in the sound:​a “bent note,” a “melancholy edge,” a “feeling that yearning is eternal and sorrow not very far from the moment’s joy.”12 A boxed set of Billie Holiday’s Jewish American songbook might start with Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” and the numbers from Porgy and Bess (George and Ira Gershwin) and Show Boat (Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern) she made her own—“I Loves You, Porgy,” “Summertime,” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” It might contain another dozen or so Gershwins (including “Things Are Looking Up,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It”), with strong showings by Irving Berlin (“He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” “This Year’s Kisses,” “Cheek to Cheek”), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“Blue Moon,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Glad to Be Unhappy”), Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, singly and together (“The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” “I Must Have That Man”), Harold Arlen (“I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine”), and Vernon Duke (“I Can’t Get Started,” “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New York”). It would skew heavily toward the sessions from the 1930s with Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra, Benny Goodman now and then sitting in, and include favorites from lesser-​ known composers like Ralph Rainger (“Moanin’ Low,” “I Wished on the Moon,” “Miss Brown to You”), Harry Tobias (“No Regrets”), J. Fred Coots (“You Go to My Head”), and Allie Wrubel (“What a Little Moonlight Can Do”), who went on to win an Academy Award for “Zip-​a-​Dee-​ Doo-​Dah” from Song of the South. “Lady Day’s voice conveys a sense of deliverance and release” in the lighter songs, Angela Davis suggests, and manages often to interpret “a song as ‘happy’ that most people would unhesitantly classify as ‘sad.’ ” Davis identifies Holiday’s playful diversions of lyric intent as a blues achievement, “rooted in West African histories” in which C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

141  }

“different meanings are not necessarily mutually exclusive.”13 A nice example is Holiday’s rendition of “Trav’lin’ All Alone” by blues composer J. C. Johnson, which figures in a canonical scene of Holiday myth. In a story she told many times, her singing career began when she was barely into her teens and looking for a job as a dancer at a Harlem club called Pod’s and Jerry’s, or the Log Cabin, or Mexico’s—it depended on the telling.14 She and Sadie were bunked up nearby with no food and no money and their belongings about to be thrown out in the street. Billie danced woodenly on stage and was ordered to go home when a piano player took pity on her and asked if she could sing. She started into “Trav’lin’ All Alone” and, the story goes, brought the house to its knees. Her 1937 recording of the song with Lester Young and Buck Clayton is classic early Holiday:​sweetly, surprisingly up-​tempo even as it carries, gently, the unshakeable blues ache of the lyric. In this, Holiday and her accompanists weren’t playing against a Tin Pan Alley idiom, as Angela Davis suggests, but very much inside one. There’s a nice klezmer vibe in the opening horns, and the little drama of the lyric, a sentimental exile’s lament, could easily have come from the Yiddish tenement songs that enterprising Jews wrote and sold for pennies a sheet in gas lamp–era New York.15 The story of “Trav’lin’ All Alone” that Holiday told again and again—the city urchin in dire straits, saved by underdog effort, the kindness of strangers, and an unforgettable way with a song—might have been penned for the theater by Irving Berlin. It might have been Irving Berlin. Billie Holiday had no Karnofsky family in her corner. The nearest equivalent to an adoptive family was Bill Dufty and his then wife Maely, a Russian Jew “done out of her family by Hitler.” Billie and Maely became “family to each other,” Dufty said, “scrapping, fighting, but God help the unfortunate stranger who came between them to take sides.” When Dufty was asked how he came by the chutzpah to ghostwrite the life of Billie Holiday, he would say she and he were related by marriage. Billie was godmother to the Duftys’ son, Bevan, and Maely, Dufty said, was “midwife” to Lady Sings the Blues.16 Holiday lived with the Duftys for stretches of time when it pleased her, or when she needed safe haven from men who were after her, the feds or a husband or boyfriend bent on roughing her up. Maely called Louis McKay {  142  } 

religion around billie holiday

“Louis Decay” for the ruination he brought down on her friend. An earlier companion, the self-​described “half-​Negro, half-​Jew” John Levy, was rumored to be worse; pages cut from the published version of Lady Sings the Blues include a scene of Maely tweezing strands of rotted catgut from Holiday’s scalp after Levy broke a bottle over her head and paid a “drunken bootleg doctor” to suture the wound rather than risk arrest by taking her to a hospital.17 A different John Levy, who played bass on some of Holiday’s sets, decided he needed to move on because he was tired of being confused with “John Levy, the pimp.”18 When John Levy the pimp died of a blood clot on Christmas Eve 1956, Holiday wired the Duftys, “Don’t tell Bevin there is no Santa.”19 Holiday had a more contentious relationship with Joe Glaser than did Armstrong, the apparent fierceness of whose loyalties—“What can I tell you? Asking me about Joe is like askin’ a chile ’bout its daddy”— continues to vex and divide.20 It was Joe Glaser who sent Armstrong onto the set of Rhapsody in Black and Blue in a leopard-​skin toga, Joe Glaser who, managing both Armstrong and Billie Holiday during the making of New Orleans, insisted she take the part of a singing maid when the other musicians appeared by name in the film as themselves. Glaser came to jazz by way of fellowship with the Chicago gangsters who kept the Prohibition-​era night world awash in booze. In 1928 Glaser, who then managed a Chicago nightspot called the Plantation, was convicted of raping a fourteen-​year-​old girl and sentenced to ten years in prison. He never served time; instead, he or his associates kidnapped the girl from the House of the Good Shepherd in Chicago and prevailed upon her to change her story. The Illinois Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict, and Glaser was cleared. In 1935 the Chicago Tribune reported that a grand jury had indicted Glaser and two members of his “vice syndicate” in a robbery scheme that supplied contraband liquor to a different cabaret he managed. Again he escaped doing time.21 After repeal, Glaser relied on his mob connections to smooth his talent’s way in the business, which included keeping Holiday supplied with the junk she needed and Armstrong with the weed he enjoyed. It’s rumored that Glaser set up Holiday’s 1947 heroin arrest, whether for publicity, for “her own good,” or to take the heat off Armstrong, whom federal drug enforcement under celebrity-​hungry Harry Anslinger also had in its C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

143  }

sights.22 Glaser might have thrown his gangster weight to get Holiday’s cabaret card restored after she served time in prison—Frank Sinatra counted on his mob connections to buffer his refusal ever to obtain one—but never did.23 A tape left running in a 1955 studio session records Holiday’s scurrilous imitation of a Jewish nightclub owner in Chicago who refused to pay her after hearing her sing; Glaser, who urged Holiday to appease the man by singing in a more accessible style, is as much the subject of her rant. Joe Glaser had me about seven-​eight years and he told me, “you gotta sing pop songs; you gotta sweet up the tempo.” I said, “Fuck you, I’m going to sing like I want to sing. . . . This is my way of doing it and Mr. Glaser I’m sorry.” . . . I said, “You son of a bitch, you sing it. I’m gonna sing my way and you sing your way.” You know I got to live with my tunes before I sing a song. It’s got to mean something, man.24 Holiday’s refusal to “sweet up” on cue and her identification of Glaser with a superficial style of singing very different from her own:​ these might lend support to those who contend that the mostly Jewish business of Tin Pan Alley shackled Billie Holiday and other black artists of the era to “insipid” materials “composed around what were considered marketable formulas,” undemanding songs of love and devotion above all.25 But listen to Holiday sing “My Yiddishe Momme,” another accidental recording, this one from 1956. Holiday was singing to toddler Bevan Dufty, who can be heard babbling on the tape. Like Armstrong in “Russian Lullaby,” Holiday voices a formative nurture and a haunting debt in the form of a Jewish song.26 “My Yiddishe Momme” (words Jack Yellen, music Lew Pollack) was a top-​ten record in 1928 when Sophie Tucker sang it, English on one side, Yiddish on the other. Holiday’s bootleg “Yiddishe Momme” appears on a 2010 compilation billed as the “Secret Musical History of Black-​Jewish Relations” produced by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. “Holiday drains the maudlin from Tucker’s version,” say the liner notes, “and rides it like a wave of ache.” In her rendition {  144  } 

religion around billie holiday

of “My Yiddishe Momme,” Hilton Als hears Holiday “becoming the voice of universal longing by letting Jewish sentiment rest in, and run through, the blood that filled her Black soul, her Black body.”27 The trick to making art when one is perennially on the receiving end of prejudice, Als ventures, is to refuse the temptation to disconnect, to persist in making it one’s task “to imagine and sometimes empathize with others who are not yourself, the better to make art out of this condition:​the human condition.” Turning fellow feeling into art:​it already sounds schmaltzy, which makes it a nice description of what songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley-​to-​Broadway line—their labor so fundamentally Jewish, says David Lehman, yet “so unrelated to the actual religion”— made it the work of their music to do.28 To put oneself in the other guy’s shoes, to acknowledge that yes, things really are that bad, and to offer companionable good cheer even so. Stormy Weather. You’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues. Somewhere over the Rainbow. Start All Over Again. The Jewish lyric’s work of imagining oneself in the place of another was not just a business of empathy, but also—God bless America—​ of self-​reinvention, of starting over as someone or something entirely new. Jerome Robbins first imagined West Side Story with a cast of clashing Catholics and Jews. Its rewriting as a conflict between blue-​collar whites and Puerto Ricans, Lehman suggests, follows a pattern that begins with Al Jolson’s jazz-​singing cantor’s son in blackface:​ “the Jew who shows himself as something other than who he is.” Jewish songwriters made an American songbook that sounded like spirituals (“Ol’  Man River” from Show Boat, Hammerstein and Kern), clip-​clopping cowpokes on horseback (“Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein), and steamy Latin cross-​rhythms (“America” from West Side Story, Bernstein and Sondheim). What’s most Jewish about the songbook, Lehman suggests, may be the paradox of its makers’ fervent desire to leave Jewishness to one side, to escape the murderous Old World and the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for the great wide open American dream. Okay by me in America, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.29 W. C. Handy recalled that the best blues he heard at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the term blues came into wide use, came C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

145  }

from jukes and barrelhouses in the disreputable part of Clarksdale, Mississippi, that billed itself “The New World.”30 To many in the cosmopolitan North, the South was perennially an old world, shrouded in the lingering darkness of slavery and benighted by old-​time religion. But the South had its own secular impulse, just as the North had a past in slavery, obscured in the spatial imaginary of abolitionism. Casting an eye on his African Methodist Episcopal Church’s empty pews and depleted coffers in the Mississippi towns being shuttered by migration in the early 1920s, an AME preacher and district superintendent stoically observed that a “moving spirit is in the air.”31 Blues, suggests Adam Gussow, was this moving spirit’s sound, its pulse and feel. Declining church allegiance among black southern youth in the 1920s and 1930s surprised its documenting sociologists, who perhaps assumed that only educated city dwellers were able and inclined to alter their childhood religious patterning. Among black southerners for whom music competed with the church in directing the motions of bodies and souls, blues provided a soundtrack for generational rebellion. In so doing, blues also chronicled the exodus from environments sufficiently punishing that, as Langston Hughes put it, relief could long be found “only in the sorrow songs,” that is, the spirituals of the church. Now, in place of religious songs, said Hughes, “new words are formed, / Bitter / With the past / But sweet / With the dream.”32 Bitter was my cup But no more will I be the mourner For I’ve certainly turned the corner Oh, things are looking up. That, by the way, was Billie Holiday singing George and Ira Gershwin with Teddy Wilson’s Orchestra in 1938, Vido Musso filling in for Lester Young on sax. Holiday and Lester Young were deeply devoted partners in song who gave each other the enduring, majestic endearments Lady and Prez.33 Together they made a record sixty-​seven sides, most before the war, and died young of long erosions within months of one another in 1959. For stretches of time they were estranged, but it’s said at the end that {  146  } 

religion around billie holiday

each of them played Billie Holiday records late into the night in the places where they lived alone, he to hear her voice, she to hear his horn. Young was born in Mississippi into a family of touring musicians with whom he traveled down to New Orleans, up to Minneapolis, finally breaking with the Young Family Band in 1927 because he was tired of playing riverboats and tent shows. It was a representative backstory in Harlem, where Young would share an apartment with Billie and Sadie in the early 1930s. Holiday set her arrival in Harlem in 1927, the year Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat made its Broadway debut, Al Jolson blacked up in The Jazz Singer, and the Great Mississippi Flood emptied the Delta of thousands more who turned their way north. In 1927 Langston Hughes published Fine Clothes to the Jew, his book of poems that followed Weary Blues. The Negro critics were not pleased, Hughes recalled. They “called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public.”34 Fine Clothes to the Jew, the title, refers to a bluesy poem called “Hard Luck,” whose speaker tells of putting his Sunday best in hock to a Jewish pawnbroker to get a dollar and a half for gin. But it also hints at the complex relays among blackness, Jewishness, Americanness, and respectability in New York’s musical culture. The Harlem-​ based Amsterdam News titled its review of the book “Langston Hughes— The Sewer Dweller” and said that Hughes had produced “100 pages of trash,” not of the straw and paper variety but “reek[ing] of the gutter,” in order to satisfy the prurience of “white publishers” and the “morbid tendencies of a jazz-​crazed word.”35 By contrast, the paper’s fifty-​eight notices of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat in 1927 and 1928 took a range of positions, but in the main praised the production as a venue for black talents like Paul Robeson, whose wattage transcended the cribbed and unflattering roles allowed to them. (Among its scenes, many played show-​within-​a-​show style, Show Boat included an exhibition of supposed Dahomey natives at the African Pavilion of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, chanting in an ersatz native language before reverting to their “real” Old Negro dialect.) As long as plays like Show Boat remain popular, an Amsterdam News correspondent concluded, there “will be an increasing demand for Negroes to give an air of reality to them.”36 C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

147  }

Blackness on the New York stage was sometimes the anteroom a song needed to pass through on its way to a wider, more middlebrow regard. This was particularly true of songs with a louche vibe, in keeping with a musical tradition of departing from whiteness for license to take up appealingly disreputable themes. In this way, blackness as musical mise-​en-​scène expanded the performative possibilities for white and black artists alike. Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale,” written for a 1930 revue, The New Yorkers, was first sung by Kathryn Crawford on a stage set made to look like Reuben’s Delicatessen. Jewish, but still too white:​ the song was banned from radio and widely panned. Then the producers switched out Crawford for Elisabeth Welch of known Irish, black, and Native American heritage; the stage set was also changed from Reuben’s to a mock-​up of the Cotton Club. After that, the song became a hit for both white and black performers who recorded it, including Libby Holman, Mel Tormé, and Billie Holiday.37 So much of American music comes of Jews channeling blackness. Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice singing brassy songs in blackface:​ Hello Barbra, Hello Bette, Hello, Dolly. Venturesome Libby Holman’s career in blues, which began when she sang “Moanin’ Low” on Broadway in the persona of a Harlem prostitute and eventually teamed her with Josh White in the first white-​black duo to tour nationally. Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, singly and together:​ in Berlin’s 1930 Warner Brothers musical Mammy, Jolson plays a blackface minstrel who sings of Dixie’s charms and mammy’s arms; on its merits, he would lobby the Gershwins to cast him in the role of Porgy. Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz, who, having invested in the song-​and-​dance revue Hot Chocolates, is said to have put a gun to black composer Andy Razaf’s head and ordered him to write a “funny” song for the show on the spot:​ “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” was the stunning real-​time result.38 A line in Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke’s “I Can’t Get Started” cast everyone who ever voiced the part of its spectacularly powerful and perpetually unavailing suitor, from Bob Hope to Billie Holiday, as black, and as Yahweh:​“Green Pastures wanted me to play God.” The black-​Jewish circuitry of American popular song made a complicated scene. Not all Jewish songs that were sung or otherwise voiced in black idioms were show tunes. Still, they make an implicit theater, {  148  } 

religion around billie holiday

a drama of mutual recognition. Children of diaspora. Latecomers to the American dream. Offspring of refugees, exiles, and slaves.39 Julie the showgirl who passes for white in Show Boat:​she’s the invisible Jew who yearns to blend in and be at home in America. Porgy the beggar who petitions indefatigably for love:​ he may be kneecapped by prejudice, but hear what he can do with a tune. In “his lighter music,” James Weldon Johnson wrote, “the Negro has given America its best known distinctive form of art,” “fused and then developed, chiefly by Jewish musicians, until it has become our national medium of expressing ourselves musically in popular form.”40 They that carried us away captive required of us a song.41 As Broadway and Tin Pan Alley stitched Jewish-​American genealogies to the Old Negro, so African Americans were practiced at fusing history to the Jewish sacred past. “The Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew,” James Baldwin wrote; the “more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt.”42 In the words of the spiritual:​ When Israel was in Egypt’s land:​ Let my people go, Oppress’d so hard they could not stand:​ Let my People go. Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land, Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go. That was Louis Armstrong, or Fats Waller, or the Golden Gate Quartet. Or it was Paul Robeson, who released a recording of “Go Down Moses” on a compilation of spirituals that included “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat. “Musically [‘Ol’ Man River’] is a complete miracle,” Robeson explained to critic Gilbert Seldes, “the creation of the tone of the Negro spiritual by an alien to the negro’s traditions.” Robeson also sang arias in French, Italian, and German but said that the “Jewish sigh and tear” were as close to him as “the traditions of my race.”43 Sometimes the joining of black and Jewish voices allowed for a tentative surfacing of what otherwise stayed trammeled underground. C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

149  }

Consider the muted cross-​referencing of black and Jewish history in Irving Berlin’s “Supper Time,” a song about lynching written for Ethel Waters in As Thousands Cheer. Berlin said he possessed just one childhood memory from before 1893, the year his family docked in New York from present-​day Belarus; it was lying on a blanket by the side of the road and watching as his family’s wooden house in Mogilev was torched and burned to the ground.44 Moishe and Roza Gershowitz (later Gershwin) and the Wonskolaser sons (later Warner Brothers) escaped the murderous pogroms of imperial Russia too, but Broadway and Hollywood didn’t really find musical material in the terrorizing of eastern European Jews until Fiddler on the Roof. The contemporaneous American scene of lynching, meanwhile, remained likewise unspoken in early blues performance, even as lynch mobs and tent shows shadowed one another on rural southern roads, competing entertainments with promoters, handbills, and revelers who came by chartered bus or train.45 As Thousands Cheer was a topical revue, with songs and skits pulled from the headlines in the year of its Broadway run, which began in late September 1933. The number of documented lynchings of African American men reached twenty-​four in 1933, a decade-​long high and a sharp reversal of several years’ steady decline. Waters’s persona in As Thousands Cheer sings “Supper Time” after learning that her husband is among them. Perhaps, as they listened, New York audiences thought of George Armwood, dragged from jail that October in not-​ so-​far-​off Princess Anne, Maryland, and hanged from a tree. “Then members of the mob, shouting, seized the loose end of the rope and dragged the body half a mile on Main Street to a blazing pile in the centre of the thoroughfare,” the New York Times reported. “Hundreds of persons, packed so thickly about the fire that police could not fight their way through, watched the body burn.”46  Waters’s persona can’t bring herself to set the table or to quiet her hungry kids because that man o’ mine, she sings, ain’t comin’ home no more. Subsequent recordings of “Supper Time” by Judy Garland and June Christy and Barbra Streisand made Berlin’s number a popular torch song, one you might never guess was about lynching at all. Voicing blackness set Jewish songwriters squarely within a homegrown tradition of minstrel performance, American as apple pie. {  150  } 

religion around billie holiday

Blacking up is how Jews like The Jazz Singer’s Jakie Rabinowitz become American. Andrea Most suggests that more than blackness was the conduit of Jewish musical belonging; what helped Jews make themselves at home in America was a genius for exploiting the malleability of race in general. What kind of music do you write for an Irishman’s story of an Italian in China? Jerome Kern’s answer to Oscar Hammerstein’s question about the score he would work up for a musical about Marco Polo was “good Jewish music.”47 If an actor could be white or black or a South Pacific islander or the king of Siam onstage, a Lithuanian or Polish Jew could be an American. Crafting the persona one desires for the setting at hand:​What could be more American than that? Still, blackness presented a particular enticement, wrapped in a paradox. In the racial imaginary of good Jewish music, blackness signaled both liberty and its opposite. Their voicing of blackness might indeed testify, as Most suggests, to “the marvelous freedom Jews felt in America to invent themselves anew.”48 Yet what were voiced through blackness were often the very limitations that Jews threw off via race-​bending performance. Blackness:​how vast the possible scope of our remaking. Blackness:​ how much we have overcome to be here. As the marker of fresh license or old injuries survived, blackness was in either case a place to leave the beleaguered ethno-​religious particularity of Jewishness behind. “It was understood on Broadway,” Ann Douglas writes, that “you started black or ethnic and got whiter and more Wasp as, and if, success came your way.” It was a “class pattern as much as a racial or ethnic one,” says Douglas—“black to white, ethnic to Wasp, lower class to upper,” visibly to invisibly marked in one’s history, commitments, and struggles.49 Jewish songwriters could change their names, move to Hollywood, play golf with the goyim. Mamie Levy and William Abrahams’s son could be Richard Rodgers. Israel Baline could be Irving Berlin. Eleanora Fagan could be Billie Holiday, but it wasn’t quite the same thing. The perception that Hammerstein and Kern were sloughing ethnic infirmity onto blackness seemed to lie at the root of protests against Show Boat’s “portrayal of blacks as shuffling, mumbling, dancing, singing caricatures” during a 1993 revival in Toronto. The publisher of Canada’s largest black newspaper remarked of the production that Jews of all people “must know what it is like to be reviled, denigrated and to suffer C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

151  }

abuse.” In a column addressed to Jews, he wrote, “I feel my people’s pain just as surely as you feel yours.”50 Director Harold Prince, who brought the Toronto revival of Show Boat to Broadway, insisted that he would “not rewrite history”:​ “The fact that during the 45-year period depicted in our musical there were lynchings, imprisonment, and forced labor of the blacks in the United States is irrefutable.”51 Show Boat depicted the rise of American popular sound, riverboat to cabaret to jazz, as sharing a history with racial terrorism. The identification of black and Jewish struggles along the way wasn’t the problem; it was the point. The invisibility of Jewishness in Jewish popular song fit itself to the generational rebellion of black southerners who had their own reasons for leaving religion behind. New York in the 1920s was where cantors’ kids and preachers’ kids—Irving Berlin and W. C. Handy, Al Jolson and Fats Waller, Harold Arlen and Bessie Smith—made an American soundtrack from the contest between the past, one’s people, and old-​ time religion, on the one hand, and the future, self-​making, and secular lives, on the other.52 I have this word to bring, This thing to say, This song to sing:​   Bitter was the day   When I bowed my back   Beneath the slaver’s whip. That day is past. —Langston Hughes, “A New Song”

“Setting down the sacred past” is Laurie Maffly-​Kipp’s resonant phrase to describe the labors of African American lay historians—storytellers, preachers, diarists—who wrote black memory into the long nineteenth century. It’s evocative as well of the secularizing impulses of the Harlem Renaissance, whose representative artists and intellectuals strove {  152  } 

religion around billie holiday

to come to terms with a black sacred past of religious consciousness nurtured in bondage. To set down the sacred past might mean to put off its yoke, to lay down the burden of black religion once and for all. Somewhat differently, to set it down might be to make religious inheritance the implicit baseline for an index of change:​ even as the New Negro left rural kin behind, still he or she might on occasion conjure an Old Negro, or the cultural relics thereof—old-​time sermons, spirituals, blues—as counterpoint, a reminder of what pre-​exodus life was like. In a spirit closer to Maffly-​Kipp’s examples, to set down the sacred past might mean to fix memory in less fugitive forms, the better to create a usable history. Alternatively, to set down the sacred past might be to translate “old” religious strivings into the materials of modernist expression. Or it might mean any of these in combination.53 A nice example of the sacred past becoming material in the Harlem Renaissance, and an exception to the invisibility of religion in the pages of Locke’s New Negro anthology, is James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation.” Johnson’s poem retells Genesis 1–3 in the imagery and rhythms (though not the dialect) of an old-​time Negro preacher in the South. “And God stepped out on space,” it begins, “And He looked around and said, / I’m lonely—/ I’ll make me a world.”54 Johnson went on to publish “The Creation” in God’s Trombones:​Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), a book that sought to do for African Americans “something like what [J. M.] Synge did for the Irish,” which was to “express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without.”55 The result looked backward and forward at once:​the poem’s figure of the deity whispering a mud-​sculpture Adam into being “like a mammy bending over her baby” at once recurs to the vernacular imagery of black women’s servitude and boldly liberates the divine image at once from patriarchy and whiteness.56 Its rendering of God in a poetic vocabulary of human gestures, vulnerabilities, and powers likewise gives expression to a childlike anthropomorphism—“the story of Jehovah creating the earth and man we now realize belongs to the infancy of our civilization,” noted a reviewer of The Green Pastures, in which Bible stories were enacted by an all-​black cast57—and underscores what northern-​educated clergy preached as the progressive, Social Gospel theology of human being as God’s embodiment in the world. Better the C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

153  }

image of God should be the “moving, breathing frame of me,” wrote Countee Cullen in “The Black Christ,” “Strong hands and feet, live heart and eyes.”58 The image of the Black Christ, invoked elsewhere by Cullen in “Christ Recrucified” and by other Harlem Renaissance writers in many contexts, linked the scene of crucifixion with the reality of lynching.59 There were different ways this could go. The figure of the bleeding, bastard “Nigger Christ  / On the cross of the South,” as  Langston Hughes put it in his “Christ in Alabama,” aimed most obviously at any who missed the connection between cross and lynching tree.60 In late 1931, Hughes, then on a speaking tour through the South, read “Christ in Alabama” to a North Carolina audience. The poem appeared in the journal Contempo in response to a call for work on the Scottsboro trial. Hughes had planned to spend part of his trip meeting with the Scottsboro defendants, nine young black men falsely accused of rape, eight of whom were sentenced to death for the crime. But the white response in North Carolina to “Christ in Alabama”—“bad enough to call Christ a bastard,” in Hughes’s summary, “but to call Him a nigger” went too perilously far—made him fear for his safety, and he returned early to New York.61 In Hughes’s 1935 short story “Big Meeting,” a carload of white people pull up to a Negro tent revival, expecting to be entertained. They include the owner of a lunch counter “where colored people couldn’t buy a glass of soda” and a lady who “always did love to hear the darkies” sing. From under the tent a series of rousing testimonies build up to the preacher’s dramatic rendering of Golgotha— “Mob cussin’ and hootin’ my Jesus! . . . They stoned Him first, they stoned Him! Called Him everything but a child of God. Then they lynched him on the cross”—and the car with the white people screeches “noisily away in a swirl of dust.”62 Together, “Christ in Alabama” and “Big Meeting” announce the limits of their reach:​it was on racists to see Jesus in the lynched black body, and that wasn’t happening. Or it was happening, but it was not a deterrent. Walter White’s 1929 Rope and Faggot:​ A Biography of Judge Lynch had argued that lynch mobs were driven by an evangelical Christian fervor, and sociologist Arthur Raper’s 1933 Tragedy of Lynching appeared to confirm it:​ the counties highest in church attendance, {  154  } 

religion around billie holiday

Raper showed, were those most likely to rustle up a lynching.63 It was a Hallelujah event. “They kill him now with famished tongues of fire,” Countee Cullen wrote in “Christ Recrucified.” “And while he burns, good men, and women too / Shout, battling for his black and brittle bones.”64 The critique of racial terror implicit in the image of the cross as lynching tree could shade into a critique of Christianity writ large. In 1930–31 the New Masses published a series of “Negro songs of protest” that Lawrence Gellert said he’d taped or taken down on collecting trips through the South. The anti-​lynching song “Sistern and Brethren,” in Gellert’s account, had come from a lay preacher in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. Perhaps it was a riff on the traditional hymn “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree,” which delights in the cross as the fruit-​ bearing Tree of Life. Sistern an’ Brethren Stop foolin wit’ pray When black face is lifted Lawd turnin’ ‘way . . . Your head tain’ no apple For danglin’ f’om a tree Your body no carcass For barbecuein’ on a spree.65 “Sistern and Brethren” appeared in a collection published by Gellert in 1936 under the title Negro Songs of Protest, hailed as a landmark document in both the New Masses and the Daily Worker. After weighing the evidence, including tapes of Gellert prompting those he recorded, Gellert’s largely sympathetic biographer Bruce Conforth decided that Gellert made up most of the protest songs he published in order to win the readership of the cultural Left. Those who found “Sistern and Brethren” credible appreciated its clear-​eyed refusal, close in spirit to much Harlem Renaissance critique, to hew to the pacifying nostrums of white Christian power. A different way the analogy of lynching to Christ’s crucifixion might work was to make black suffering the mark of chosenness, burden, C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

155  }

and eventual triumph. “Black people are Christ figures,” writes James Cone, “not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice.”66 This may in fact be the most Jewish reading of the lynched black body of Christ. Slavery and racial terror wrought “unspeakable physical, psychological, social, moral, and religious affliction and suffering,” says theologian M. Shawn Copeland. “Yet, from the anguish of our people rose distinctive religious expression, exquisite music and song, powerful rhetoric and literature, practical invention and creative art.”67 I am a Jew, How may I tell? The Negro lynched Reminds me well I am a Jew.68 That was Abel Meeropol, who owned a copy of Gellert’s Negro Songs of Protest, and who wrote the poem that became “Strange Fruit.”69 In a 1995 letter to the New York Times, Meeropol’s sons, Michael and Robert, insisted that “you don’t have to be black to hate lynching or to compose bluesy music.” The occasion was a review that had left intact what they described as a “falsehood” created by “the ghostwriter of Billie Holiday’s ‘autobiography,’ ” which was that she had written “Strange Fruit.”70 “When [Meeropol] showed me that poem,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues, she was interested right away. And Meeropol “of course was interested in my singing. He suggested that Sonny White, who had been my accompanist, and I turn it into music. So the three of us got together and did the job in about three weeks” (94). The song hadn’t made Meeropol much money—he collected two dollars in royalties for it in 1941—but when Lady Sings the Blues appeared he made a campaign of being recognized as the sole composer of “Strange Fruit,” words and music. At Meeropol’s insistence, Holiday’s publisher agreed to strike the offending passage from subsequent hardback editions, but the suggestion that Holiday had a hand in writing “Strange Fruit” stayed in the paperbacks and made it into the movie version of Lady Sings the Blues in 1972. {  156  } 

religion around billie holiday

Meeropol meanwhile collected dozens of letters and affidavits in testimony to the fact that he, his wife, and their friends had performed “Strange Fruit” in meetings of the Teachers’ Union and at Cabaret TAC (Theater Arts Council, originally the Theatre Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy) before Holiday ever saw it. The song was scored in pen on the back of a Cabaret TAC program dated November 13, 1938, four days after Kristallnacht, two days after Kate Smith first sang Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” to the nation on her popular radio show.71 The project of asserting sole authorship of “Strange Fruit” occupied Meeropol until the end of his life, and his sons continue to make his story known. “Our father was a first-​generation Jewish American whose parents came to the United States from Russia,” they wrote to the Times. “He taught English in the New York City public school system until 1945, when he became a full-​time writer. His credits include the lyrics to ‘The House I Live In’ ”—a paean to American freedom that Frank Sinatra made famous in a 1945 film by the same name. “In the 1950s, he was a pallbearer at the funeral of our birth parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (though he never knew them), and later adopted us.”72 Before writing the version of “The House I Live In” that Sinatra sang onscreen, Meeropol gave the same title to an unpublished poem:​ Bigot-​tree Is a poisonous growth Arising out of the swamp Of Ignorance And Prejudice From its twisted Branches Freedom Is lynched.73 The point of this “House I Live In,” unassailable as far as it goes, is that lynching is the strange fruit, the “poisonous growth” of bigotry, ignorance, and prejudice. To Meeropol, lynching was a problem with a solution. Organize. Educate. Preach the Social Gospel, Popular-​Front style. Lynching was one of Meeropol’s themes, a dark middle passage in the C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

157  }

history of progress for which his words and music made a soundtrack. It’s what the march of freedom leaves behind. In 1940 Meeropol wrote “Goin’ to Build My Heaven,” a rousing anthem of social betterment:​ Ain’t goin’ to be no Jim Crow law, (When I get to Heaven) . . . Ain’t goin’ to be no lynchin’ no more, (When I get to the Heaven I’m fightin’ for!)74 Meeropol’s idealism was dearly bought:​Here was a man who created a family from the collateral wreckage of a state-​sanctioned double murder. “Legal lynching” was Jean-​Paul Sartre’s term for the Rosenbergs’ execution, which delivered their sons, ages ten and six, into Meeropol’s care.75 God bless America:​ after being hounded incessantly by the House Un-​American Activities Committee, Meeropol was tapped to write a cantata on the Liberty Bell for the nation’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976. “A committed leftist all his life,” his sons wrote in a separate letter to the New York Times, Meeropol “believed in our country’s ideals. ‘The House I Live In’ was one of the two songs he wrote”—“Strange Fruit” was the other— “of which he was most proud.” In 1986 “The House I Live In” became a part of centennial festivities for the Statue of Liberty, and Sinatra, who’d decided by then that he was a Republican, sang it at the Reagan White House.76 In defense of their father’s authorship of “Strange Fruit,” Michael and Robert Meeropol said that Billie Holiday “had a habit of altering melodies” and that folk-​blues singer Josh White’s recording of the song reflected their father’s conception better than hers.77 A preacher’s kid from Greenville, South Carolina, White had been a protégé of Mayo Williams in the era of race records at Paramount. As a teenager he recorded gospel songs as Joshua White, the Singing Christian, and blues as Pinewood Tom, the latter to shield his traffic with the devil from his parents and the church. His versatility and range teamed him at different times with Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Libby Holman, and the Golden Gate Quartet, with whom White sang at the 1941 and 1945 inaugurations of FDR. White went on to accompany Eleanor Roosevelt, then United Nations ambassador for war relief, on a tour of European capitals in 1950. {  158  } 

religion around billie holiday

When European audiences requested “Strange Fruit,” White demurred, lest listeners decide the song told “the whole story” of race in America; when he sang “Strange Fruit” in the United States he made a point of following it always with Meeropol’s “The House I Live In.”78 The house I live in, The same for black and white, My country right or wrong, And if it’s wrong to see it right, A home where all are equal, The Christian and the Jew, Where all will have Four Freedoms, That’s America come true.79 The sacred past that Billie Holiday made material was not the sacred past of a Singing Christian or a Pinewood Tom. Her singing does without the crossing-​over-​Jordan rhythms of gospel; musically, she took little heed of a southern religious past in the manner of the blues singers and blues poets who consciously turned their backs on it or otherwise registered its pressures. Part of the reason was that the sacred pasts of southern black Protestant church cultures were not her own. Just as important, for Holiday, the South of “Strange Fruit” was not past. Josh White’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” more faithful to Meeropol’s original in his sons’ estimate, has a people-​gather-​round quality. Come and hear the story of lynching in the South. You’re in a union hall, maybe, a coffeehouse in a church basement. “When Billie sings it,” White’s biographer Elijah Wald recognized, “you’re at the foot of the tree.”80 For Josh White or Abel Meeropol or the religious thinkers for whom the crucified black body betokened God’s saving design, lynching was ground zero for projects of redemption, for imagining otherwise. Shortly before the appearance of Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, AME minister and preacher of the Social Gospel Reverdy Ransom offered a description of “The New Negro” in a poem by that name. Slavery was the chisel that fashioned him to form, And gave him all the arts and sciences had won. C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

159  }

The lyncher, mob, and stake have been his emery wheel, to make a polished man of strength and power. In him, the latest birth of freedom, God hath again made all things new.81 Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” refused to make lynching the material or the instrument of progress, to conserve a bitter history as salvific. What Meeropol’s poem about lynching “summed up” for Holiday—“all the things that had killed Pop”—included wartime exposure to poisons that left Clarence Holiday unable to fight the pneumonia he picked up in Texas, where she believed he was sure that no small-​town hospital would have treated him.82 Black soldiers who served in the Great War returned home in 1919 to a summer of race riots and lynchings, including the murder of Wilbur Little, who would not change his army uniform for civilian clothes at the insistence of white residents of Blakely, Georgia, and was hanged and burned in reprisal for that intransigence.83 Mob violence in eighteen states and the District of Columbia took uncounted numbers of black lives, among them some two hundred sharecroppers around Elaine, Arkansas, who had threatened to unionize. The period became known as Red Summer, as though the Bolsheviks were to blame. New waves of racial terror would find new pretexts. What Holiday would offer in the meantime was witness, not remedy. No shuddering backward glance at lynching. No heaven to fight for where lynching is not. Chicago newspaperman Vernon Jarrett recalled seeing Holiday perform “Strange Fruit” in 1947. “She was standing up there singing this song as though this was for real, as if she had just witnessed a lynching. That’s what knocked me out. I thought she was about to cry. . . . There was a sense of resignation, as if ‘these people are going to have power for a long time and I can’t do a damn thing about it except put it in a song.’ ”84 In The House I Live In, the film, Frank Sinatra plays Frank Sinatra. He’s recording in the studio, something schmaltzy with strings; he breaks for a cigarette, goes outside, and sees a gang of white toughs who’ve cornered a misfit and are moving in for the kill. Frank comes between {  160  } 

religion around billie holiday

them, gets the hoodlums’ side—“We don’t like his religion!”—and cuts to the point of the film:​ “Look fellas, religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi or somebody as stupid.” The pilot and bombardier who sank the Japanese battleship Haruna, Sinatra explains, were a Presbyterian and a Jew, and a good thing no one called off the bombing because of it. Who could argue? The ostracized boy’s folks donate blood plasma. Should a soldier die in refusing it? The kids are eating out of his hand. Outcast returned to the fold, they gather round and listen to Sinatra sing Meeropol’s take on the second-​generation immigrant’s story. What is America to me A name, a map, or a flag I see A certain word, democracy What is America to me The house I live in, A plot of earth, a street The grocer and the butcher, And the people that I meet The children in the playground, The faces that I see All races and religions, That’s America to me. To Meeropol’s dismay, a stanza that put “black and white” together in the house that was America was deemed too controversial for Hollywood, but the version that offended no one was widely acclaimed, and the film won an Honorary Academy Award in 1946. The song that opens the film, before Sinatra cuts out for a smoke, turns out to be “If You Are but a Dream,” words and music by Moe Jaffe, Jack Fulton, and Nat Bonx, which Sinatra released a year earlier as the flip side to his recording of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Moe Jaffe was a Lithuanian Jew who’d fled with his family to America; Nat Bonx was born in Philadelphia to Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland. If you are but a dream, I hope I never waken. It’s a nice touch. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Don’t pinch me, I’m dreaming. The new C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

161  }

arrival from Vilnius or Belarus, maybe Sicily, leaning out from the boat in New York Harbor, craning his neck. The things I see about me / The big things and the small / The little corner newsstand / And the house a mile tall. Could any of it be real? “The House I Live In” answers the prayer of “If You Are but a Dream.” It’s a description of the immigrant’s dream come true. The howdy and the handshake / The air of feeling free / And the right to speak my mind out / That’s America to me. The cornered boy in the film whose religion is unacceptable to the mob is never identified as a Jew, but neither do we sense a melee between Minnesota Lutherans and a breakaway synod:​ Sinatra even calls the boy’s tormentors out as Nazis. The verse cut from the film does name the forms of otherness at issue, erstwhile conflictual and potentially violent differences the American-​dream-​in-​song recasts in the pleasing idiom of pluralism:​The same for black and white / . . . The Christian and the Jew, / Where all will have Four Freedoms / That’s America come true. The whole point of religious variety in The House I Live In—​there are a hundred different ways of going to church, says Frank—​ is that “religion makes no difference.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, take note.) Religion doesn’t matter because freedom of religion, democracy, has come to take its place. The excised verse also makes the point that religious difference in The House I Live In can stand in gamely for racial difference. But here’s where religious pluralism as shorthand for democracy breaks down. Freedom of religion guaranteed equality between Jews and Christians, at least in principle. But it could never mean equality between black and white, however well Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms managed to finesse the issue by extending freedom of worship to all races and creeds. Religion doesn’t matter unless you’re a Nazi or somebody as stupid, says Frank, because to the Nazis the despised religion, the Jews, are a race. Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues that the war years were “strange ones” for her. Her great-grandmother, she supposed, might have looked out from her shack behind the big house in Virginia and seen Union and Confederate armies clashing, smelled the smoke and corpses. This war, the “rest of us, what the hell did we know about what was going on?” (126). In 1943 Holiday was Esquire’s pick for best {  162  } 

religion around billie holiday

female vocalist of the year, and Jerome Kern presented the award to her at Philharmonic Hall. The press picked up rumors of a promised star turn in Orson Welles’s Story of Jazz, and wondered why Holiday had remained among the “sepia beauties . . . overlooked by the film industry” for so long.85  She did some victory work here and there: a tribute show to Benjamin O. Davis Sr., the army’s first African American general; a “Negro Salute to the Fighting Jews of Europe” at New York’s Town Hall. A musicians’ strike that lasted from 1942 to 1944 shut down the making of records except for V-discs, “America’s Best for Our Armed Forces,” produced for the War Department and shipped to soldiers overseas. Several Billie Holiday recordings were released on V-discs, among them a satiny “Any Old Time” with Artie Shaw, then serving in the Pacific theater with his navy band, and an all-star jam of “Billie’s Blues” (renamed a more morale-building “I Love My Man” for the troops) that featured Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Louis Armstrong. The group had come together for a war bonds benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House, where Holiday became the first black woman ever to sing on its stage. In 1945 servicemen in the Pacific voted her their favorite female vocalist, with Dinah Shore a close second.86 Still, Billie Holiday never really registered as a wartime musical force in the manner of some contemporaries: Lionel Hampton’s Double V Band playing Razaf and Johnson’s “Yankee Doodle Tan” on radio from the Savoy Ballroom, a cheering regiment of “colored lads in khaki” in attendance.87 Glenn Miller’s heroic disappearance over the English Channel. The Andrews Sisters, sweethearts of the USO, hawking war bonds to words and music by Irving Berlin (“Any Bonds Today?”), who donated his royalties to the effort. Holiday was chided by the Baltimore Afro-American for refusing “moral support” to the “men of your own race, living in foxholes,” “fighting and dying that you might continue to bask at the theatrical shrine of Dionysus.” She had failed to show for a USO concert at Camp Shanks in Orangetown, New York, the Afro-American reported, because she decided the train ride would be too hard on her nerves. “I am afraid, Miss Holiday,” the paper scolded in an open letter to the singer, “it is not what you are doing for our much sought-for American ideal, but what you have done against it.”88 Down Beat took note of Holiday’s “new, stream-lined” silhouette C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

163  }

and declared it “interesting.”89 She began to appear in long sleeves or past-the-elbow gloves onstage. Stump Cross told Linda Kuehl that he and Holiday, with whom he had played club dates in Harlem when she was a teenager, stayed in close touch until the war. Then, after 1942, “Lady and I strayed.” “I went into the army,” Cross explained, and “she went on heroin.”90 It wasn’t that Holiday was “in the dark that there was a war going on,” as the Afro-American charged.91 She’d given it a different soundtrack. In her version of the no-show at Camp Shanks, the coordinator of Negro shows for the USO had flubbed the arrangements, leaving her stranded on Fifty-Second Street with no money for her fare. “Listen, I recorded that song, ‘Strange Fruit,’ and still sing it nightly,” Holiday said in her defense. “Nobody could sing that song and refuse to entertain our soldiers, could they?”92 USO tours, parades, war-bond rallies: none of these were terribly real to her. What was real: the “couple of thousand cats, stranded off somewhere in cracker country, with no music, no women, no nothing”; they’d press in on her after a show to pull the flowers from her hair “and divide them petal by petal.” Boys she’d toasted at the Famous Door on their last night in New York who wrote her now “from some damn island,” fighting snakes and rot, “waiting and waiting and never knowing for what.” One came back with his hair gone all white. Maybe “some of the things had happened to him like happened to other Negro soldiers.”93 A report prepared for the Office of War Information said that the 1943 Harlem riots were precipitated in part by the brutal treatment of black soldiers on army bases in the South.94 Negro boys Holiday knew, she said, “spent a lifetime scuffling to get up from down South and to make it somewhere in New York. Then bam, they’d be drafted and end up right back in some camp in the South.”95 One of these was Lester Young, who was inducted in 1943 and sent to Fort McClellan, Alabama, where he copped to a marijuana charge in hopes of being dishonorably discharged and getting back to his horn. Instead, he was sentenced to a year’s detention in a fetid Jim Crow stockade at Camp Gordon in Georgia, where he languished for the remainder of the war. Afterward, he didn’t talk about it; he “became quieter,” Geoff Dyer says, “looked no one in the eyes, tried to find {  164  } 

religion around billie holiday

places to hide but there was nowhere, so he took to trying to stay inside of himself, eyes peeping out of his face like an old man’s face through the gap between curtains.”96 By the 1950s he was “remote and spaced out,” alcoholic, his playing “ghostly and uncertain.”97 The last interview he gave was in Paris, a few weeks before his death in 1959. “They want everybody who is a Negro to be a Uncle Tom, or Uncle Remus, or Uncle Sam, and I can’t make it,” Young told jazz writer François Postif. “It’s fight for your life, that’s all.”98 Abel Meeropol’s “The House I Live In” isn’t really a description of America. It’s a description of an American musical. Swanee River, the Cotton Blossom, or Dorothy Gale’s Kansas were the Jewish songwriter’s version of Plymouth Rock, surrogates in imagination for the larger, longed-for whole. David Lehman makes the elegant point that the landscape of the Jewish musical—Oklahoma, Ol’ Man River, Catfish Row—​ is where Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for a uniquely American poetry gets its answer: “Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”99 We know we belong to the land. And the land we belong to is grand.100 Our Negroes, our boats, our stumps and our planting. The record of Jewish belonging, musically speaking, is an American pastoral. Barney Josephson said he believed that Holiday didn’t understand Meeropol’s lyrics to “Strange Fruit” right away, because when he showed her the song for the first time at Café Society, she asked him what the word “pastoral” meant. Maya Angelou’s son wondered the same thing. In Heart of a Woman, Angelou tells of meeting Billie Holiday in 1958, some eleven months before her death. Holiday had come to Los Angeles to stay with Angelou and her twelve-year-old son, Guy. Each night before bed Holiday would sing a cappella for Guy and his mother, lullaby soft. On her last night with Angelou and her son, Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit.” “She painted a picture of a lovely land,” Angelou said, “pastoral and bucolic, then added eyes bulged and C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

165  }

mouths twisted, onto the Southern landscape.” After Holiday finished singing, Guy asked her what a “pastoral scene” was. Billie looked up slowly and studied Guy for a second. Her face became cruel, and when she spoke her voice was scornful. “It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That’s what it means.” The thrust of rage repelled Guy and stunned me. Billie continued, “That’s what they do. That’s a goddam pastoral scene.”101 Holiday made several tours of Europe in the last years of her life, not as a goodwill ambassador in the Cold War but because her ardent fans were there. American music had changed in the 1950s, and Holiday claimed not to understand it.102 Jazz exploded into bebop and its splintering ripostes. Pop no longer swung. Rock and roll could be heard in the distance, rumbling in on a gospel train. There were girl groups and doo-wop, crooners and songbirds who’d made it in Hollywood—​Sinatra, Doris Day—​but no longer much of a place for a jazz stylist. And anyway, Holiday loved European audiences for being so unlike Americans. In Europe, Leonard Feather said, Billie Holiday was “lionized and feted and never Jim Crowed.”103 A Danish family heard her sneezing at the airport in Copenhagen and brought her home with them for tending. They’d lost everything in the war but they loved each other, she said, and they loved her, too. In Paris they called her the Princess of Harlem. In Berlin, a smitten fan she’d taken for a “real square” got up a band to play for her, and they turned out to be “the swingingest cats I ever heard. All they have is American records,” most from before the war, and “no American radio or TV where some promoter can push a button and within a week every damn body is brainwashed” and listening to Patti Page sing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” “I was never so happy in my life.”104 In 1958 Holiday had gotten away from Louis McKay and wanted to live abroad, where she wouldn’t need a cabaret card to work, and where {  166  } 

religion around billie holiday

drug addiction was for doctors to do something about, not cops.105 “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’ ” she’d said of the court case that landed her in jail. “And that’s just the way it felt.”106 “I want to settle in Britain because I love the people,” she told a reporter in Paris. “They do not just call me a singer; they call me an artist and I like that.”107 In the last weeks of her life, a petition reached New York mayor Robert Wagner asking him to grant Billie Holiday “what may be her final request: Freedom to take bonded leave of this city she loves, to fly as soon as her doctors permit to European refuge where she may regain her health and strength and return another day.”108 On May 31, 1959, a companion who found Holiday unconscious summoned an ambulance to her apartment. The ambulance delivered her to Knickerbocker Hospital in Harlem, a charity hospital that provided free care “to the worthy sick poor of New York City.”109 The needle tracks that crisscrossed Holiday’s body marked her for the ineligible class of unworthy sick poor, so she was turned away at the Knick, strapped back into an ambulance, and taken to the municipal Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem. Its policy limited visitors to relatives by blood or marriage, and Holiday had no one but Louis McKay, then in California, from whom she was separated but not yet divorced. When Joe Glaser learned of Holiday’s collapse, he sent McKay a plane ticket to New York, and appears to have prevailed upon him to resume his role as her supplier. Holiday’s celebrity allowed Dufty to get in with a press pass, and he began filing reports on her condition for the New York Post. Someone at the hospital informed the police that a packet of heroin had been discovered among Holiday’s effects, and officers were sent to arrest and fingerprint her in her bed. Now her lawyer could visit, and before Holiday lapsed into a coma he succeeded in getting her signature on contracts for a new book and a movie of her life. He did not assist Holiday in drawing up a will, which meant that her estate and all future earnings would pass to McKay, his new wife, and his sons by a prior marriage.110 John Levy, the bass player, described Louis McKay as “a poor kind of pimp, not a classy one or one that ever really made it.”111 He was also a preacher. Holiday told Mike Wallace that he’d discovered his gift for it C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

167  }

at fifteen when he prayed at the burial of his mother’s dog, and that old acquaintances still greeted him on the street as Preach.112 “He couldn’t wait for her to die,” Dufty said of McKay, who was angling to get them both to sign the film rights to Lady Sings the Blues over to him before it was too late. At the end, Holiday drifting in and out of consciousness, McKay read the twenty-third psalm over her hospital bed, like a minister over a freshly dug grave, and left the room. Dufty said Holiday managed then with great effort to open one eye; she asked him if McKay was gone and he said yes. “I’ve always been a religious bitch,” she said to Dufty, “but if that dirty motherfucker believes in God, I’m thinking it over.”113 “Nobody said anything,” Dufty recalled of Holiday’s funeral. “No Reverend Licorice with an idiotic sermon, but a Requiem High Mass.”114 The New York Post reported that for “Billie Holiday, an artist who sang some of the purest notes in improvised sound, there was no music save the traditional unaccompanied Latin chants of a 10-voice Catholic choir.”115 Afterward, “there was such a quietness,” bassist Milt Hinton remembered. “We just stood around, like, in awe, and we filed out of the church and stood on the corners for a few minutes until everybody got out and we just quietly, just stepped away into the crowd. It was not the usual thing of musicians going to a bar after a guy’s gone and having a drink, or the type of New Orleans festivities. It was just dead quiet and sadness.”116 In her very last televised appearance, a London broadcast of Chelsea at Nine in February 1959, Holiday’s closing number was a swinging “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” It makes no difference how I carry on, she sang, don’t you talk about me when I’m gone. A music critic who set out to write a biography of Billie Holiday gave up when he realized she never looked the same way twice. He came to see that “each photograph of her seemed to show an equally beautiful but otherwise entirely different woman—a phenomenon not fully explained,” Francis Davis supposed, by changes in her style or fluctuations in her weight.117 In Holiday’s final years, the disparities became more pronounced. A fan who saw her perform at an evening of “Jazz Under the Stars” at Central Park in July 1957 said she appeared so {  168  } 

religion around billie holiday

roughened and wasted away, “I thought, ‘I’m looking at a dead woman. She’s not long for this world.’ ”118 In December that year a CBS broadcast reunited her with accompanists from the 1930s, including Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Coleman Hawkins; all show their age and more except for Holiday, who looks girlish and radiant and sings better than she had in years. Françoise Sagan described an appearance at the Mars Club in Paris a year later: “It was Billie Holiday—and yet it wasn’t”; she looked wizened, she forgot the words to her songs, she struggled vainly for “that physical equilibrium which had conferred on her such marble-like serenity amid the storms and dizzy turbulence of her life.”119 As late as April 1959, Holiday had a successful string of dates at Storyville, a club in Boston; photos from the April 24 performance show her looking elegant in a dress of fitted black lace, her luminous face unlined by age or care. (One of these photos is on the cover of this book.) Father Norman O’Connor, the “jazz priest” who’d hosted Holiday in Boston, said she was “pleased and relaxed” after her Storyville run; she talked about moving to Europe “in a kind of dreamy fashion, knowing she would never get there.”120 Bandleader Jack Parnell, who played with Holiday in London, recalled that in afternoon rehearsals she “looked like a sack of old clothes sitting on a chair.” But by “evening she looked like a girl of eighteen, it was quite uncanny!” The explanation for it, he supposed, was that “there was an awful lot of junk pushed in there . . . certainly she was quite a different person to the one earlier in the day.”121 The junk transformed her, it  was killing her, there was never enough of it, she was running out of time. Steve Allen and Leonard Feather were MCs at the May 1959 concert that turned out to be Holiday’s last, a benefit at the Phoenix Theatre in the East Village. Backstage before Holiday’s performance, Allen noticed “this little old Negro lady sitting on a cot or something, and just to be polite I said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ She said, ‘Fine, how’s it going?’ Something like that . . . and suddenly I had a creepy feeling and I did a slow double take, and the little old lady was Billie.” She was matchstick thin and frail, her arms “like the arms of prisoners rescued from Dachau.” Allen needed Leonard Feather’s help to get Holiday onstage. Feather stiffened and choked back a sob; Holiday looked at him sharply and asked him if he’d seen C r o s s i n g J o r d a n   { 

169  }

a ghost. When the two men settled her at the microphone, “she sang terribly,” her voice “all scratchy, no vitality, no volume, nothing.” She made it through two songs and needed to be taken home.122 Scratchy, no vitality, no volume were judgments some listeners attached to Holiday’s final albums, Lady in Satin (1958) and Last Recording (1959). A voice in its death throes. A spectral rasp. In reissues after Holiday’s death, these records’ archiving of her ravaged voice became the draw, as “mesmerizing and unsettling as a horrific accident.”123 The ragged depth and beauty of Holiday’s later sound nevertheless gathered a core of faithful acolytes, not all of them posthumous. Father O’Connor dashed off a letter to Holiday after a first listen to Lady in Satin and pronounced it “Wonderful—thoroughly enjoy it—wanted you to know.”124 Holiday said she believed Lady in Satin was the best work she’d ever done. By then, all that was left of her voice was style: her phrasing, her timing, her way of telling stories, as Robert O’Meally observes, “in the most understated way and with a few concentrated notes that seemed to signify a million notes restrained.”125 Father Charles Borromeo Carroll, the chaplain at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, wrote in his manual on liturgical voice that the “guiding principle” in both speaking and singing is “refinement by restraint.” The object is to “use all the powers” of the voice “with such skill as to almost seem not to use them.” Imagine, instructs Father Carroll, an “exquisitely wrought statue of the Virgin Madonna.” She holds “aloft and forward the Christ-Child”; she “does not obtrude self into the situation.” Likewise, says Carroll, the best vocalists “always appear to have much reserve power at their disposal if they wish to use it.” Better “to leave that impression with an audience than to have folks think” you’ve gotten “to the bottom of [your] bag of tricks.”126 In lucid moments at Metropolitan Hospital, Holiday spoke of making another album. She joked that she’d record it right there in the hospital, call it Lady at the Met. “Her voice came and went,” Whitney Balliett said of Holiday’s final years. But she “refused to let on that anything had changed, and this bravery gave her a confusing majesty.”127

{  170  } 

religion around billie holiday

5 our lady

Beauty, genius, and pain give rise to myth, and myth gives rise to demythologizers, earnest chroniclers called to set the distortions and disturbances of myth to rights. Many who have written about Billie Holiday in recent decades have sought to undo two, closely related myths about her. One is that she was a natural. The other is that she suffered for it. The combination, says novelist Russell Banks, makes “a version of the artist in general and of the African-​American woman in particular that the American public loves to love.” Holiday’s own biographical embellishments and evasions, the Diana Ross movie version of Lady Sings the Blues, and William Dufty’s hackwork served up as memoir, says Banks, sustain the myth of Billie Holiday as “the ‘natural’ artist, the purely and simply gifted individual who pays for the gift with lifelong suffering and deprivation and, finally, with her life itself.”1 A variation on this story says that Holiday was a natural because she suffered, that her suffering was both the explanation and the substance of her gift. Scenes of Holiday’s “arrests and drug addiction joined with her stage persona of the torch singer to create a new image,” observes

Farah Jasmine Griffin, “that of the tragic, ever-​suffering black woman singer who simply stands center stage and naturally sings of her woes.”2 The hard life of Billie Holiday, long on pathos and short on surprise: if you’d never heard her sing, you’d still recognize the tale. The press reported that Billie Holiday’s death was tragic, and well before she died the press reported that her life was tragic, too. In 1956, Ebony ran a five-​page spread titled “Billie Holiday’s Tragic Life,” with the singer “reenacting [her] life story” in a sequence of posed shots: here lighting a cigarette under a streetlamp, there hustling drugs on the sidewalk, now getting busted in a drab hotel room with Louis McKay, a silhouetted G-​man surprising the outlaw couple in bed.3 “One of the greatest blues singers of our time tells the stunning, tragic, and strangely tender story of her life,” ran the print ad for Lady Sings the Blues in the Chicago Defender, where the book was reviewed as the document of a fall, dispatched from mortifying depths. “Lady Day wanted the world to know the pitfalls of passion that gave her the ability to command the attention of audiences of worldly nobility, and then to descend to the bottom—playing in cheap, little taverns and niteries.”4 Billie Holiday was by the end “so consumed by her image,” Stuart Nicholson’s biography laments, that it “rendered her a victim at the expense of her music, the one thing that made her unique.”5 The laudable desire to free Billie Holiday from the myth of her natural talent is the desire to free her from stereotypes that say what is natural to blackness. The black artist as less than artist, because the gift is natural, not cultivated. The black artist as raw material in need of cultivation: childlike and fragile or childish and undisciplined, needing rescue from wreckage and squander. “Capable of producing great work only under the tutelage of her racial superiors,” as Angela Davis hears Barney Josephson to mean when he bragged of stage-​managing “Strange Fruit” at Café Society.6 Not a self because not in charge of the self, not self-​owning. Imagine James Wood or Michiko Kakutani being sent to the stage with Patti Smith or Keith Richards to read from the performer’s autobiography between songs, as Gilbert Millstein was summoned to stand alongside Holiday at Carnegie Hall and read from Lady Sings the Blues.

{  172  } 

religion around billie holiday

The laudable desire to free Billie Holiday from the myth that suffering was her measure is the desire to release her from that reduction, to offer an assist to her own “unending quest,” as Robert O’Meally puts it, to escape the “narrow set of expectations” that clamped down on women who like her were black, poor, exploited, and abused. To insist on her misery is to deny her resilience. In the end, what matters “is that somehow, out of whatever her personal history might have been,” says O’Meally, Billie Holiday “was able to invent for herself a shining identity as an artist.”7 It’s a fine line we’re walking. According to Banks, we mustn’t mistake the “brutalized, rejected, hauntingly beautiful, African-​American woman” who was Billie Holiday for the brutalized, rejected, hauntingly beautiful, African American woman she projects in song, lest we overlook the “intelligence, discipline, craft, and deliberate use of tradition” required to make her performance compel our belief. Remember, it was all an act, an art, a brilliant show. The risk of doing otherwise is to align yourself with the “perverse use that a racist, misogynist culture makes of art’s disguise”—which in Holiday’s case is to spin the doomed-​songstress story into myth and the myth into the life: miserably determined, abruptly curtailed, no bigger or grander or more mysterious than a racist, misogynist culture will allow.8 But in the end this don’t-​be-​fooled injunction feels too pat, and wishful. It imagines a Billie Holiday who can be pulled cleanly away from this Billie Holiday’s performance of Billie Holiday. When Holiday was tried in 1949 for possession of opium, following a raid on the hotel room she shared with John Levy, she arrived at the courtroom with a black eye, and told reporters it was Levy’s handiwork. “You should see my back,” she said. Levy even took away her coat and sold it. “I got nothing now, and I’m scared.”9 As legal scholar Sara Ramshaw tells the story, [Holiday] testified that she had known Levy for about a year, and when asked whether Levy was her business manager, she vehemently replied, “He’s my man!” At this remark, the judge, jury, and entire courtroom “erupted

O u r L a d y   { 

173  }

with spontaneous laughter,” which continued as the district attorney resumed his questioning. Holiday testified that “when Levy gave her something to get rid of, she was just doing what her man told her.” One commentator declared that she “did everything but sit on a piano and sing ‘My Man.’ ” When asked why she handed the phone to Levy instead of taking the call herself, she said, “I never did anything without John telling me!”10 A few years after the trial, Holiday told Mike Wallace that Louis McKay, to whom she was now married, controlled her repertoire entirely. mw: As a former preacher, how does [your husband] react to some of your more torrid blues songs? bh: He tells me how to sing, and what to sing. It’s just getting terrible.11 She got a laugh from that one too. “Fact is,” writes poet Rita Dove of Billie Holiday, “the invention of women under siege / has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.”12 Holiday—let’s see her for the moment as the woman under siege, inventing—knew what would work, what would sell; she delivered on audience expectation in the courtroom to renew the lease on her always tenuous freedom. It didn’t mean she wasn’t under siege because she played at being under siege, or that Levy didn’t actually blacken her eye. Dove’s “invention of women under siege” is usually parsed in a different way: the woman under siege is what’s made up, invented, to sell records or copy. Despite what she said to Mike Wallace, no one could tell Billie Holiday how to sing, and she appears to have had more say over her material than some biographers have assumed. But both John Levy and Louis McKay were physically abusive men who controlled her money and lived on her earnings. “If [Billie] asked him for fifty dollars,” pianist Bobby Tucker recalled of the unsavory Levy, “he’d say, ‘Don’t ask for money in public,’ and he’d knock her down literally, with his fist in her face, in the stomach, anywhere.”13 Carl Drinkard, another of Holiday’s accompanists, said that she “respected” {  174  } 

religion around billie holiday

Louis McKay “because he was the only man who was tougher than she was, and could beat her without leaving a mark on her.”14 If Jimmy Rowles is to be believed, the physical abuse was for Holiday a kind of method acting. Part of Rowles’s job at the piano when he played for Holiday in the years she and John Levy were together, he recalled, was to improvise for audiences for the time it took Levy to beat Holiday brutally between sets. When Levy “got through kicking the shit out of her so she aches and burns and her crotch hurts,” it’s “great ’cause that’s where she sings from. If she aches, it’s great, she’s happy; if he kicks her good, then she can sing.”15 Those disposed to seek out punishing scenarios in intimate relationships sometimes style themselves the curators of their own fulfillment, deliberate and self-​aware, even as the law, Katherine Franke points out, would for better or worse have “a very hard time distinguishing between a woman suffering from battered women’s syndrome” and another’s “consent to systematic subjugation in her marriage.”16 In Holiday’s case, neither “lifestyle choice” nor “victimization” seems the right description of her reality. I’d rather my man would hit me / Than for him to jump up and quit me / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do. Holiday recorded seven different versions of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” and sixteen of “My Man”—He isn’t true / He beats me, too / What can I do?—and both remained in her performance repertoire until the very end of her career. “Performativity,” says Judith Butler, “has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition” of what is “oppressive and painful” in order to force the oppressive and painful to pay off, to mean differently. “This is not freedom,” says Butler, “but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.”17 It was a question Billie Holiday confronted early. Her friend Pony Kane remembered Billie/Eleanora, then age eleven or twelve, returning to her boardinghouse room “looking like she been put through the mill” by some man the night before. “She must of liked the men beating on her,” Kane said. “A lot of her men did, yep.”18  Skinny “Rim” Davenport, another childhood associate, said of the girls he ran in the Baltimore neighborhood where Billie sang in brothels and speakeasies, “Now and then I take one of them to a nightclub. But I never let ’em see no other cats. If they’d of done that I’d of beat ’em up. Oh, they love O u r L a d y   { 

175  }

that. They be so proud of their black eye. They say, ‘Look! Look what my man done to me!’ ”18 This scenario in all its components—the prostitute’s battering, the pimp’s brutality and bluster, the coding by either of her submission to his beatings or her toughness to withstand them as a good—had left its impress not only on the spaces of Holiday’s childhood formation but on the songs she elected to sing once she’d established her identity as an artist. Holiday’s torch songs in particular, John Szwed details, were steeped in representations of gendered violence that went to the making of popular music in complicated ways, drawing on the traditions of American blackface minstrelsy and on the French performance style known as Apache. Les Apaches was the name that came to be affixed to Paris’s early twentieth-​century street gangs, young men and women reputed to run wild with a “dark and savage energy,” ruthless as the storied warriors of the American West (l’énergie sombre et farouche des guerriers du Far West).19 This segment of the Parisian demimondaine inspired the danse Apache, a pantomime of violence between pimp and prostitute, usually in a nightclub or street setting, that would figure in film and stage performance on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. The Apache dance—the woman is typically yanked by the hair, grabbed roughly by the arms and shoulders, and thrown to the floor between clinches and blows—is technically demanding for both partners, though typically only the woman received star billing. The “Apache’s female partner was not a victim of abuse,” insists dance historian Richard Powers. “She was proudly making a statement, that she didn’t have to remain in the cage of the Domestic Sphere, and furthermore, could stand up to a man in a physical arena, a public physical arena. She willingly and enthusiastically entered that arena.”20 The danse Apache was sometimes credited to the French cabaret artist Mistinguett, who invoked the dance form made popular in American blackface minstrelsy when she referred to the Apache dance as Le Cake-​Walk des Barrières (the cakewalk of the slums, the mean streets). Blackface, black artists, and black settings on the American stage meanwhile made space for songs like Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” or Ralph Rainger’s “Moanin’ Low,” each sung to acclaim on Broadway by an actress adopting the persona of a Harlem prostitute. {  176  } 

religion around billie holiday

Mistinguett’s signature song was “Mon Homme,” the original of Billie Holiday’s “My Man.” Before Holiday recorded “My Man,” the song had been made famous on Broadway by Fanny Brice, who performed it not in blackface but in the torn costume of a French Apache girl standing alone beneath a streetlamp.21 Holiday’s varied performances of “My Man”—in the courtroom with a blackened eye, defending John Levy the pimp; returning on Levy’s arm to the House of the Good Shepherd, where she sang it for the inmates; in Lady Sings the Blues, which ends with the lyrics of “My Man” to intimate her readiness for the future that awaited her with Louis McKay—all tap into this genealogy. So too the streetlamp scene in Symphony in Black between Billie Holiday and the sharp-​dressed man who beats her and throws her to the sidewalk, and its precursor, the scene between Bessie Smith and the sharp-​dressed man who throws her to the ground in St. Louis Blues. There’s more to Holiday’s iconic persona than what her Catholic background supplied, but the Catholic background is a part of it too. If the stories you hear and the examples you are given make injured and suffering girls both romantic and valuable, then your idea of self, your subjectivity, will gather substance from that fact. The spectacular canonization in Rome of St. Thérèse of Lisieux was reported on the front page of the New York Times in May 1925, midway through Holiday’s first period of residence at the House of the Good Shepherd, where she recalled taking the saint’s name as her own.22 Thérèse (1873–1897), who died of consumption at twenty-​four, counted as devotees among Holiday’s contemporaries the torch chanteuse Édith Piaf, the writer Jack Kerouac, and the radical journalist Dorothy Day. A cloistered Carmelite from the age of fifteen, Thérèse gained renown (among Catholic schoolgirls not least) not for heroic deeds of faith but for her “Little Way” of self-​abnegation, equanimity in painful illness, and humble, often unrequited gestures of mercy and love. “I want to suffer and even rejoice for love,” Thérèse wrote in her autobiography, “for this is my way of scattering flowers. Never a flower shall I find but its petals shall be scattered for You; and all the while I will sing, yes, always sing, even when gathering my roses in the midst of thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns may be, the sweeter shall be my song.”23 O u r L a d y   { 

177  }

Good Shepherd girls who learned Thérèse’s story were also fed tales of worldlier paths to redemption. “The Magdalens of a sad past are very often women of superior social position and of many accomplishments,” observed an early twentieth-​century history of the community. “The stories of their downfall and of God’s mercy in bringing them to the shelter of the Good Shepherd and the merit of religious vocation are stranger than any romance.” Their stories might have been photo spreads in True Confessions, or movies starring Billie Dove. The lovely “Portuguese girl, abandoned in a strange land by the machinations of an inhuman stepmother”; the ransomed slave brought to the city and “sold for crime”; the society girl brought low by opium; the child denizen of sordid “variety theaters” and “adult haunts of vice”: all of them delivered from the “terrible fascination of the street” to the sanctity of convent life.24 Every girl at the House of the Good Shepherd was at least a potential Magdalen, one who took perpetual vows in the tradition of Saint Thaïs, Saint Pelagia, and others whose example made the penitents’ pedagogy. What brought a Good Shepherd girl into their company was her possession of a story, since it was the lives of the fallen and reclaimed before her, the sins and snares they navigated, that offered her the model for her own. To undertake the discipline of confession and amendment within the House of the Good Shepherd was to craft one’s own Magdalen story, to own the Magdalen persona, not because one necessarily aspired to perpetual vows as a penitent but because that was the identity on offer. It was what being a Good Shepherd girl made you. When Billie Holiday returned to the House of the Good Shepherd in the early 1950s and sang “My Man” for the sisters and inmates there, she was performing a version of the story she had learned in that place to tell about herself. It was a story she could sell, in the most literal sense. But in the tradition she was brought into at Good Shepherd, one’s Magdalen story was also spiritual capital. The order’s newer description of its Magdalens (now contemplative sisters) dates their formation to Mother Euphrasia’s insight that “there were women who allowed themselves to be found by God” among the battered and degraded, and from that place to “announce to all God’s reconciling love for everyone.”25 In the order’s older, more severe account of the {  178  } 

religion around billie holiday

Magdalens’ office, the “principal aim of the Sisters of St. Magdalen, and the end of their Institute, is to tend in all their actions to a great spirit of penance, abnegation, and mortification, to expiate their own sins, and also to obtain from God the conversion of the penitents.”26 In either case, the Magdalen’s vocation, so intimately tied to her abjection, is the advancement of forgiveness in the world. “What was it that I was growing able to hear in Billie Holiday’s later songs,” the novelist Haruki Murakami wonders, “songs we might label somehow broken, that I could not hear before?” What Murakami decides he hears is forgiveness. It “has nothing to do with ‘healing,’ ” Murakami says. “I am not being healed in any way. It is forgiveness, pure and simple.”27 The role of Good Shepherd Magdalen preserved for late modern Catholicism what Caroline Walker Bynum identifies as a paradox of late medieval women’s piety, the notion that divine mercy might be found in plumbing every possibility of the flesh. Late medieval asceticism, in Bynum’s demonstration, was neither world-​denying nor intent on immolating the body’s appetites and desires but was instead the profoundly embodied “expression of the doctrine of the Incarnation: the doctrine that Christ, by becoming human, saves all that the human being is.” An embodied piety that found redemption in states of brokenness and abjection, says Bynum, arose in a religious world whose central ritual was the coming of God into food as macerated flesh, and it was compatible with, not contradictory to, new philosophical notions that located the nature of things not in their abstract definitions but in their individuating matter or particularity. Thus Francis of Assisi telling his disciples that beatings are “perfect happiness,” Beatrice of Ornacieux driving nails through her palms, Dorothy of Montau and Lukardis of Oberweimar wrenching their bodies into bizarre pantomimes of the moment of Crucifixion . . . were to their own contemporaries not depressing or horrifying but glorious. They were not rebelling against or torturing their flesh out of guilt over its capabilities so much as using O u r L a d y   { 

179  }

the possibilities of its full sensual and affective range to soar ever closer to God.”28 Mother Euphrasia’s biographer reports an outbreak of zeal for self-​injury that seized a House of the Good Shepherd in the French town of Nancy. A visiting Jesuit had preached an inflammatory sermon, to which the penitents responded with an “extraordinary fervour,” some lining their beds with “bundles of nettles, branches of thorns, and pillows filled with stones,” others begging for “hair shirts, chains of iron, and to fast on bread and water.” Mother Euphrasia prudently “put a check on this ill-​regulated, though well-​meant” contagion and returned her charges to the “safe and tranquil path” of “humility, obedience, and charity.”29 Still, the tableaux of Christ’s passion in the stations of the cross, the suffering saints in painted plaster and stained glass, the heavy crucifix that hung in each room of every House of the Good Shepherd: all might have exerted on generations of inmates a countervailing pull in the direction of actively seeking meaning in pain.30 The woman who stood as Holiday’s godmother at the House of the Good Shepherd, Christine Scott, recalled an occasion when ten-​ year-​old Billie/Eleanora went “with the rest of the girls, all of them in white dresses and veils,” to “see the Sisters, and they gave her Mary rosary beads.”31 The rosary’s daily string of prayers centered twice each week on the “sorrowful mysteries” of Jesus’s execution: the agony in the garden, the scourging at the pillar, the crown of thorns, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion. “Mary” rosary beads, designed to facilitate devotion to Mary as Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows, are strung in seven groups of seven, each group separated by a medal representing a particular torment suffered by Jesus’s mother as he progresses toward the tomb. In the iconography of Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows, seven separate swords pierce her heart. “Oh, and yes,” Christine Scott remembered of that day, “I gave her a prayer book. I almost forgot that. She must of appreciated it ’cause she always kept it in her hand.”32 The prayer book Christine Scott gave to the child Billie Holiday was likely the palm-​sized Key of Heaven, a “Manual of Prayers and Instructions for Catholics” and a ritual first communion keepsake in the early decades of the twentieth century. {  180  } 

religion around billie holiday

Among its lessons in piety, the little book contained a “Prayer Before a Crucifix,” a meditation on Christ’s “five most precious wounds” and an entreaty that each might be “impress[ed] upon [the petitioner’s] heart” in the form of a humbling spiritual disposition. A tiny gilt crucifix came tucked inside the pages of each copy of the Key of Heaven, so that the desire for Christ’s wounds might be voiced in prayer whatever the supplicant’s surroundings.33 “The Beat bear stigmata,” Gilbert Millstein wrote, ten months after sharing the Carnegie Hall stage with Billie Holiday, “a constant outraging of the body.” The occasion was his ardent review of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. “One gets ‘kicks’; one ‘digs’ everything”: drinking, drugs, living and dying too fast. “Inwardly, these excesses are made to serve a spiritual purpose.”34 Kerouac said the “vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific” came to him as he sat among the flickering candles and the statues of saints and martyrs in Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell, Massachusetts, the French Catholic church of his childhood.35 As twentieth-​century Catholics move into secular ranks, says Thomas J. Ferraro, “the Catholic culture that they bear (and reproduce and transform) reemerges as a cluster of performative predispositions—not only or primarily a choice of subject or pronounced belief.”36 Compare Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to AME minister Reverdy Ransom’s scene of lynching in “The New Negro.” “The lyncher, mob, and stake have been [the Negro’s] emery wheel,” Ransom wrote, “to  make a polished man of strength and power.” Ransom’s is a Protestant reading of the lynching tree. To the extent that “The New Negro” gazes on the lynching tree, it sees an empty cross, the proof of resurrection. “In him [the Negro], the latest birth of freedom, / God hath again made all things new.” Catholics have traditionally focused instead on the tortured body on the cross, bleeding and raw. Devotion to the agony of the crucified Christ inspired among some late medieval holy women a spiritual practice of imitatio crucis. “Reading the lives of fourteenthand fifteenth-​century women saints,” Caroline Walker Bynum notes drily, “greatly expands one’s knowledge of Latin synonyms for whip, thong, flail, chain, etc.”37 Those avowing knowledge of Holiday’s own attraction to physical punishment connected it to what they heard in her singing: an exquisite sensitivity, perhaps, to affliction.38 By the time O u r L a d y   { 

181  }

of her last televised performance, David Margolick suggests, Holiday “had grown oddly, sadly suited to capturing the full grotesqueness” of “Strange Fruit.” Worn and “largely wasted away” in her appearance on London’s Chelsea at Nine, says Margolick, Holiday now “not only sang” of the lynched body’s bulging eyes and twisted mouth. “She embodied them.”39 As an adult, Billie Holiday prayed to Saint Thérèse in times of trouble, and she retained an attachment to the rosary. Mary Lou Williams remembered the two of them praying at a funeral or wake and Holiday wanting her friend’s attention. “ ‘Mary, talk to me,’ ” Billie said, “ ‘I’m Catholic too.’ And she holds up her fist and she has her rosary wrapped around her hand.”40 Holiday stopped going to confession, she told Dufty, after a censorious priest upbraided her from his side of the lattice on hearing the recitation of her sins. Holiday reportedly shot back, “You’re a white man and you ain’t God,” and quit the confessional for good.41 The memory of her confinement at Good Shepherd sometimes closed around her like live burial. “Sure they had no more business putting me in that Catholic institution than if I’d been hit by a damn truck,” Holiday says in Lady Sings the Blues. “But they did. Sure, they had no business punishing me, but they had. For years I used to dream about it and wake up hollering and screaming” (119). The Catholicism to which Holiday was drawn as an adult on its margins accommodated vice and forgave it; when Father Norman O’Connor assured Holiday she could enjoy herself and still be a good Catholic, she said she wished he were pope.42 Dufty speculated that Holiday turned to heroin when her religion failed her. It was her Irish spirit, he supposed, that made her choose a luminous dissolution as the way of release from the predations of law and order and the behavioral predicaments of polite society. (“When one is oppressed,” Dufty explained of this temperament, “it is a mark of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor.”)43 Others might see in Holiday’s preference for the needle less a rejection of her religion than a more fiercely embodied pursuit of its mystical consolations. Heroin in any case did for Holiday what the House of the Good Shepherd could not: compel her submission. Her friend Mae Barnes {  182  } 

religion around billie holiday

said that when Holiday’s drugs of choice were booze and weed, she’d “carry on like hell and have a ball,” going from club to club to hear music and “move with the rhythm” like the street kid she’d been in Baltimore. But when “Billie got on this heroin habit, sometime in 1942 or 43,” said Barnes, “she became meek and mild and couldn’t help herself, and anybody could make her do anything.”44 For all her ferocious resistance to physical confinement and bourgeois constraint, Holiday was pliant to her addictions, to the reality of abuse in her relationships, to the shutting down of the body she shrugged off at forty-​four. “She was very composed and ready for it,” Alice Vrbsky recalled of Holiday’s death. Vrbsky was a fan who became a companion and assistant to Holiday in the last years of her life. “She wasn’t a desperate dying woman by any means. Whatever she was thinking at the end, it was as though she wasn’t in trouble in not wanting to die, maybe she was even looking forward to it.”45 Songs like “Don’t Explain” and “My Man” and the episodes of Holiday’s biography for which they make a soundtrack, inadmissible to progressive consciousness by any canon of political correctness, are characterized nevertheless, says Michele Wallace, by an “existential correctness.” They offer scripts for understanding pain, the pain you might invite upon yourself and the pain that “just seeks you out and sweeps you up” when you imagined you were choosing otherwise. Their lesson is less “about how tragic a woman’s life can be if she doesn’t realize her life is her own property” and more about the illusory spell of agency—what’s the difference if I say / I’ll go away / when I know I’ll be back on my knees some day?—and they bind Holiday and her audiences not in shared projects of consciousness-​raising but in a communion of “emotional and spiritual recognition.”46 “Wherever people were lonely, isolated, afflicted,” Dufty wrote, there was Billie Holiday.47 The annals of Catholic spirituality are replete with stories of women who gave up eating, a course Billie Holiday appears to have chosen in the final months of her life. Holiday arrived in New York a self-​ described “fat healthy broad,” and John Hammond saw fit to estimate her weight at two hundred pounds in his first, brief notice of her in Melody Maker.48 By the time of her wraithlike appearance on Chelsea at O u r L a d y   { 

183  }

Nine, she had dropped into the skeletal double digits; at the end, Dufty said, you could see the white of her skull through the skin. According to Alice Vrbsky, Holiday’s chief nourishment in the last year of her life was a mix of 7 Up and gin, and she fell asleep with a lit cigarette so often that her bedclothes were burned through with holes. Holiday joked it made her holy.49 It was also the case—sometimes true as well for holy women who fasted—that Holiday loved to feed people. Visitors to the apartments she shared with Sadie until Sadie’s death in 1945 remembered one or both women always cooking. Dufty said Holiday was the “greatest cook alive”: she never cared for money or held on to it because her idea of wealth was an “icebox brimful of good food, two chickens for three people, a giant fish, stuffed with peppers and hamburger and sewn up with the precision of a plastic surgeon,” a fifth of gin, plenty of ice, and music and company she loved. “Any musician could go there [to Billie’s apartment] and eat,” Beat poet Babs Gonzales remembered. “She fed everybody in New York for about four years.”50 Bynum writes of the lives of medieval holy women for whom giving and self-​denial combine in imitatio of the suffering Savior as food. In  devotions that included “self-​flagellation, self-​starvation, and acute illness” alongside the “compulsive provision of food” for others, women became the lacerated and weeping body of Christ, “the bleeding meat they often saw in Eucharistic visions.”51 Holiday’s feeding of others did on occasion assume the tenor of punishments to which she made herself vulnerable. Pianist Memry Midgett recalled meeting Holiday at her apartment in September 1954 to cab together to that night’s performance with the Birdland All-​Stars: Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, and Lester Young. Holiday had been dragged from rehearsal earlier in the day by a drunk and violent Louis McKay, who demanded that she host a gathering that night for his son’s birthday. Midgett found Holiday at home washing up from the elaborate meal she’d cooked and served to McKay’s crowd. The two women arrived late to the performance and Holiday fell down onstage and forgot the lyrics to her songs, sick not from heroin, Midgett judged, but from not eating. After the concert, a furious McKay “managed to knock Billie right across the street with a single blow of his fist.”52 She married him. {  184  } 

religion around billie holiday

The better share of Holiday’s devotion to others’ hungers took a different form, a pivot away from self-​harm and toward a communion of appetites and their sating. Lady Sings the Blues describes the apartment she shared with Sadie as a “combination YMCA, boardinghouse for broke musicians, soup kitchen for anyone with a hard-​luck story, community center, and after-​hours joint where a couple of bucks would get you a shot of whisky and the most fabulous fried-​chicken breakfast, lunch, or dinner anywhere in town” (47). Holiday explained her culinary style to Mike Wallace as “southern cooking,” made from castoffs and meant to be shared. When Wallace asks Holiday to comment on a passage from Lady Sings the Blues—“You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave” (195)—she thinks he’s talking about food. If he came to her house for supper, she says, she’d cook up red beans with a little ground meat, some fried onions and peppers, and pigs’ feet sliced thin and fried crisp to eat like potato chips. Holiday also tells Wallace about her two big dreams: buying a house in the country where she’d care for and feed the kids nobody wanted, and running her own club in the city, where she’d sing what and when she wanted and cook for one or two hundred people, her friends and anyone else who wanted to come.53 Holiday’s weakness, Alice Vrbsky supposed, was that “people were using her all of the time, but she never learnt to use them.” When Holiday “had scads of money coming in” and people asked for money, “she gave it to them and nobody ever gave it back to her.” Sadie was the same and used to say, “If we give it out now, we’ll get it back later.” But, Vrbsky said, “it didn’t work out quite that way.” John Hammond described an apartment Billie shared with her mother as “a beat-​up flat, an awful, after-​hours place.” Dancer Ruby Helena showed up at the door to ask for money after her purse was stolen and stayed for half a year. Lester Young moved in after being spooked by the rats in his hotel. Babs Gonzales said that any “musician could go there and eat and get money for the subway or to go to the movies. Every day they could do that. And if [Billie] was out of town she would leave money with her mother.”54 Sadie’s “give it out now, get it back later” sounds like a riff on Ecclesiastes 11:1, “Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find O u r L a d y   { 

185  }

it after many days.” The passage is usually glossed as commending acts of charity whose reward is God’s, not the beneficiary’s, to bestow. Casting bread might be like “scattering flowers,” Thérèse of Lisieux’s description of caritas extended for caritas’ sake: “I can prove my love only by scattering flowers,” that is to say, “by making profit of the very smallest actions, by doing them all for love.”55 There’s a New Testament parallel to “cast thy bread upon the waters” in the teaching on hospitality in the Gospel of Luke. “When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor thy neighbours who are rich,” Jesus says in the Douay-​Rheims translation of the Bible used in the Key of Heaven, “lest perhaps they also invite thee again, and a recompense be made to thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind; And thou shalt be blessed, because they have not wherewith to make thee recompense: for recompense shall be made thee at the resurrection of the just.” Or in the limpid paraphrase of Jack Kerouac, “Christ says go out and find the bums. . . . Find the blind and the cripples. . . . Christ invites everyone, including the outcasts. So there’s no contradiction at all between Christ and a bebopper and a hipster.”56 No-​strings-​attached hospitality was a calling Billie Holiday shared with an Italian in Harlem named Big John who, bandleader Elmer Snowden remembered, always “kept a pot of lima beans and pigs’ feet on the stove in the back of his mill and whenever a musician gets off work or especially if he don’t have no gig, he always has a meal and a place to sleep. Billie used to come in sometimes.”57 It was also the credo of the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day. A young journalist fresh from the Marxist New Masses, Day began in the early 1930s to house and feed the destitute with loaves-​and-​fishes faith and the earnings of her paper, the Catholic Worker, which she sold for a penny a copy. In the 1920s, Day sang in Greenwich Village cabarets and ran with a crowd of artists, anarchists, and gangsters who admired her “because she could drink them under the table,” in Malcolm Cowley’s report, all of whom she surprised by entering the Catholic Church as a convert in 1927.58 In addition to running Catholic Worker houses in the city, Day urged her companions in the movement to open houses of hospitality in the countryside, much as Holiday dreamed of a big house {  186  } 

religion around billie holiday

in the country where she’d take in strays. Peter Maurin, an immigrant street philosopher and Day’s friend in the effort, imagined these rural communes as places where prostitutes and drug addicts might care for one another, building up communities of the blessed, even as most went the way of flophouses on the land. Thomas Merton called the Catholic Worker “the sign that we can find a mansion for beats in the Church as well as for the respectable.”59 Day’s conversion to Catholicism grew from her attraction to the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, which she’d begun attending at dawn on Sundays when the Greenwich Village bars had closed, a stop on what she called her “downward path . . . to salvation.”60 The nominal religion of Day’s childhood had been a dry Episcopalianism, seasoned by some casual experiments in mortification as the path of mystical transport. When Day was ten, she wrote in her roman à clef, The Eleventh Virgin, a Catholic tenement girl from the neighborhood undertook to initiate Day and her sister into “the mysteries of her religion and her saints.” Impressed by their companion’s intimate disclosures—if we “expect to get to heaven, we’ve got to begin trying that stuff now”—the pair began to practice secret corporal austerities in the darkness of their bedroom, as “visions of St. Pelagia and the virgin with her little Christ child” hovered about to fan the coals of “their glowing imaginations.”61 There’s no evidence that Billie Holiday and Dorothy Day crossed paths, but the wealthy Catholic layman who sought to finance Holiday’s funeral and burial, the shipping heir Michael Grace, was a benefactor of the Catholic Worker. Day and Billie Holiday shared the friendship of Mary Lou Williams, whose jazz liturgies Day admired. In 1968 Day attended the Lenten Mass composed by Williams at the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in Harlem, and wrote in her journal, “I have just come from a glorious celebration. . . . One came away feeling as though one had truly celebrated Mass, offering worship, adoration, glory to God, not to speak of penitence.”62 Day and Holiday also shared a constituency in the Beat poets who adored them both. Allen Ginsberg, who wrote in 1966 that the “sadistic persecutions” of Billie Holiday for her drug use had outraged America’s “spiritual heart,” first read his long poem “Kaddish” in its entirety at the offices of the Catholic Worker, and he signed a letter to Dorothy O u r L a d y   { 

187  }

Day “Love, Allen.”63 Kerouac had given Billie Holiday a cameo in On the Road, was set on building a novel around her and Lester Young when his friend John Clellon Holmes beat him to it with The Horn, and named his love interest Billie in Big Sur. Dufty insisted that Holiday was nevertheless “revolted by the crypto hipsters and the banner of ‘The Beat Generation’ under which they traveled,” because she “couldn’t understand why anybody would proclaim to be ‘beat’ while there was life to fight.”64 Ginsberg urged Dorothy Day to publish Kerouac’s poetry in the Catholic Worker and she declined to do so.65 No one who’s spent time in Catholic Worker houses has had much to say about the food—Day grew abstemious after her conversion, and the sensuous pleasures of good eating seem to have joined those of sex, booze, and cigarettes on her list of snares to faith. Still, she would have affirmed Billie Holiday’s point that you need “something to eat . . . before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.” It might have been a line in one of Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays” (simple versed paragraphs he wrote for the Catholic Worker) on the necessity of both corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Day learned from Maurin, she said, that doing God’s mercy means “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,” and “sheltering the homeless” as the way of instruction and comfort.66 “Awoke in great misery of spirit,” Day wrote in her journal the morning after Mary Lou Williams performed for the unexpectedly large crowds that showed up to hear them both at a gathering hosted by the Catholic social justice organization Pax Christi in 1966. “Last night the food ran out.”67 Insofar as a lived theology of Corpus Christi mattered for Billie Holiday or Dorothy Day, it was the Mystical Body of Christ and not only the tortured, bleeding body of Christ that mattered. The Mystical Body of Christ was a name for the church, which Day understood to mean all of humanity. For Day, the church was universal, catholic, for no other reason than that hunger is universal. Fellow human beings were brothers and sisters in Christ not because they were Christian but because Christ was human. Jesus was present in the breaking and eating of bread because Jesus broke bread and ate it with his friends. “It is because we forget the Humanity of Christ (present with us today in the Blessed Sacrament just as truly as when He walked with His {  188  } 

religion around billie holiday

apostles through the cornfields that Sunday long ago, breakfasting on the ears of corn),” Day wrote in 1935, “that we have ignored the material claims of our fellow man during this capitalistic, industrialist era. We have allowed our brothers and sisters, our fellow members in the Mystical Body to be degraded, to endure slavery to a machine, to live in rat-​infested holes.”68 In 1943 Pius XII articulated the doctrine of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ, a communion of flesh as well as spirit. Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely “pneumatological” as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are united by an invisible bond. . . . But a body calls also for a multiplicity of members, which are linked together in such a way as to help one another. And as in the body when one member suffers, all the other members share its pain, and the healthy members come to the assistance of the ailing, so in the Church the individual members do not live for themselves alone, but also help their fellows, and all work in mutual collaboration for the common comfort and for the more perfect building up of the whole Body.69 The doctrine of the Mystical Body says that your being resides in what you are a part of, what needs your tending, what you might constitute by your presence and build up and care for. “We are all supposed to see Christ in each other,” Day wrote, because Christ and every person are members of one body. “It is hard to see the dear sweet Christ in many a pestering drunk that comes in demanding attention.” Yet these “staggering, unlovely, filthy ones . . . are God’s messengers.”70 A wealthy visitor to a Catholic Worker house, a favorite story of the movement goes, was so humbled by the operation that she took the diamond ring from her finger and gave it to Dorothy Day to use to advance her work. Day thanked the donor and put the ring in her pocket. When one of the more troublesome regulars came through the door of the O u r L a d y   { 

189  }

house that evening, a woman recalled as particularly sour and demanding, Day took the diamond ring from her pocket and put it on the indigent woman’s finger. A member of the staff objected, suggesting that the ring could be sold and the money used to pay the woman’s rent for a year. “Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do what she liked with the ring. She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas. Or she could enjoy wearing a diamond ring on her hand like the woman who gave it away. ‘Do you suppose,’ Dorothy asked, ‘that God created diamonds only for the rich?’ ”71 Whenever Billie Holiday showed up in Baltimore, her childhood friend Freddie Green remembered, “no matter how much of a star she was,” she’d “go down in the slums, in the bars, and she’d have her mink, you know, and she’d just throw it on the chair and sit down with a little booze and she’d buy for everyone else.” And she’d go “out on the street dragging her mink and little kids would be dirty and have molasses on their face and hands but she didn’t care. She grabbed ’em up in her arms and hugged ’em and asked ‘how you feel? how’s your mama?’ ” And the kids would bury their grimy hands and faces in her mink and she’d gather them up “in her arms and not care.”72 “Music and cooking are so much alike,” says Italian chef Marcella Hazan. “Taste, like rhythm, may be described, but it does not exist until it is experienced.” Tom Ferraro elaborates: in food as in music, “the rhythm of preparation, consumption, and cleanup is eucharistic”; it seizes spiritual presence from the abstract register of description and extends it to bodies, senses, mouths.73 That the singing of Mass was a liturgical function, a priestly office no less than the consecration of bread and wine, was Pius X’s justification for attempting, unsuccessfully, to bar women and girls from church choirs.74 Holiday never got the big house full of foster kids to feed, or her own club to manage as she pleased, where she could show up to cook for a crowd and sing whenever she liked. Still, singing itself—“any grace might taste like the sacrament,” writes Bynum, “any communion or sharing might be a banquet, any gift might be given by . . . mouth”—could be a form of breaking bread, of hospitality extended without thought of gain.75 “We loved Lady Day like we loved spring, summer, winter, fall, and {  190  } 

religion around billie holiday

every day that breaks at dawn, we adored her so,” Stump Cross remembered. “She had her little dribbles like she gave to each musician, like ‘here you are, here you are, here’s a part of it for you, now sing with me,’ and it sent sparks out.”76 Holiday controlled her sound, as  far as possible, but never its dispersal. She laid claim, as many singers do, to certain songs as hers, “Strange Fruit” especially. But she wasn’t custodial over their afterlives. “Strange Fruit” was in no way hopeful or forward-​looking or programmatic, but it inspired actions that were all of these things. Holiday supposed her art might change things because her “nerve” drew people together, not because she had a message, the message. mw: Why is it that the color thing has not ever really been that important with musicians as it is with some of the rest of us? bh: The only answer I can give to that is I guess we all, we  have more nerve than other people, and we get a chance to meet more people, and bigger people. Like we get a chancelike I met Roosevelt’s son. How did I meet him? In Café Society. You know and I had nerve enough to go over and say hello. . . . I think we have a, more of an opportunity to meet people as they are—real people, nice people, they’re going to show us around. That’s why musicians and actors and artists can sort of straighten all that deal out. . . . And if you get up and sing and dance or make a speech—and you have nerve enough [inaudible], everybody gets to be one happy family. That’s the only way I can explain it.77 Holiday was the rare artist who could work almost entirely in a popular idiom. The best composers of show tunes share that gift; Holiday’s renditions of classics like “A Fine Romance,” “Summertime,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” ramp up the two-​for-​one pleasures of songs both familiar and enduringly great. Frank Sinatra was another and their admiration was mutual, if a little more ardent on Sinatra’s side. Holiday often said that the vocalist she liked best was O u r L a d y   { 

191  }

Jo Stafford, a singer of pop standards in the manner of Andy Williams and Doris Day. (One imagines she’d have appreciated Karen Carpenter, the whole package.) Holiday’s repertoire included songs that were challenging in any number of registers, songs almost no one else dared to sing once she had put her stamp on them. But Holiday never disdained a song for being popular, and she made jazz standards of songs that were unabashedly light, even silly. It wasn’t the case, as some biographers have argued, that she got all the worst songs and made them better. She got the same songs others sang and made them hers. “I have always thought the words were a little pseudo-​poetic,” Philip Larkin remarked of “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” But Billie “sings them with such passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry.”78 “A pop song is a popular song,” says the poet Michael Robbins, “one that some ideal ‘everybody’ knows or could know. Its form lends itself to communal participation. Or, stronger, it depends upon the possibility of communal participation for its full effect.” Rote lyrics have a power not unlike the power of the Mass: there’s a liturgical element in the standards, a democratizing sameness. Catholics can walk into a Mass anywhere and know what they’ll hear. Black and white Catholics sang from the same Liber Usualis. The meanings of the words were secondary; when the Mass was sung in Latin, communitas inhered in the embodied as much as in the strictly verbal dimension of song. At its best, a popular song works the way a Mass or Kaddish works, says Robbins; it enlists us among others who know the score, and who “share the burdens with us.”79 A glaring fault of the Hollywood version of Lady Sings the Blues, pianist Teddy Wilson rightly observes of the Diana Ross film, is that it portrays Holiday as wholly singular, unique, when really she was Billie Holiday only in the company of other musicians. Trying to tell the Billie Holiday story without them, Wilson says, would be like portraying Louis Armstrong as a solitary genius.80 The miraculous rookie sessions with Wilson’s orchestra, where so many gossamer songs became monuments of jazz style—“I Wished on the Moon,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Miss Brown to You”—were recorded on a shoestring, on the fly, Holiday not yet twenty-​one. Drummer Jo Jones, who played {  192  } 

religion around billie holiday

on some of the Teddy Wilson sessions, remembered that he and Billie would “go to the market for some leg bones, and she puts the pot on and we run downtown and make the records in three hours, and rush back uptown before the beans spoil. And she fixes a big ham and potato salad and plenty of food in the kitchen for the folks who could always eat . . . we never rehearsed. Rehearse? Rehearse what? Rehearse to play natural? How you going to rehearse to play natural?”81 It’s in service to the mystery of these early recordings that the language of Billie Holiday’s “natural” gifts comes most easily to the fore. We want so to resist it, to push back against the horizon of expectations and assumptions that say jazz artists don’t think, they feel, and their sound pours out spontaneously from that fact. That black music, like black religion, is emotive and raw, its wildness constrained only by form or by cool. But the vocabulary of the natural may be the closest some descriptions dare come to naming what it is about Holiday’s sound that feels irreducible, “free of everything,” in Ornette Coleman’s words, “but what created it.”82  Natural here is supernatural’s admiring but agnostic sibling: prodigy, force of nature, something beyond human power to predict or determine. How could Billie Holiday have possessed, asks Russell Banks, a “musicianship comparable to that of only a handful of geniuses in this century” when she was barely out of her teens?83 How could she keep coming in late with the vocal, never hurry, and still finish a line precisely on time? How could she sound like that? Sports analogies could be useful. Max Kaminsky recalled playing with Holiday when she started singing with Artie Shaw’s orchestra in 1938. One “evening Artie was late showing up at the rehearsal, and since I used to lead when he wasn’t there, I started the band on a new arrangement” for the song “Yesterdays.” “Billie stood up in front of the mike, listening sort of dreamily while we played the song through once, and on the second time around she came gliding in, in the nick of time, like a lazy ball player starting to lope around the bases but taking his own good time because he knows that ball he just hit is never going to stop sailing.”84 For every fumbling recourse to the natural to get at Holiday’s power there’s an otherworldly reach, a going-​there to intimate that Billie Holiday is hard to fathom because she is, as Peter Coviello says of Prince, O u r L a d y   { 

193  }

“in an only barely not literal sense, divine.”85 Did the “juju women give her some kind of special herbal potions,” wonders poet hattie gossett; did she dream a dream in which “the goddesses appeared and gave her a sign?”86 It’s “as if she were positioning her body like an antenna,” Will Friedwald writes of Holiday’s stillness on stage, her head tipped ever so slightly to one side. “Perhaps she wasn’t actually singing,” perhaps she was “channeling a greater force,” the music coming not from her but “through her, as if she were the transmitter for some higher power.”87 “Lady is an icon,” Donald Clarke says, “not a triumph of marketing but a real icon, an image of something sacred, itself regarded as sacred—because she was granted grace.” Clarke’s biography gives the last word to pianist Jimmy Rowles, who says he gave up a chance to sleep with Billie Holiday in this world but expects a do-​over in the next.88 It’s a tacky ending to a book, but even there sacred imaginings come irrepressibly to the fore. In the spirit of communal participation, let’s end this book where so many have paused to linger in appreciation and awe, with Holiday’s rendition of “Fine and Mellow” in the CBS production The Sound of Jazz. “This sacred moment is church,” writes Farah Jasmine Griffin of the performance, which originally aired live in December 1957. “The song is the sermon.”89 The Sound of Jazz broadcast included short segments of conversation recorded in rehearsal the night before. “It’s the kind of thing television can do,” Holiday told the Chicago Defender. “You know, showing our faces while they play a tape of us talking about the blues and then us singing and playing.”90 The economics of the music business in 1957 were such that the bigger you got, the less it mattered what kind of accompaniment the management sent up to the stage with you. The musicians who gathered at CBS studios for The Sound of Jazz traded horror stories about having to teach chords to the high school kids hired to play with them at gigs. The idea for The Sound of Jazz was to get all of the best players together again. The men backing Holiday on “Fine and Mellow” were Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Lester Young on tenor sax, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Doc Cheatham and Roy Eldridge on trumpet, Milt Hinton on bass, Danny Barker on guitar, and Mal Waldron on piano. Everyone but Mulligan had been with Billie on {  194  } 

religion around billie holiday

and off for decades; one or more of the players in this session appear on fully half of the 330 studio tracks she made between 1933 and 1959. In the clip of “Fine and Mellow,” Holiday speaks in voiceover as she and her well-​worn accompanists take their places on the stage. “Everything I do sing, it’s a part of my life,” she says. “Blues to me is like, feeling very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy.” Farah Jasmine Griffin sees and hears “church” in this performance as a latter-​day version of the ring shout, the west African–derived ritual form that gave vocal, kinetic, and communal enactment to an embodied aliveness beyond the capture of enslaved labor. Brought to America via the Middle Passage, the ring shout was transmitted through generations in religious and secular forms, from gospel shouts in black Baptist churches, to the walk-​around dances of minstrel troupes, to the circles that form around inspired performers at house parties and in clubs. “In the circle,” Griffin writes, “the artists/priests acknowledge the dead and are visited by them.”91 One might also see and hear “church” in The Sound of Jazz as an instance of the Mystical Body. Tom Ferraro’s description of the streetwise performance ethos in the ethnic Catholic enclaves that gave rise to Frank Sinatra is true of any jazz session worthy of the name: “Sociability produces individuality out of group interaction, not apart from it; individual success provokes quality emulation, not sullen resentment; and the aesthetic pleasures of competitive, individuating display strengthen the body politic, rather than dividing it against itself.”92 It’s a good description of what Billie Holiday elicited from the band. Watch the tape. Ben Webster blows first, after a chorus of Billie singing “My man don’t love me / he treats me awful mean.” Sadie once chased Webster out of their apartment with an umbrella after he and Billie came to blows, but the two musicians ended friends. Then sad and lovely Lester Young, his swollen eyes like “two eggs in a bowl of milk,” guitarist Danny Barker said, his feet in bedroom slippers, his seated body slumped and inert. He’s so ill, edging so near the grave, but he summons a gallant buoyancy and rises on cue, blows his slow and heartbreakingly gentle solo before being led away to a corner of the room. In fifteen months Holiday would leave his funeral early, buckled with grief and bitterness at not having been asked to sing.93 Next is tall, O u r L a d y   { 

195  }

blond Gerry Mulligan, looking like he wandered in from Yale; then gruff and gravelly Coleman Hawkins, who played with Clarence Holiday when Billie was fourteen. Finally, Roy Eldridge, blowing his trumpet in liquid bursts, like a faucet turning off and on; he’s showing off, takes two choruses instead of one. “The musicians that played for Lady played through their hearts and cried to Lady,” Stump Cross said of Holiday’s accompanists; they called out to her “through the piano, through the trumpet, through the trombones.”94 In the clip of “Fine and Mellow,” you see Holiday answer back each one with an incantatory listening. They offer her gifts; she appraises them meet. What spirits light on them light on her; while each man plays she lifts her ears and gently nods or tilts her head from side to side, subtly shifting the plane of her face, as though she were balancing a beam of moonlight on her chin. The entire scene feels suffused with a radiant improbability. It almost never happened: New York City was digging out from an early snow that tied up cars and buses for hours. The show’s sponsor threatened to fold at the last minute on the grounds that it would be unseemly for CBS to project Billie Holiday, a felon and a drug addict, into the living rooms of Americans, especially on a Sunday. Holiday was not alone in fragile health and circumstances. Nat Hentoff, one of the show’s producers, was asked how he’d managed to bring so many luminaries together in the studio at one time, and said he could do it because to a one they needed the gig. “All of them dying, most of them,” Danny Barker remembered of his fellow players on this session. “Drank their self or doped their self to death.” Yet here, for this moment, they were. Milt Hinton remembered the feeling in rehearsal the night before, “the ecstasy, just to be flitting around again” with the musicians in the room: “Here we are, playing together.” After rehearsal, Doc Cheatham said, Billie Holiday invited all of the musicians back to her place, and cooked up a meal of greens and ribs.95

{  196  } 

religion around billie holiday

Notes

In tro d u ct i o n 1. Didion, “Art of Fiction,” 143–44. 2. Quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 6. In a 2009 conversation, McCullough explained that Harper & Row had moved in the 1970s to a business school model, one of the first publishing houses to do so. Its focus would no longer be the love of literature but the bottom line, a shift that ultimately drove McCullough, an extraordinary literary editor whose authors included Djuna Barnes and Sylvia Plath, to writing and publishing cookbooks. Stephens, “Conversation with Fran McCullough.” 3. Didion, “Art of Fiction,” 147. 4. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 8. 5. Courthouse of Baltimore City, commitment form for Sadie Fagan, May 13, 1908, reproduced in Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 78. 6. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 7. Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 284. 8. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 9. Hammond, “More Places with Spike.” 10. For this quote’s provenance, see Henry, “ ‘And I Don’t Care,’ ” 41. 11. Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” 120, 122. 12. I’m most influenced here by Primiano, “Vernacular Religion,” and Orsi, “Everyday Miracles.” Orsi’s description of religion “lived with and against its multiple inheritances (and its varied encumbrances), with equivocal, instructive, creative, and unpredictable outcomes,” might as nicely be predicated of jazz. Orsi, Cambridge Companion, 10 (emphasis added). 13. Orodenker, “On the Records.” 14. Exhibitors Herald, “Official Cut-​Outs.” 15. Bivins, Spirits Rejoice, 8. 16. Ibid., 22; Ford, Flag of Ecstasy, 114. Ford told Linda Kuehl that friends of Billie Holiday’s let him know that she loved this poem and carried a copy in her purse. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 17. Billie Holiday to Louis McKay, n.d. (ca. 1958), in catalog of Schulson Autographs, https://​www​.schulsonautographs​.com​/pages​/books​/2212​/billie​

-holiday​/autograph​-letter​-signed​-4​-to​-n​-p​-n​-d​-but​-ca​-1958; Paulist Archives, memorial page for Rev. Norman Joseph O’Connor; Louis McKay to William Dufty, July 19, 1959, in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 447; miscellaneous receipts and invoices, Billie Holiday Collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, box 2, folder 19. 18. I thank Jason Bivins for this insight. 19. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 20. Friedwald, Biographical Guide, 221. 21. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9; Eckstine interview; Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. 22. Huang and Huang, “She Sang as She Spoke,” 289. 23. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 24. Redding, review of Ethel Waters; Baltimore Afro-​ American, “Waters Sings for Billy Graham.” Cf. Redding’s review of Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues. 24. See the cover of the March 1951 issue of Tan Confessions. 25. On Welles’s abandoned Story of Jazz, see Feather, “Trumpeters Jubilee”; Chicago Defender, “Billy Holliday [sic] to Sing”; Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 239–41; Stowe, Swing Changes, 138–39; Benamou, It’s All True, 119–23; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 56–61. 26. Lees, Cats of Any Color, 19. 27. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 62. 28. Cowell, “American Composers,” 378. 29. Jessamy, “Attention, Please!” 30. Angelou, Heart of a Woman, 16. 31. Kerouac, “Origins of the Beat Generation,” 42. For photographs of the church, Ste. Jeanne D’Arc, see Suiter, “Kerouac’s Lowell.” “Heroine of the Hip Generation” was Kerouac’s working title for a chapter on Holiday in Hold Your Horn High, a book he planned to write about Lester Young. See Charters and Charters, Brother-​Souls, 224. 32. This spot-​on term is Tom Ferraro’s. 33. Reed, “Who Are the Jazz Martyrs,” 42, 49. 34. O’Meally, Lady Day, 10. 35. Harte added that Holiday wouldn’t say the things in bed that “chicks say who don’t get a chance to curse.” Instead, she would say, “Use me.” Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9 (emphasis added). 36. Holiday, interview by Wallace. C ha p t er 1 1. Weiner, Religion Out Loud, 2. Jazz in particular, says Jason Bivins, “disrupts stable identities, spills over its own limits, and generally evades definition in ways suggestively similar to the tricky category ‘religion.’ ” Bivins, Spirits Rejoice, 12–13. 2. Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price, 123; Sullivan, “Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.”

{  198  } 

Notes to Pages 7–17

3. Sheed, House That George Built, 9. 4. Delaunay, Django Reinhardt, 101. Europeans who heard jazz in wartime were not converted en masse to the American way. Banned by the Nazis, jazz became a metaphor for lightness and rebellion in Nazi settings. It wasn’t just swing kids in resistance to Hitler who associated jazz with freedom, but ordinary Germans and German officers who were waiting out the war. Guitarist Django Reinhardt escaped the fate of one million of his fellow Roma who were exterminated in the camps by entertaining jazz-​loving German soldiers in occupied Paris. “When the soldiers came,” Michael Dregni recalled, “they wanted wine and women and song. And to many of them, jazz was the popular music, and Django was the most famous jazz musician in Paris. And it was really a golden age of swing with these gypsies living kind of this grand irony.” Dregni speaking on NPR, “Django Reinhardt.” 5. Dom Joseph Gajard, “La musicalité du chant Grégorien” (1928), quoted in Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 302. 6. Stowe, Swing Changes, 149. 7. Dufty, “True Story,” part 2. 8. Kuehl MS, box 1, folders 7 and 1. Irene Kitchings told Kuehl that Goodman came to Billie and Sadie’s after-​hours place on 142nd Street well before Hammond entered the picture. To Kuehl’s request for confirmation, Benny Goodman told Kuehl, “You know I did date her [Billie] a couple of times. . . . But, oh yes, I was up there in Harlem before 1933. I was playing with Ben Pollack’s orchestra in 1929. We played here at the Central Park Hotel at that time. And we went up to hear Charlie Johnson’s orchestra at Small’s. Oh, it was a regular ritual. You couldn’t live here and not go up there.” Ibid., folder 7. 9. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 191. 10. Cone, Spirituals and the Blues, 108, 127. 11. For the story and sound of early Paramount records, see van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall; and van der Tuuk, White, and Blackwood, Paramount. 12. See, in addition to van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, Luhrssen, “Blues in Wisconsin”; Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label,” parts 1 and 2; and Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling” and “Paramount’s Decline and Fall.” 13. Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-​Spirituals,” 346. 14. See especially Martin, Preaching on Wax. 15. Walton, “Preachers’ Blues,” 216–17. 16. Brown, “Preacher Blues.” 17. Nix, “Black Diamond Express,” part 1. A bibliography of this rich terrain would include Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here; Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture”; Martin, Preaching on Wax; Oliver, Screening the Blues; Reed, Holy Profane; Walton, “Preachers’ Blues.” 18. Lethem, “We Happy Fakes.” 19. Jagger et al., According to the Rolling Stones, 117. 20. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 21. Spencer Williams, “Ticket Agent Ease Your Window Down.”

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8 – 2 8   { 

199  }

22. Jefferson, “All I Want Is That Pure Religion.” I am indebted here to Giggie, After Redemption, 23–58. 23. Cone includes these lyrics (with altered spelling) without further attribution in Spirituals and the Blues, 120. 24. See Baraka, Blues People, 109. 25. See Shack, Harlem in Montmartre; Jackson, Making Jazz French. 26. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 9. 27. Wilson, “Recreating a Famed Concert.” This program note was written by Whiteman’s manager, Hugh C. Ernst. 28. In his review of the concert in the New York Times, Olin Downes reported that “Livery Stable Blues” was “introduced apologetically as an example of the depraved past from which modern jazz has risen.” Downes said that he “indignantly rejected” the apology, and found the orchestra’s rendition of “Livery Stable Blues” “a gorgeous piece of impudence,” far “better in its unbuttoned jocosity and Rabelaisian laughter than other and polite compositions that came after.” Downes, “Concert of Jazz.” See Breitwieser, “Jazz Fractures,” for a compelling argument that “The Jazz History of the World,” the orchestral performance heard at one of Jay Gatsby’s parties, was inspired by Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert. 29. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 26. 30. Boas, “Limitations of the Comparative Method.” My understanding of Boas’s school and its broader impact is indebted to Hegeman, Patterns for America. 31. Lomax, “ ‘Sinful Songs,’ ” 182; Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs, xxx. My understanding of the Lomaxes and Lead Belly relies on Filene, Romancing the Folk, and Szwed, Alan Lomax. 32. New York Herald-​Tribune, “Lomax Arrives with Lead Belly”; Lomax, “ ‘Sinful Songs,’ ” 184; Lomax and Lomax, Negro Folk Songs, x; Life, “Lead Belly,” 39. 33. Baraka, Blues People, 161. 34. Tillich, From Time to Time, 176. 35. Tillich, “Demonic,” 77, and Theology of Culture, 5, 8. 36. Time, “Protagonist,” 26–27. Coffin appeared on the cover of this issue of Time. 37. On the institutional genesis of religious studies, I am indebted to Jewett, “Columbia Naturalists.” On Paul Tillich’s contribution to religious studies, see Fessenden, “ ‘Woman’ and the ‘Primitive.’ ” 38. Lomax, “ ‘Sinful Songs,’ ” 183. 39. Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs, 49. In another incident, an obliging superintendent “sent a trusty with a shotgun into the dormitory” to bring back a prisoner to sing a tune the Lomaxes wanted to record: Presently the black guard came out, pushing a Negro man in stripes along at the point of his gun. The poor fellow, evidently afraid he was to be punished, was trembling and sweating in an extremity of fear. The guard shoved him up before our microphone. . . .

{  200  } 

Notes to Pages 29–34

[The superintendent asked,] “Do you know the song about the bad man who killed his wife?” “Well, I don’ rightly know. I used to sing it. Ef you give me a day or two to study it up, I might be able to sing it.” “Hell, you’re going to sing it now. Turn on your machine, young fellow.” (Lomax, “ ‘Sinful’ Songs,” 130.) 40. Gioia, “Red-​Rumor Blues.” 41. See Denning, Cultural Front. 42. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 199. 43. Ibid., 18, 24, 29. 44. Kahn, “Young Man with a Viola,” 20. 45. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 32, 35. 46. New York Amsterdam News, “World Weeps.” 47. Newman, “Florence Mills,” 483. 48. Kahn, “Young Man with a Viola,” 22, 19. 49. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 21–23, 25. 50. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 194–95. My knowledge of Hammond’s concert is indebted to Anderson, Deep River, 224–47, and to Wald, “From Spirituals to Swing.” 51. New Masses, “New Masses Presents.” 52. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 195. 53. Taubman, “Negro Music Given.” 54. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 207. Johnson had in fact died the previous August. 55. Badger, “James Reese Europe”; Howland, “Jazz Rhapsodies”; Morgenstern, “Night Ragtime Came”; Walton et al., “Black-​Music Concerts”; Wilson, “Handy’s Night, 50 Years Later.” 56. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 191. 57. Hammond, “Random Notes”; Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 192. 58. New Masses, “Between Ourselves.” 59. Wald, “From Spirituals to Swing,” 387–88. 60. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 203. 61. New Masses, “Between Ourselves.” 62. Taubman, “Negro Music Given.” 63. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 202–3. 64. Time, “Spirituals to Swing.” 65. Orodenker, “On the Records.” See Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! 66. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 204. 67. Albertson, “John Hammond—Part 3.” 68. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 200. 69. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 7. 70. Ibid., box 1, folder 9.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 4 – 4 4   { 

201  }

71. Berg, “Nazis’ Take on ‘Degenerate Music’ ”; for the traveling exhibit, see Ziegler, Entartete Musik. 72. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 210. 73. Chase, “Billie Tells Her Story.” 74. Grafton, “I’d Rather Be Right.” The New York Evening Post, where Grafton’s column appeared, was one of the few venues in the contemporary press that dared openly register the song’s political weight. The nation’s largest African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, named Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” one of the top ten records of 1939 and signaled that its flip side, “Strange Fruit,” was “equally interesting” (“Ten Best Records of 1939”). Among other black papers, the Chicago Defender included a fifty-​word notice of “Strange Fruit” and named it “propaganda” (“Billie Holiday Makes Record”). The Atlanta Daily World reprinted a verse, quoted NAACP leader Walter White on the song’s haunting beauty, and twice described Holiday as “buxom” (“First Song About Lynching Evils”). That notice was copied largely from another black paper, the Norfolk (Va.) New Journal and Guide (“Nightclub Singer Waxes”). 75. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 94–95. 76. Interview with Holiday reported in Le Berthon, “White Man’s Views.” 77. Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 164; Mills, “Lynching Kept Out of Sight.” 78. Thompson, letter to the editor. 79. “United Automotive Workers Resolution”; “N B C Baptists Endorse”; “Easter as National Negro Double V Day,” all in the Pittsburgh Courier. My understanding of the Courier’s role in the Double V campaign is indebted to Washburn, “Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign.” 80. Pittsburgh Courier, “Double V Campaign.” 81. Bolden, “Orchestra Whirl.” 82. Holiday, interview by Conover. 83. Bowe, “Razaf, Johnson to Compose.” 84. Eric Lott suggests that the real Double V music was what Amiri Baraka called “the willfully harsh, anti-​assimilationist sound of bebop,” which, says Lott, “made it possible to keep playing jazz in the face of given musical and social facts without losing self-​respect.” Lott, “Double V, Double-​Time,” 461. 85. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 18–19. 86. See Hervieux, Forgotten; Nalty, Strength for the Fight; Lee, Employment of Negro Troops. 87. Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge, 366, 456, 476. 88. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 99. 89. Greer Johnson told Linda Kuehl that it was in Holiday’s room at the Braddock that he picked up her Voice-​O-​Graph recording of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” where it lay discarded on the floor. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 90. Brandt, Harlem at War, 6. 91. Hughes, “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” in Collected Poems, 281. 92. Eleanor Roosevelt quoted in Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, 129. 93. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative.”

{  202  } 

Notes to Pages 44–51

94. Belair, “United States Has Secret Sonic Weapon.” 95. African American music made an especially useful calling card in Africa, where Moscow campaigned assiduously for allies among newly independent states. Sent to Africa to convey American solidarity with the freedom struggles of Africans, the State Department’s jazz ambassadors communicated above all African American solidarity with the freedom struggles of Africans. When the jazz tours brought Louis Armstrong to Kenya in 1960, a Nairobi newspaper welcomed him warmly: “Satchmo’s title should be ‘Ambassador Extraordinary of the United States . . . charged with being the physical embodiment of all that is desirable in the field of human relationships in that country, the bastion of the Free-​World.’ To which description the embittered citizen would murmur ‘Little Rock.’ . . . Is it not possible to use the sneer ‘Little Rock’ to the advantage of the United States? To point out that this nation is prepared to legislate against the ignorance of the prejudiced and enforce that legislation with armed force if necessary? . . . Ambassador Satchmo comes to us as the living testimony that the United States constitutes a large slice of this world wherein opportunity of advancement is not governed by inherited position or colour.” Nairobi Sunday Nation, quoted in Davenport, “Jazz and the Cold War,” 292. In 1957 Armstrong refused to tour the Soviet Union and South America with State Department backing unless Eisenhower intervened on behalf of the nine black students then attempting to enroll at Little Rock’s Central High. Initially quiescent, Eisenhower sent the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock and federalized the state’s National Guard to secure the students’ safety, winning Armstrong’s thanks and his participation in the tour. See Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 63–91. My understanding of the State Department’s jazz diplomacy is indebted to Von Eschen and to Monson, Freedom Sounds. See also the archived materials on the website for “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World.” 96. Quoted in Kaplan, “When Ambassadors Had Rhythm.” 97. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 254–55 (emphasis added). 98. On Eisenhower’s words, see Henry, “ ‘And I Don’t Care,’ ” 41. On the American “faith in faith,” see Hungerford, Postmodern Belief. 99. Clar, “Negro Church,” 16. I am indebted to Jason Bivins for this reference. Part of what it means to hear “religion” in black music is to note an implicitly otherworldly quality in the sound. “The Negro could not ever become white and that was his strength,” wrote Amiri Baraka. “At some point, always, he could not participate in the dominant tenor of the white man’s culture. It was at this juncture that he had to make use of other resources, whether African, subcultural, or hermetic. And it was this boundary, this no man’s land, that provided the logic and beauty of his music.” Baraka, Blues People, 80. To hear the spiritual quality of the music as and through the “black church,” and to integrate this “church” into the Cold War–era tapestry of American religious life, may be in the end to refuse its otherness entirely.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 1 – 5 2   { 

203  }

100. Memo dated March 19, 1962, from American Embassy Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, to the U.S. Department of State, quoted in Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 77. 101. Crouch, “Obama’s One Cat.” 102. Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. 103. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 96. Cha p t er 2







1. Millstein, “Troubled Song.” 2. Dufty, “True Story,” part 1; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 77. 3. Wilson, with Ligthart and Van Loo, Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz, 24. 4. Count Basie, interview by Kuehl, cassette 1. 5. Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. Blues beginnings are African American beginnings, says Amiri Baraka. When “a man looked up in some anonymous field and shouted, ‘Oh Ahm tired a dis mess / Oh yes Ahm so tired a dis mess,’ you can be sure he was an American.” Baraka, Blues People, xii. 6. Millstein, “Troubled Song.” 7. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 50; Jones, Jazz Talking, 249. 8. Freddie Green, quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 20. 9. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 10. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 23 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 11. Clarence “Pop” [sic] Foster quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 78. Most accounts put Holiday in Harlem no earlier than 1929. She was released from Welfare Island in October 1929, and her first known singing job as Billie Holiday, at the Grey Dawn in Queens, dates from after this time. According to Donald Clarke, Elmer Snowden says he did see Holiday in Harlem in 1927. Wee Wee Hill told Linda Kuehl that her departure from Baltimore came in the summer of 1927. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 36; Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 12. Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 18. 13. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 14. Ibid., folder 7; Jones, “Max Jones Spends a Holiday”; Ruby Helena quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 176, and also quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 104. Composer Irene Kitchings told Linda Kuehl that Sadie’s favorite of Billie’s companions was the white heiress Louise Crane. “Sadie loved that girl because she was such a nice girl. She was just so good to Billie and to Sadie, too.” Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 15. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 195. 16. Kaminsky and Hughes, Jazz Band, 105. Holiday says she managed to pass as “Spanish or something” while on tour with Artie Shaw (Lady Sings the Blues, 81); Marianne Moore was thrilled by her resemblance to Mei Lanfang, a male performer in Peking opera famous for his female roles (Szwed, Billie Holiday, 41). Many have noticed that Holiday seldom looked the same twice;

{  204  } 

Notes to Pages 52–59

O’Meally’s Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday is premised on that observation. 17. The court document is reproduced in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 102. 18. Holiday’s intake form at Alderson can be viewed in the 1984 documentary film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day. 19. Information from correctional officers Virginia McLaughlin and Jean Allen interviewed in ibid. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who served time at Alderson for her Communist organizing, reported that, while there, Holiday “endeared herself to the inmates by refusing to sing for a party of guests at the Warden’s residence, saying under her contract she was not allowed to sing free. But she could sing for charity, so she offered to sing for the inmates, which was refused.” Flynn, Alderson Story, 166. 20. Anderson, “Ernie Anderson Reminisces,” 102. 21. Time, “New Life,” 70; see also Jack Egan, “Billie Back: Sans Verbiage, Plus Lbs.,” Down Beat April 21, 1948, reprinted in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 104. 22. On the cabaret card system in New York, see Ramshaw, “Creative Life of Law.” 23. Ulanov, History of Jazz, 253. 24. Sagan, With Fondest Regards, 13. 25. Dufty, “Billie Holiday Dies After Relapse.” 26. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, 31. In 1945, Holiday’s concert itinerary included a skating rink in Richmond and a hosiery mill in Suffolk, Virginia. Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 82. 27. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 194. 28. The lyrics are from Billie Holiday singing “My Man” on Decca, 1948. Channing Pollock translated them from the French “Mon Homme” for Fanny Brice in 1921. 29. Barker quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 396. Bevan Dufty, William Dufty’s son, told me that Barker’s account is largely accurate, and that Billie sat in the Dufty kitchen and talked as his father typed. 30. I am indebted to Maya Gibson’s research on Frank Harriott’s unpublished manuscript in “Alternate Takes,” 45–57. Harriott’s receipt of a Julius Rosenwald Award for his project on “a celebrated blues singer” was announced in the Pittsburgh Courier on May 24, 1947. His death was noted in the September 22, 1955, issue of Jet. 31. Philadelphia Tribune, “Find Billie’s Well Hidden Dope.” 32. Blackburn, With Billie, 261–66; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 29–32; Holiday to Bill and Maely Dufty, July 23, 1956, in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 176; Holiday to Tallulah Bankhead, January 12, 1955, in O’Meally, Lady Day, 173; William Dufty to Holiday and Louis McKay, ca. January 1, 1957, in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 182. Holiday wrote to Father Norman O’Connor in November 1955, “My book is about to go to the printers. We are still haggling over a couple of places where I want to libel a couple of people and the Publishers and Lawyers think I’d better not” (in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 398). A transcript of Maely Dufty’s taped phone call with Louis McKay, and excised pages of the

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 9 – 6 3   { 

205  }

manuscript of Lady Sings the Blues containing accounts of Holiday’s relationships with Levy, Bankhead, and Welles, are archived with the Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 11. 33. New York Times, “Polk News Awards Announced”; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 51; Longo, Spoiled Priest; Dufty, “True Story,” part 2. 34. On pulp detective magazines, see McWilliam, “Fear and Loathing in Suburbia”; Godtland and Hanson, True Crime Detective Magazines. Roosevelt’s editorial is in the July 1930 issue of True Detective Mysteries. J. Edgar Hoover’s “Law Enforcement on the March” is in the March 1943 issue of True Detective; “Jail for the Jezebel” is in the June 1952 issue of True Detective, “Scarlet Sinner’s Final Exit” is in the January 1942 issue of Exposé Detective, and “Bad Woman” is in the January 1938 issue of Real Detective. 35. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 20. 36. Anslinger and Tompkins, Traffic in Narcotics, 168. See also Dufty and Marja, “Czar Nobody Knows.” 37. Charles Henri Ford, “Chanson Pour Billie,” in Flag of Ecstasy, 114. Ford was a walking cross-​section of the circles Holiday moved in and the figures who were drawn to her. At age sixteen, living under his parents’ roof in Columbus, Mississippi, Ford started a magazine he called Blues: A Bisexual Bimonthly; Gertrude Stein was a contributor during its nine-​issue run. Ford joined Stein’s expatriate community in Paris before settling in New York, where he published View, a distinguished magazine of the literary and visual arts and an early venue for surrealist art and poetry. Ford’s sister, Ruth Ford, followed her brother to New York after studying philosophy at the University of Mississippi and became an actress, playing Temple Drake on Broadway in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, a part Faulkner wrote with her in mind. It was at a salon hosted by Ruth and Charles Ford at Ruth’s apartment in the Dakota that Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein hatched the idea for West Side Story. See Hevesi, “Ruth Ford, Film and Stage Actress, Dies at 98”; Thredgill, “Mississippi Trailblazer: Charles Henri Ford.” 38. Harriott, “Hard Life of Billie Holiday.” 39. Dufty, “Did Old Addiction Cause a Hospital Runaround?” 40. De Veaux, Don’t Explain, 27. 41. Harriott, unpublished “novel loosely based on the life of Billie Holiday,” quoted in Gibson, “Alternate Takes,” 48. 42. Drinkard, Zaidins, and Tucker all quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 234, 303, and 179, respectively. 43. Harriott, “Hard Life of Billie Holiday.” 44. Dexter, “I’ll Never Sing.” 45. Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. 46. Monson, “Problem with White Hipness,” 419. 47. Barker, interview by White. 48. Red Rodney quoted in Gitler, Swing to Bop, 282. 49. Schneider, Smack, 29. 50. Kerouac, On the Road, 99.

{  206  } 

Notes to Pages 63–67

51. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 141, 236n5. 52. I am indebted to Szwed’s rich discussion of torch songs in Billie Holiday, 91–92. 53. Billie Holiday singing with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935), https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​ QTT9Su1d​-VE. Transcription is my own. 54. Baraka, “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” in Black Music, 31. 55. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 4. 56. Millstein, “Books of the Times.” 57. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 46–47. 58. Holiday, “I’m Cured for Good,” 28. 59. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 19. The baptismal certificate is reproduced in O’Meally, Lady Day, 80. 60. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 42–44. 61. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 452–53. 62. Catechism of Christian Doctrine. Emphasis added. 63. Catholic Church, Rituale romanum, 101. In the Catholic tradition, written lives of saints are often begun in the spiritual intimacy of the confessional. Though bound to hold in confidence the confessions he hears, the priest-​confessor might exhort an exemplary penitent to write her spiritual autobiography, as in the cases of Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux, or he himself might write the penitent’s biography after her death. See Milinkoff, Related Lives. 64. Catalog of St. Frances Academy, Baltimore, 1910–22, reprinted in Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 293–95. The catalog states that first- and second-​grade students attend for $2 a quarter. The Oblate Sisters also took in orphans and students whose parents could not pay. See Rouse, Negro Education Under Catholic Auspices, 57–62. 65. The Eighth Biennial Report of the Board of State Aid and Charities to the Governor and the General Assembly of Maryland, 1914–1915 judged the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls not yet up to the grade of C in meeting the state’s standards for proper housing, adequate supervision, medical corps, proper food and clothing, religious instruction, and education (94). 66. Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 23. 67. Baltimore Afro-​American, “Girl, Eleven, Accuses Blind Man.” 68. Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 26, 27. Newspapers of the period show many instances of girls being held in protective custody at Houses of the Good Shepherd in connection with rape and trafficking proceedings. 69. Sadie’s commitment and release papers are reproduced in Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 78, 81. Sadie Fagan is listed as an inmate in the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls in the 1910 census. 70. Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 21; Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 190n199. 71. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 13, 38; O’Meally, Lady Day, 72, 27; Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 50–68, 75–76. The notification

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 7 – 7 4   { 

207  }

of Sadie Fagan’s marriage to Philip Gough at St. Francis Xavier Church in East Baltimore, reproduced in Whalen, 89, indicates as her place of baptism Good Shepherd Chapel, at Calverton, Maryland. This is how the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls is described in several accounts, e.g., East Cambridge (Mass.) Sacred Heart Review, “Ecclesiastical Items”; Baltimore Sun, “Home to Mark Jubilee.” 72. U.S. Department of Commerce, Benevolent Institutions 1910, 198; Rouse, Negro Education Under Catholic Auspices, 80–82. 73. Philadelphia Public Ledger, “Miss Drexel’s Profession.” 74. Catholic Church in the United States, 122. 75. See Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, http://​www​.josephites​.org​ /about​-us​/our​-history/. 76. Baltimore Sun, “Cardinal Lauds Them”; Charlotte (N.C.) News, “Catholic Church and Negro”; Carroll, Priest’s Voice. As a missionary to Negroes, Carroll was also a Dickensian chronicler of their habitations: “undrained mud streets, with pools of stagnant water everywhere; sidewalks dilapidated or none; low ramshackle frame houses, with their centers of gravity anywhere, tottering in decay.” Carroll, “Negro Missions,” 5. 77. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1; Skinny “Rim” Davenport quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 32, 33; Baltimore Afro-​American, “Girl, Eleven, Accuses Blind Man.” On Holiday’s musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, see also O’Meally, Lady Day, 83–88. 78. Baltimore Sun, “ ‘Dixie’ for Cardinal” and “Colored Choir to Sing”; “Grand Jury Report”; Baltimore Sun, “Twenty-​Four Negro Girls Held.” 79. Pius X, “Tra le sollecitudini,” issued by Pius X on November 23, 1903. On the nonimplementation of the ban on women’s voices, see Ruff, Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform, 278–79. 80. Carroll, Priest’s Voice, iv. 81. Ibid., 63; see also iv, 118–19, 100–102, 26. 82. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 120. 83. Shirley Horn quoted in Huang and Huang, “She Sang as She Spoke,” 287. 84. Teddy Wilson quoted in Hentoff, “Music That Is New Again.” 85. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 121. 86. Carroll, Priest’s Voice, 38, 158. 87. Catholic Church in the United States, 122. 88. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 182. 89. Rouse, Negro Education Under Catholic Auspices, 81; Colored Harvest, October– November 1931, quoted in ibid., 82. 90. Good Shepherd Services, “Second House of the Good Shepherd.” The 1930 census shows a dozen women in their twenties and thirties residing at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls. 91. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Rules and Observances, 76. 92. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 175. 93. Kolve, “Ganymede/Son of Getron,” 1067n132. Kolve is referencing Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 10–28.

{  208  } 

Notes to Pages 75–81

94. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Rules and Observances, 10. 95. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 171. 96. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, 173. This line comes in the epilogue to the book, written by Thérèse’s superior after words that Thérèse reportedly said. See http://​www​.archives​-carmel​-lisieux​.fr​/english​/carmel​/index​.php​/last​ -year​-of​-therese​/last​-year​-of​-therese​-page​-3. 97. Thelma Carpenter quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 452. 98. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 38, 40. 99. Mother Euphrasia “spoke to the rigid corpse as she would have spoken to a living sentient being,” commanding “her stiffened arms to fall by her side immediately, so that the surgeon was able to proceed with the operation without hindrance.” Ibid., 204–5. “She’d give you the heart out of her body” was how a neighborhood kid who’d come up with Billie/Eleanora described her, suggesting that some version of the story might have made it from the convent to the street. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 3. 100. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 310. Billie Holiday’s godson Bevan Dufty, William Dufty’s son, said that when he was an infant Holiday would attempt to nurse him at her breast. Holiday was godmother to children of many of her friends, including Rosemary Clooney and Leonard Feather. According to lawyer Earle Zaidins, speaking in the 1984 film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day, Holiday attempted to adopt children but was rejected as unfit. 101. See Sisters of the Good Shepherd, “Contemplative Communities.” 102. Conway, Footprints of the Good Shepherd, 113–15. 103. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 76. 104. No newspaper account confirms this death, which may have been a rehash of an older story that continued to circulate at Good Shepherd. “In an effort to escape yesterday morning from her room on the sixth floor of the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, Calverton Road, by means of an improvised rope made of bed linens, Annie Woodall, 16 years old, was dashed to death when the sheets parted” (Baltimore Sun, “Killed Escaping from Home”). Annie Woodall’s death in turn repeated in most of the details the far more publicized death the previous August of a white inmate, Florence Cleland, who had plunged to her death from an upper story of the House of the Good Shepherd in Washington, D.C., when her grip on the rope she’d made of bed sheets failed. Washington Post, “Girl Dies in Escape.” 105. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 174–75. 106. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Rules and Observances, 10. 107. Holiday’s godmother, Christine Scott, told Linda Kuehl that Holiday had been given the name of Madge. When Holiday died, Scott told Kuehl, “I read it in the papers and the magazines. When I seen her picture I said to myself, ‘that’s my godchild. That’s my Madge.’ ” Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 108. Holiday, “How I Blew a Million Dollars,” 33. Dove appeared on the cover of True Confessions in July and December 1932 and on the cover of True Story in May 1929 and April 1930. 109. My synopses of Dove’s films rely on Munden, American Film Institute Catalog.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 1 – 8 6   { 

209  }

110. Dyer, White, 29. See also Wilson, Baptized in Blood. 111. Conway, Footprints of the Good Shepherd, 116. 112. Rosemary Clooney quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 454. 113. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 157. 114. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Rules and Observances, 10–11. 115. Conway, Footprints of the Good Shepherd, 116. 116. Lincoln, “Development of a Jazz Singer.” The songs invoked here are “I Cover the Waterfront,” lyrics by Edward Heyman; “Long Gone Blues” and “Lady Sings the Blues,” lyrics to both by Billie Holiday; and “My Man,” English lyrics by Channing Pollock. 117. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 78. 118. Houses of the Good Shepherd in Ireland and Australia are among the Catholic institutions worldwide to come under censure for operating Magdalene laundries, where unmarried pregnant girls were sent, most often by their families, to labor for their keep before and after giving birth, and where girls deemed wayward in general were sent for rehabilitation. A 2013 report on the Magdalene laundries in Ireland presented four religious orders, including the Good Shepherd, with formal evidence that inmates in their care experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In response, the religious orders have apologized to women who suffered in their custody, described the refuge they provided in good faith as part of a larger societal and institutional complex that failed them, and noted cases in which girls sent to them for an appointed stay chose not to leave. Carr, “Congregations Welcome Magdalene Report.” It was not the practice of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Baltimore to take in girls who were pregnant. The order has declined to contribute to reparations for former inmates in Ireland. See also Phillips, “Education for Girls.” 119. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1; Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 18–19. 120. In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday says of her days at Alderson, “I never minded any part of it except the last chore at night, which was locking the cottage door. As soon as that door slammed locked, I would start thinking about being locked in that Catholic institution with the body of a dead girl, and my back would begin to crawl. I didn’t mind anything much except that locked door” (158). 121. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 100–101. 122. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 123. Ibid. 124. Bobby Tucker and Ruby Helena quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 179 and 102, respectively. 125. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 126. Mingus quoted in Kuehl, Schocket, and Morgenstern, Billie Holiday Remembered, 11. 127. Bobby Henderson quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 60, and in Blackburn, With Billie, 88–89.

{  210  } 

Notes to Pages 86–90

128. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 223, 222; Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. 129. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Practical Rules, 28, 31. 130. Carroll, Priest’s Voice, 14. 131. Colored Harvest, September–October 1923, 13; Colored Harvest, September– October 1925, 11. For more on liturgical music in Holiday’s early life, see Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 213–19. Baptism is normally performed only once, but three separate baptisms were recorded for Billie Holiday: the first on March 19, 1925, and a second on August 14, 1925. The latter was the ceremony followed by first communion reported in the September–October 1925 issue of Colored Harvest. At some point during her second commitment at Good Shepherd, Holiday managed to be baptized again, this time by Father Carroll. Schoettler, “ ‘Lady Day’ Doesn’t Really Resolve Question”; Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 24–27. 132. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 133. Ibid., folders 1 and 3; Christine Scott quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 29. 134. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 47; Millstein, liner notes to Essential Billie Holiday. 135. Good Shepherd Services, “Closing of Mount and Hollins, 1965,” https://​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​qBA261PoyK8. Ch a p t er 3



1. Philadelphia Times, “St. Magdalen’s Convent.” 2. Tuttle and Tuttle, Beyond the Borderland, 219–20. 3. Tuttle, Career of Religious Ideas, 29, 31. 4. Tuttle, “Psychograph: An Explanation.” 5. For more on the escaped nun’s tale, see Billington, Protestant Crusade; Franchot, Roads to Rome; and Griffin, Anti-​Catholicism. 6. Bourne, Lorette, 105, 108. 7. Tuttle, Secrets of the Convent, 96, 26, 5–6. 8. Grand jury indictment of Mae West et al., case no. 168495, March 2, 1927, quoted in West, Three Plays, 206. 9. Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen, City of New York, December 7, 1926, quoted in Chevigny, Gigs, 56. 10. Tuttle, Secrets of the Convent, 7, 6, 9, 84. In the 1984 film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day, Father Peter O’Brien, Mary Lou Williams’s friend and manager, suggests that Holiday’s life is illuminated by a “strange connection between the very seductive world of nightlife and jazz, and the sort of life that a certain kind of Catholicism can propel you toward.” 11. Tuttle, Secrets of the Convent, 169, 171, 173. 12. Morton, Lomax, and Szwed, Jelly Roll Morton. 13. Tuttle, Secrets of the Convent, 170. 14. Bergreen, Louis Armstrong, 14; Giddins, Satchmo, 22.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 0 – 9 9   { 

211  }

15. Methodist minister Alfred Clay founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) in New Orleans in the early 1890s. Under its auspices, a Waifs’ Home was opened to black and white children in 1893. In the 1890s the SPCC placed homeless children there and with other agencies, including a new House of the Good Shepherd for both black and white girls established in 1896. Shortly after Clay’s death in 1900, a Home for Negro Waifs was opened on the site of a former juvenile prison for black offenders, and by 1904 the original Waifs’ Home housed only white boys. By 1910, juvenile sentencing reports in the New Orleans press were thick with cases of black children sentenced indefinitely to the Good Shepherd or the Home for Negro Waifs for offenses like loitering, malicious mischief, and gambling with dice. See, e.g., New Orleans Times-​Democrat, “Waifs’ Home,” “School Board Meets,” and “Juvenile Court”; and New Orleans Times-​Picayune, “Fine New Home for Outcast Waifs.” 16. Karst, “Armstrong, 11, Parading on Memorial Day.” 17. Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, 31. 18. Hughes, Mister Jazz, in Collected Works, 6:247–49. 19. New York Times, “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan.” 20. Evans, “Guitar in the Blues Music,” 13. 21. U.S. Department of Education, Special Report, 205. 22. Armstrong, Satchmo, 8–9. 23. Ibid., 11. Armstrong adds that his heart “went into every hymn I sang. I am still a great believer and go to church whenever I get the chance.” 24. Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, 38. 25. Armstrong, letter to L/Cpl. Villec, 1967, in Armstrong in His Own Words, 170. 26. Armstrong, “They Cross Iron Curtain,” 59. In reminiscences he wrote circa 1970, Armstrong reported being unable to find a priest to officiate at his 1942 wedding to Lucille Wilson because “Lucille is Catholic and I am Baptist.” Armstrong in His Own Words, 141. 27. Bergreen, Louis Armstrong, 21. 28. James “Stump” Cross quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 144. 29. Johnson, “Some Bringing Down Things.” 30. Mae Barnes quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 47. 31. See Watts, Hattie McDaniel. 32. Sherrie Tucker makes the nice observation that Holiday, “walking through the part” of a white woman’s maid, “wants to make sure audiences will not find her believable in this insulting role.” Tucker, “But This Music Is Mine,” 247. 33. Armstrong, Swing That Music, 72. 34. Chicago Defender, “Billy Holliday [sic] to Sing.” 35. Roosevelt, “Executive Order 8840.” 36. The fullest account of Welles’s abandoned Story of Jazz, on which I draw gratefully here, is in Szwed, Billie Holiday, 56–61. See also Feather, “Trumpeters Jubilee”; Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 239–41; Stowe, Swing Changes, 138–39; Benamou, It’s All True, 119–23. Had Welles been allowed to complete

{  212  } 

Notes to Pages 100–105

The Story of Jazz, Benamou suggests, he would have produced a film “with immediate relevance for the war effort,” since Armstrong’s records were “officially banned in Nazi-​occupied Europe” but “clandestinely distributed and imitated in live performances by attaching ‘coded’ titles to the songs.” Armstrong “would have been transformed by the film into an unofficial yet popularly welcomed ‘Good Will ambassador’ to occupied Europe, a reminder of a time when cultural expression flowed freely across the Atlantic, with jazz functioning as a liberating force”—precisely the role he assumed in the Cold War. It’s All True, 123. 37. Crowther, “New Orleans, Study in Jazz.” 38. Armstrong, “They Cross Iron Curtain,” 60. 39. Lofton, “Perpetual Primitive,” 184, 172. 40. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 209. 41. Hammond, “Did Bessie Smith Bleed to Death?” 42. Dugan and Hammond, “Early Black-​Music Concert,” 195, 206. Hammond misstated Smith’s age (she was forty-​three, not thirty-​four) and the place of her death (it was Mississippi, not Virginia). 43. Albertson, Bessie, 256–70. Hammond’s uncorrected story stood for years as the definitive account and became the basis for Edward Albee’s play The Death of Bessie Smith. 44. Billie Holiday’s friend and helper Alice Vrbsky told an interviewer that Holiday said “her father died in a similar way to Bessie Smith; he was shunted around from place to place and she felt his death was very close to a lynching, although the exact facts were never known.” Vrbsky quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 315. 45. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 208–9. 46. The African American Pittsburgh Courier described Louise Crane as “the lady John Hammond” and noted her “fast-​growing discovery list” (“New Vibe Star”). My understanding of Holiday’s relationship with Crane is indebted to Szwed, Billie Holiday, 44–46. 47. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 9. 48. After seeing Holiday sing at MOMA, the poet Marianne Moore wrote to Crane that the performance “has given me something to think about for fifteen years! . . . There were so many novelties and peaks of sophistication in rhythm and tone-​contrasts. I was taxed by the wealth of what was scattering out.” Moore to Louise Crane, June 5, 1941, in Letters of Marianne Moore, 414. 49. New York Times, “ ‘Coffee’ Concerts Close.” 50. “Interview with Elizabeth Bishop,” 296. 51. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 208–9. 52. Smith recorded “Loveless Love” as “Careless Love.” 53. When Hammond brought Bessie Smith into the studio for her 1933 “comeback” recordings on Columbia, he paid her a flat, no-​royalty fee of $37.50 a side. That session, the last before her death, was followed three days later in the same studio by Billie Holiday’s first recording session, also under Hammond’s direction, for which he paid Holiday $17.50 for each of two sides.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 6 – 1 1 1   { 

213  }

Columbia Records’ reissues of Bessie Smith’s recordings after her death netted Hammond $200,000. Albertson, Bessie, 224, 230, 281–85; Reed, “Who Are the Jazz Martyrs,” 43; Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 14. 54. According to Dufty in the BBC film Reputations; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 27. 55. Huang and Huang, “She Sang as She Spoke,” 289. 56. Danny Barker quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, 243. 57. My account of Bessie Smith’s early life is drawn from Albertson, Bessie, 7–14. 58. See Leib, Mother of the Blues; Albertson, Bessie, 11–14, 112–15. 59. Handy, Father of the Blues, 11–12. 60. Ida Goodson, interview in the 1989 film Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. 61. Ibid. 62. Foster and Stoddard, Pops Foster, 20–21. 63. Sorett, “Secular Compared to What,” 58. 64. Mays, Born to Rebel, 15. 65. Gussow, “Heaven and Hell Parties,” 186; Gussow, “Ain’t No Burnin’ Hell,” 85, 94. 66. Murray, Boogie Man, 32–33. I am indebted to Adam Gussow for this reference. 67. Gussow, “Heaven and Hell Parties,” 194. 68. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 413. 69. Weisenfeld, New World A-​Coming, 129. 70. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 221. 71. Weisenfeld, New World A-​Coming, 282. 72. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 157. 73. Morton, Lomax, and Szwed, Jelly Roll Morton. My understanding of Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish tinge draws gratefully on Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 48–82. 74. Locke, “The New Negro,” in Locke, New Negro, 6. 75. Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry, 13–14. 76. Locke, “The New Negro,” in Locke, New Negro, 4, 16. 77. Ibid, 3–5. 78. Harriss, “From Harlem Renaissance,” 268. 79. Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 100–101. 80. Locke quoted in Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 271. 81. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” 217. 82. Fisher, “City of Refuge,” 61. 83. I am indebted here to Paul Allen Anderson’s rich discussions of Locke and African American music in Deep River. 84. Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in Locke, New Negro, 199–200. 85. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” 218, 224. 86. Paul Achard, quoted in Kear, “Vénus noire,” 52–53. 87. Lena Horne quoted in Anderson, This Was Harlem, 175. 88. See, for example, the 1887 Jubilee and Plantation Songs, which includes “Oh Dat Watermelon!” and “Zip Coon,” together with “Balm of Gilead,” “Kingdom Coming,” and “Angels Met Me at the Crossroads.” 89. Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 149, 59, 89.

{  214  } 

Notes to Pages 111–123

90. Ibid., 89–90. 91. Locke, Works of Alain Locke, 52. 92. Hughes, “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 93. Hughes, “Judgment Day,” “Madam and the Number Writer,” and “Sylvester’s Dying Bed,” all in Collected Poems, 71, 270, and 141, respectively. 94. Hughes, “Song for Billie Holiday,” ibid., 360. 95. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 4. 96. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 209; Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 4–5. 97. Bivins, Spirits Rejoice, 260. 98. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 209. Jubilate! Sacred Singers, the Jena Jubilee Singers, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the Los Angeles Spirit Chorale have all performed and recorded versions of “God Bless the Child.” Holiday’s 1950 recording of the song with Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra features an ersatz jubilee chorus. 99. Cullen, Black Christ and Other Poems, 83. 100. Hardy, “ ‘No Mystery God,’ ” 150. 101. See, e.g., Best, Passionately Human; Weisenfeld, New World A-​Coming; and Curtis and Sigler, New Black Gods. 102. See Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 25–32, 125–31, 235–38. The man who throws Billie Holiday to the ground in Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black was Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, who popularized the snake hips dance in Harlem. “I think he came from tidewater Maryland,” Ellington said of Tucker, “one of those primitive lost colonies where they practice pagan rituals and their dancing style evolved from religious seizures.” Ellington quoted in ibid., 235. 103. Bill Bailey quoted in ibid., 37. Watch Bailey’s moonwalk at the Apollo: https://​ youtu​be.com​/hZHS​-JKRuzw. 104. Undated photo, Andrusier Autographs archive. See http://​www​ .andrusierautographs​.com​/product​-category​/archive​/page​/4​/​?sort​=​title. 105. McKay, “ ‘There Goes God,’ ” 152. 106. Father Divine quoted in Primiano, “ ‘Consciousness of God’s Presence,’ ” 101. 107. Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession, 157. 108. Primiano, “ ‘Consciousness of God’s Presence,’ ” 102–3. 109. Bivins, Spirits Rejoice, 96–99 (Ellington quoted at 96). 110. Ibid., 160–64. Williams and Holiday reportedly enjoyed smoking weed together before each moved on to stronger stuff, Williams to a newfound Catholic faith and Holiday to heroin. Dahl, Morning Glory, 183. 111. Cincinnati Enquirer, “Duke Jazz Concert.” 112. Ida Goodson, interview in Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. 113. Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable, 52. I am indebted to Adam Gussow for this reference. 114. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 115. Holiday quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, 198; see also Jones, Jazz Talking, 250.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 3 – 1 3 0   { 

215  }

116. Billie says in Lady Sings the Blues that Clarence Holiday was the one man Sadie had really loved, and that when he died she knelt at his casket for four hours. “I know because I waited out every minute of it for her. She didn’t shed a tear or make a sound. She just held her rosary in her hand, and if you looked closely you could see her lips move” (74–75). 117. Whalen, “Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study,” 190–94; Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 20. 118. Chase, “Billie Tells Her Story.” In a 1956 interview, Holiday told Mike Wallace that in her childhood, the “preacher” would come for lunch “every Sunday, and Mama said, ‘Oh go on. Eat all you like, Reverend So and So.’ ” While this was going on, she and Eva Miller’s children Charlie and Dorothy, the cousins Henry and Elsie in Lady Sings the Blues, “had to wait. And he’d bring his wife and his whole family sometimes and we’d wait and wind up with the gravy.” “Mama” in this story is probably also Eva Miller, the blues-​hating Baptist aunt, since Sadie’s parish priest would not have been a “preacher,” still less one with a wife. 119. Chase, “Billie Tells Her Story.” 120. Fisher, “Clearing the Streets,” 77, 100. 121. Bruce Springsteen, eightieth birthday tribute to Frank Sinatra, https://​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=5​ QtjLEqK20M. I’m indebted to Tom Ferraro for pointing me to this clip. See Ferraro, Feeling Italian, 104. 122. Leland, Hip: The History, 203. C ha p t er 4 1. Armstrong, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” 5–6 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 2. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 61. 3. Rimler, Man That Got Away, 6. 4. “Appendix,” in Armstrong in His Own Words, 191–96; Armstrong, “Authentic American Genius,” 100, 102, 104. My reading of “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” is indebted to Jones, “Louis Armstrong’s ‘Karnofsky Document.’ ” 5. See Edwards, Epistrophies, 253–67. Edwards’s extraordinary reading of “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family” appeared just as this book went to press. 6. Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish, 75. 7. Dufty, “True Story,” part 1. 8. See, e.g., Friedwald on “St. Louis Blues” in Stardust Melodies, 38–75; Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish, 193–215; Melnick, Right to Sing the Blues. In August 1926 George Gershwin inscribed the title page of the piano solo score for “Rhapsody in Blue” “To Mr. Handy, whose early ‘blue’ songs are the forefathers of this work. With admiration + best wishes.” Levine, “Gershwin, Handy, and the Blues,” 10. 9. Albert Murray quoted in Melnick, Right to Sing the Blues, 185.

{  216  } 

Notes to Pages 130–140



10. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 78. 11. Teachout, “Top Brass.” 12. Lehman, Fine Romance, 3–4. 13. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 176, 174. 14. For various versions of this story, see Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 37, which puts it at Pod’s and Jerry’s; Harriott, “Hard Life of Billie Holiday” (the Log Cabin); Johnson, “Some Bringing Down Things” (Mexico’s); Chase, “Billie Tells Her Story” (Mexico’s, “where her mother was starring in the culinary arts”). 15. See Slobin, Tenement Songs. 16. Dufty, “True Story,” part 2. 17. Blackburn, With Billie, 190; Holiday and Dufty, unpublished MS pages of Lady Sings the Blues, filed with the Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 11. 18. John Levy (the bass player) quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 189. 19. Telegram quoted in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 182. I am grateful to Bevan Dufty for sharing insights about his parents, Bill and Maely Dufty, and about Billie Holiday. 20. New York Times, “Joseph G. Glaser Is Dead.” 21. Baltimore Afro-​American, “Cabaret Proprietor Given Ten Years”; Chicago Tribune, “Vote to Indict Joe Glaser.” 22. See Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 254–61; Blackburn, With Billie, 210–11. 23. See Chevigny, Gigs. 24. Holiday, “Me and My Old Voice.” This segment can also be heard on the Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, disc 4. 25. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 166, 168. Davis recognizes that there were “flashes of brilliance in the songs produced during this era—it was, after all, the era of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and George and Ira Gershwin. However, black musicians generally received the worst material” (168). In Holiday’s case, this was untrue. As Francis Davis explains, the music business in the 1930s was based on the sale of sheet music and song rights, not records. Teddy Wilson said that before their famous group sessions in the 1930s, he and Holiday would go through the songs that music publishers had submitted to their record company, and she would pick out her favorites to record. A song made popular on Broadway or in Hollywood might be recorded by a number of artists, black and white, while the show or the film was still in theaters; more than one version might shoot to the top of the charts simultaneously. Holiday’s luminous 1937 recording of “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” with Teddy Wilson and Lester Young “is often cited as the most obvious instance of her transforming the dross available to her into gold,” says Davis. “But as Holiday entered the recording studio, Guy Lombardo’s version of the song was already on its way to the charts, eventually to become No. 1; it wasn’t necessarily a good song, but it was a hot property.” Davis, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” 107. 26. “My Yiddishe Momme” and several minutes of chatter can be heard on the Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, disc 6.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 4   { 

217  }

27. Als, “Let’s Say There’s a Body.” 28. Lehman, Fine Romance, 13. 29. Ibid., 220, 21–24. The songs invoked here are “America” from West Side Story (Bernstein and Sondheim) and the title song from Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein). 30. Handy, Father of the Blues, 78. 31. Rev. N. R. Clay, superintendent’s report at the thirtieth annual session of the Upper Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1921, quoted in Gussow, “Heaven and Hell Parties,” 192. See also Gussow, Beyond the Crossroads, 17–73. 32. Hughes, “New Song.” 33. Young, “Interview with Lester Young,” 185; Count Basie, interview by Kuehl, cassette 1. 34. Hughes, Big Sea, 266. 35. New York Amsterdam News, “Langston Hughes—The Sewer Dweller.” 36. New York Amsterdam News, “European Correspondent of ‘News.’ ” 37. Yaffe, Fascinating Rhythm, 155–56; Szwed, Billie Holiday, 94. 38. Holden, “Lot of Hit Songs.” 39. I take each of these descriptions from the liner notes to Holiday et al., Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-​Jewish Relations. 40. Johnson, Along This Way, 328. “At these times,” Johnson added, “the Negro drags his captors captive.” 41. This line from psalm 137 also appears in the liner notes to Holiday et al., Black Sabbath. 42. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 67. 43. Gilbert Seldes, “True to Type,” New York Evening Journal, May 18, 1932, quoted in Kammen, Lively Arts, 204; Robeson quoted in Diner, Almost Promised Land, 68. See also Karp, “Performing Black-​Jewish Symbiosis.” 44. Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer, 10. 45. See Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 17–65; Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 19–44. 46. New York Times, “Mob of 2,000 Hangs Negro.” 47. Lehman, Fine Romance, 48; Banfield, Jerome Kern, 53. 48. Most, Making Americans, 10. 49. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 360. 50. Angela Lee and Arnold A. Auguste, quoted in Farnsworth, “Blacks Accuse Jews.” 51. Harold Prince quoted in “Westchester Broadway Theater Presents Show Boat,” theater program, September 20, 2015, https://​issuu​.com​ /westchesterbroadwaytheatre​/docs​/showboat​-program. 52. I am indebted here to Lehman’s discussion of The Jazz Singer in Fine Romance, 199–207; page 206 especially. 53. See Evans, Burden of Black Religion; Sorett, Spirit in the Dark; Spencer, “Black Church.” 54. Johnson, “Creation,” 138. 55. Johnson, God’s Trombones, 8.

{  218  } 

Notes to Pages 145–153

56. Johnson, “Creation,” 141. 57. Rogers, “Ruminations.” 58. Cullen, “The Black Christ,” in Black Christ and Other Poems, 84. 59. See Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 93–119; Blum and Harvey, Color of Christ, 173–204. 60. Hughes, “Christ in Alabama.” Hughes italicizes these words in the original. 61. Hughes, Big Sea, 76. 62. Hughes, “Big Meeting,” in Collected Works, 15:278, 286–87. 63. See Mathews, “Lynching Is Part of the Religion.” 64. Cullen, “Christ Recrucified,” in Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 93. 65. Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” 17. Gellert’s introduction to the song in the New Masses describes the melody as a mix of “spiritual and Scottish War Chant.” According to Bruce Conforth, Gellert said in an interview that the song was composed by a preacher to be sung by his congregation at a memorial service for the lynched man. Conforth, African American Folksong, 63–64. 66. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 166. 67. Copeland, “ ‘Wading Through Many Sorrows,’ ” 158. 68. Abel Meeropol, various typescripts in the Abel Meeropol Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Meeropol incorporated this poem into several of his personal and published writings. Reprinted with the permission of the copyright holders, Michael and Robert Meeropol. 69. See Baker, “Abel Meeropol,” 46. 70. Meeropol and Meeropol, letter to the editor, November 26, 1995. 71. Baker, “Abel Meeropol,” 46–47. 72. Meeropol and Meeropol, letter to the editor, November 26, 1995. 73. Meeropol, “The House I Live In,” undated typescript in the Abel Meeropol Collection. Reprinted with the permission of the copyright holders, Michael and Robert Meeropol. 74. Meeropol, “Goin’ to Build My Heaven,” typescript dated 1940, ibid. Reprinted with the permission of the copyright holders, Michael and Robert Meeropol. 75. Jean-​Paul Sartre, Daily Worker, July 12, 1953, quoted in Clune, Executing the Rosenbergs, 138. 76. Meeropol and Meeropol, letter to the editor, July 23, 1986; Baker, “Abel Meeropol,” 70, 56. 77. Meeropol and Meeropol, letter to the editor, November 26, 1995. 78. Margolick, “Performance as a Force,” 105. Margolick indicates that this was White’s explanation to the House Un-​American Activities Committee. Elijah Wald says White did add “Strange Fruit” to his international song list after the 1950s. Wald, Josh White: Society Blues, 276. 79. This version is from an undated clipping in the Meeropol Collection. For Meeropol’s different versions of “The House I Live In,” see Baker, “Abel Meeropol,” 55–56. 80. Elijah Wald quoted in Margolick, Strange Fruit, 101 (emphasis added). 81. Ransom, “New Negro.”

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 3 – 1 6 0   { 

219  }

82. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 94–95. 83. Davis, “Not Only War Is Hell,” 477. 84. Jarrett quoted in Margolick, Strange Fruit, 60. 85. Down Beat, “Studios ‘Find’ Billie Holiday.” 86. Chicago Defender, “Billie Holiday Is Servicemen’s Pick.” 87. Smith, “Nation Singing ‘Yankee Doodle Tan.’ ” 88. Rea, “Encores and Echoes.” 89. Unpaginated clipping from Down Beat, November 15, 1944, in the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. 90. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 10. 91. Rea, “Encores and Echoes.” 92. New York Amsterdam News, “Billie Holiday Strikes Back.” 93. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 126–28. 94. Rolland-​Diamond, “Double Victory,” 102. 95. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 128–29. 96. Dyer, But Beautiful, 25–26. 97. Balliett, “Pres,” 79. 98. Young, “Interview with Lester Young,” 181. 99. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 169–70; this point is made by Lehman, Fine Romance, 24. 100. These are Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyrics to the title song in Oklahoma! (1943). 101. Angelou, Heart of a Woman, 16. 102. According to William Peper, “Banned Billie Okay for Park,” New York World-​ Telegram and Sun, July 30, 1957, in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 187. 103. Feather, liner notes to Ladylove. 104. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 201, 204. 105. Kahn, “They Call Me an Artist.” On European nations’ drug policies, see Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 211–12. 106. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 146. 107. Kahn, “They Call Me an Artist.” 108. Dufty, “True Story,” part 2. 109. Miller, New York Charities Directory, 163. 110. Jet, “Billie’s Estate Will Go to Husband.” 111. Levy quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 334. 112. Holiday, interview by Wallace. 113. Dufty quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 441, and interviewed in the BBC film Reputations. 114. Dufty quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 446. 115. Hendricks, “Jazz Greats Attend Funeral.” 116. Milt Hinton interviewed in the 1984 film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day. 117. Davis, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” 105. 118. Joseph Adams, quoted in Margolick, Strange Fruit, 129. 119. Sagan, With Fondest Regards, 10–11.

{  220  } 

Notes to Pages 160–169

120. McLellan, “Holiday Can Teach ’Em”; O’Connor, “Holiday Was Genuine Person.” 121. Parnell quoted in Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 158. 122. Steve Allen quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 432; Allen, Mark It and Strike It, 292–95; Feather interviewed in the 1984 film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day; Feather, “Requiescat in Pace.” 123. Sam Sutherland, review of Lady in Satin, https://​www​.amazon​.com​/Lady​ -Satin​-Billie​-Holiday​/dp​/B000002AH9. 124. O’Connor wrote in pencil on a lined sheet torn from a yellow pad: “Billie—​ Excuse paper—just got a copy of your recording on Columbia with [Ray] Ellis—Wonderful—thoroughly enjoy it—wanted you to know: thus the paper.” Letter in possession of Claudia Strauss-​Schulson, Schulson Autographs, email to author, August 25, 2016. 125. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 128; O’Meally, Lady Day, 198. 126. Carroll, Priest’s Voice, 106, 129. 127. Balliett, “Lady Day,” xxii. Cha p t er 5



1. Banks, “Myth of Billie Holiday,” 88. 2. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 31. 3. Ebony, “Billie Holiday’s Tragic Life.” 4. Advertisement for Billie Holiday and William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, in the Chicago Defender, November 10, 1956; Morton, “Billie Holiday’s Book.” 5. Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 235. 6. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 187. 7. O’Meally, Lady Day, 14, 10. 8. Banks, “Myth of Billie Holiday,” 93. 9. Down Beat, “Broke, Alone.” 10. Ramshaw, “ ‘He’s My Man,’ ” 104. 11. Holiday, interview by Wallace. 12. Dove, “Canary,” in Grace Notes, 64. 13. Tucker quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 187. 14. According to Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 335. None of it was surprising, Robert O’Meally suggests; Holiday chose these men because “she needed rock-​hard partners” in the dangerous world in which she moved, a “fast and violent realm where alliances between night women and their men spelled not just exploitation but mutual dealing in a situation where power, for both pimp and prostitute, was the name of the game.” O’Meally, Lady Day, 175. 15. Rowles quoted in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 309. 16. Franke, comment on Tey Meadow’s review. 17. Butler, “Body You Want,” 84. 18. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 19. Le Petit Journal, “Comment Debarrasser Paris des Apaches?”

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 6 9 – 1 7 6   { 

221  }

20. Powers, “Hidden Story of the Apache Dance.” My understanding of the Apache dance and its contribution to torch singing and American musical performance more generally is indebted to Szwed, Billie Holiday, 32, 55, 94–95, 183. 21. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 183. 22. New York Times, “All Rome Admires St. Peter’s.” 23. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, 165. 24. Conway, Footprints of the Good Shepherd, 116, 56, 23, 27, 18. 25. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, “Contemplative Communities.” 26. Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Rules and Observances, 9. 27. Murakami, “Three Short Essays on Jazz.” 28. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 294–95. 29. Clarke, Life of Reverend Mother Mary, 157–58. 30. Interior photographs of the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls in Baltimore can be seen in Harleston, “House of Good Shepherd,” and in a Facebook post of Good Shepherd Services, “Second House of the Good Shepherd.” 31. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 32. Ibid. 33. Key of Heaven, 324. Freddie Green remembered that when Sadie and her daughter rented rooms from his mother in Baltimore, they hung “a tiny little statue of the Savior on the wall.” Wee Wee Hill said that when Sadie and Billie boarded with his mother, Miss Lou, he supposed “they was Catholic ’cause they have crosses and beads and stuff in the house.” Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 34. Millstein, “Books of the Times.” 35. Kerouac, “Origins of the Beat Generation,” 42 (emphasis added). 36. Ferraro, “Not-​Just-​Cultural Catholics,” in Ferraro, Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, 9. 37. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 210. 38. Bassist John Simmons described taking part with Holiday in a session with a whip that spared only her face and the soles of her feet. Afterward, he drew Holiday “a bathtub full of cold water with a box of table salt to close the welts.” He was sure she’d be out of commission for days but spotted her a few hours later in a club “under this pin light with this gardenia in her hair, singing her ass off. Never fazed her.” Simmons quoted in Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 135. 39. Margolick, Strange Fruit, 130. 40. Father Peter O’Brien, Mary Lou Williams’s mentor, tells this story in Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 452. 41. Dufty, “True Story,” part 3. 42. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 451. 43. Dufty, “True Story,” part 3. 44. Barnes quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 196. 45. Alice Vrbsky quoted in ibid., 319. 46. Michele Wallace, speaking in the 1984 film Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day. 47. Dufty, “True Story,” part 6.

{  222  } 

Notes to Pages 176–183

48. Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 8. Hammond described the singer “Billie Halliday” as a “real find”: “Though only eighteen, she weighs over 200 pounds, is incredibly beautiful, and sings as well as anybody I ever heard.” Hammond, “More Places with Spike.” 49. Blackburn, With Billie, 317. 50. Dufty, “True Story,” part 2; Babs Gonzales quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 119. 51. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 114. 52. Blackburn, With Billie, 258. 53. Holiday, interview by Wallace. 54. Vrbsky, Hammond, and Gonzales quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 314, 99, and 119, respectively. 55. Thérèse of Liseux, Story of a Soul, 165. 56. Kerouac quoted in Time, “Beat Mystics.” I am indebted to James T. Fisher for this reference and for his lucid exposition of the Catholicism of Kerouac and Dorothy Day in Catholic Counterculture. The Bible verse is Luke 14:12–14. 57. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. Snowden was a Baltimore friend of Clarence Holiday’s and told Linda Kuehl that he was Billie’s godfather. Horace Henderson’s hit “Big John’s Special,” recorded by Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, was named for this Big John. 58. Cowley, Exile’s Return, 69. 59. Fisher, Catholic Counter-​Culture, 43, 244; Thomas Merton to Erich Fromm, December 1961, in Cold War Letters, 15. 60. Day, House of Hospitality, 283. 61. Day, Eleventh Virgin, 12–13; Fisher, Catholic Counter-​Culture, 5. 62. Ellis, Peter Maurin, 149; Day, “On Pilgrimage” (March 1968). Michael Grace also produced Holiday’s open-​air concert in Central Park in 1957. 63. Ginsberg, “Great Marijuana Hoax,” 97; Fisher, Catholic Counter-​Culture, 251. For the text of Ginsberg’s letter to Day, see Robert Steed, “Dorothy Day, Allen Ginsberg, and Me—Catholic Worker Odds & Ends,” https://​personalist​ .livejournal​.com​/59009​.html. 64. Dufty, “True Story,” part 6. 65. Fisher, Catholic Counter-​Culture, 240. 66. Day, House of Hospitality, 33–34. 67. Day, Duty of Delight, 386. 68. Day, “Wealth, the Humanity of Christ.” 69. Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 65. I am indebted to James Fisher for his discussion of the doctrine of the Mystical Body in “Clearing the Streets,” 99–100. 70. Day, “On Pilgrimage” (May 1973). 71. Forest, “What I Learned About Justice.” 72. Green quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 21; Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 1. 73. Ferraro, Feeling Italian, 187 (Hazan quoted at 181). 74. Pius X, “Tra le sollecitudini.” The order was relaxed in 1955 by Pius XII in Musicae Sacre and recalled by John Paul II in 2003 in For the Centenary of the Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8 3 – 1 9 0   { 

223  }

75. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 114. 76. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 10. 77. Holiday, interview by Wallace. 78. Larkin, interview by Plomley. 79. Robbins, “Equipment for Living.” 80. Wilson, with Ligthart and Van Loo, Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz, 27. 81. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 7. 82. Pareles, “Ornette Coleman Gets the Treatment.” 83. Banks, “Myth of Billie Holiday,” 91. 84. Kaminsky, Jazz Band, 97. 85. Coviello, “Is There God After Prince?” 86. gossett, “billie lives,” 111. 87. Friedwald, Biographical Guide, 220 (emphasis added). 88. Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 457, 459. 89. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 196. On The Sound of Jazz more generally, I’m indebted to Griffin, 192–97; Blackburn, With Billie, 324–30; Clarke, Wishing on the Moon, 407–11; and Hentoff, interview by Schoenberg. 90. Chicago Defender, “Billie Holiday on TV.” 91. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 197. 92. Ferraro, “ ‘My Way’ in ‘Our America,’ ” 508. 93. Barker, interview by White, 112; see also Dan Morgenstern in the BBC film Reputations. 94. Kuehl MS, box 1, folder 10. 95. Szwed, Billie Holiday, 63; Barker, interview by White, 112; Milt Hinton quoted in Blackburn, With Billie, 325.

{  224  } 

Notes to Pages 190–196

Bibliography

Albertson, Chris. Bessie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. ———. “John Hammond—Part 3 (Ruby Walker Pops In).” Stomp Off! (blog), March 5, 2010. http://​stomp​-off​.blogspot​.com​/2010​/03​/john​-hammond​-part​ -iii​-return​-of​-hot​.html. Allen, Steve. Mark It and Strike It: An Autobiography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Als, Hilton. “Let’s Say There’s a Body.” In Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hartman, Libby Holman, Alberta Hunter, Eartha Kitt, Marlena Shaw, et al., Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-​Jewish Relations. 2010. Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. RSR-018. Liner notes. Anderson, Ernie. “Ernie Anderson Reminisces About Billie Holiday.” Interview by Donald Clarke. Storyville, March 1993, 95–103. Anderson, Jervis. This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman. New York: Random House, 2009. Anslinger, Harry J., and William F. Tompkins. The Traffic in Narcotics. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953. Armstrong, Louis. “An Authentic American Genius.” Interview by Richard Meryman. Life, April 15, 1966, 92–116. ———. “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” In Armstrong, Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, 3–36. ———. Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected Writings. 2nd ed. Edited by Thomas Brothers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York: Prentice Hall, 1954. ———. Swing That Music. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936 ———. “They Cross Iron Curtain to Hear American Jazz.” Interview. U.S. News and World Report, December 2, 1955, 54–62. Atlanta Daily World. “Billie Holiday Records First Song About Lynching Evils: Buxom Singer Chirps It Nightly at Café Society.” June 19, 1939. Badger, R. Reid. “James Reese Europe and the Prehistory of Jazz.” American Music 7, no. 1 (1989): 48–67.

Baker, Nancy Kovaleff. “Abel Meeropol (A.K.A. Lewis Allan): Political Commentator and Social Conscience.” American Music 20, no. 1 (2002): 25–79. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Balliett, Whitney. “Lady Day.” In The Billie Holiday Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary, edited by Leslie Gourse, xix–xxii. New York: Schirmer, 1997. ———. “Pres.” In Porter, Lester Young Reader, 74–81. Baltimore Afro-​American. “Cabaret Proprietor Given Ten Years.” March 3, 1928. ———. “Ethel Waters Sings for Billy Graham.” June 23, 1962. ———. “Girl, Eleven, Accuses Blind Man and Woman.” January 1, 1927. Baltimore Sun. “Cardinal Lauds Them.” December 16, 1910. ———. “Colored Choir to Sing.” January 7, 1939. ———. “ ‘Dixie’ for Cardinal: Colored Girls at Good Shepherd Home Sing at His Request.” January 1, 1912. ———. “Home to Mark Jubilee.” September 29, 1917. ———. “Killed Escaping from Home: Negro Girl Used Rope of Bedsheets, but It Broke.” May 29, 1914. ———. “Twenty-​Four Negro Girls Held as Rioters.” October 17, 1927. Banfield, Stephen. Jerome Kern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Banks, Russell. “The Myth of Billie Holiday.” Review of Robert O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Da Capo Press, 1991). Transition 57 (1992): 88–93. Baraka, Amiri [LeRoi Jones]. Black Music. New York: Akashic Books, 2010. ———. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow, 1963. Barker, Danny. Interview by Michael White, July 21–23, 1992. Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. http://​amhistory​.si​.edu​/jazz​/Barker​-Danny​ /Barker​_Danny​_Transcript​.pdf. Basie, Count. Interview by Linda Kuehl, November 3, 1971. Jazz Oral History Project. Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University–Newark. Beals, Melba. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. New York: Washington Square Press, 1994. Belair, Felix, Jr. “United States Has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz.” New York Times, November 6, 1955. Benamou, Catherine L. It’s All True: Orson Welles’ Pan-​American Odyssey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Berg, Marita. “The Nazis’ Take on ‘Degenerate Music.’ ” Deutsche Welle, May 24, 2013. http://​dw​.com​/p​/18dTN. Bergreen, Laurence. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. New York: Viking, 1990. ———. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Best, Wallace D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. Reprint ed. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964. Bishop, Elizabeth. “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop.” Interview by Ashley Brown. In Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and

{  226  } 

Bibliography

Sybil P. Estess, 289–302. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Bivins, Jason C. Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Black, Allida. Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Blackburn, Julia. With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day. New York: Vintage, 2006. Blum, Edward J., and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Board of State Aid and Charities, Baltimore. Eighth Biennial Report of the Board of State Aid and Charities to the Governor and the General Assembly of Maryland, 1914–1915. Baltimore: Lord Baltimore Press, 1915. Boas, Franz. “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.” Science 4, no. 103 (1896): 901–8. Bogle, Donald. Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography. New York: Amistad, 1997. Bolden, Frank E. “Orchestra Whirl.” Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1942. Bourne, George. Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents. New York: Charles Small, 1834. Bowe, Billy. “Razaf, Johnson to Compose the ‘Double V’ Song.” Pittsburgh Courier, March 14, 1942. Brandt, Nat. Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Breitwieser, Mitchell. “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation.” American Literary History 12, no. 3 (2000): 359–81. Brothers, Thomas. Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Butler, Judith. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler.” Artforum, November 1992, 82–89. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Calt, Stephen. “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label, Part 1.” 78 Quarterly 3 (1988): 9–23. ———. “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label, Part 2.” 78 Quarterly 4 (1989): 9–30. Calt, Stephen, and Gayle Dean Wardlow. “The Buying and Selling of Paramounts.” 78 Quarterly 5 (1990): 7–24. ———. “Paramount’s Decline and Fall.” 78 Quarterly 7 (1992): 7–29. Carr, Aoife. “Congregations Welcome Magdalene Report.” Irish Times, February 5, 2013. Carroll, Charles Borromeo. “The Negro Missions in the United States.” Catholic Missions, January 1907, 3–7. ———. The Priest’s Voice: Its Use and Misuse. Baltimore: Baer Publicity, 1940. A Catechism of Christian Doctrine. Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. New York, 1885. http://​www​.gutenberg​ .org​/cache​/epub​/14552​/pg14552​-images​.html. Catholic Church. Rituale romanum Pauli V. Pontificis Maximi. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1873.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

227  }

The Catholic Church in the United States of America: To Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius X. Vol. 3, The Province of Baltimore and the Province of New York, section 1. New York: Catholic Editing, 1914. Catholic University of America. New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw-​ Hill, 1967. Charlotte (N.C.) News. “Catholic Church and Negro: Without the Catholic Church, Says Father Carrol [sic], the Negro Is Doomed, ‘Body and Soul.’ ” April 8, 1904. Charters, Ann, and Samuel Charters. Brother-​Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Chase, Bill. “Billie Tells Her Story.” New York Amsterdam News, January 21, 1939. Chevigny, Paul. Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Chicago Defender. “Billie Holiday Is Servicemen’s Pick.” May 19, 1945. ———. “Billie Holiday Makes Record on Propaganda.” May 20, 1939. ———. “Billie Holiday on TV in ‘Sound of Jazz.’ ” December 14, 1957. ———. “Billy Holliday [sic] to Sing Music by Duke Ellington in Picture.” November 8, 1941. Chicago Tribune. “Vote to Indict Joe Glaser in Liquor Robbery.” April 9, 1935. Chilton, John. Billie’s Blues: The Billie Holiday Story, 1933–1959. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. Cincinnati Enquirer. “Duke Jazz Concert Set for Gotham Church.” December 19, 1965. Clar, Mimi. “The Negro Church: Its Influence on Modern Jazz.” Jazz Review 1, no. 1 (1958): 16–18. Clarke, A. M. Life of Reverend Mother Mary of St. Euphrasia Pelletier: First Superior General of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers. London: Burns & Oates, 1895. Clarke, Donald. Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday. New York: Viking, 1994. Clune, Lori. Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2013. ———. The Spirituals and the Blues. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1972. Conforth, Bruce M. African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Conway, Katherine E. In the Footprints of the Good Shepherd, New York, 1857–1907. 3rd ed. New York: Convent of the Good Shepherd, 1907. Copeland, M. Shawn. “ ‘Wading Through Many Sorrows’: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective.” In Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives, 2nd ed., edited by Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, 157–72. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Coviello, Peter. “Is There God After Prince?” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2016.

{  228  } 

Bibliography

Cowell, Henry. “American Composers.” Ohio State University Bulletin 36, no. 3 (1931): 377–79. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Penguin, 1951. Crouch, Stanley. “Obama’s One Cat Who Needs to Put Jazz on His Party Menu.” New York Daily News, December 21, 2008. Crowther, Bosley. “ ‘New Orleans,’ Study in Jazz, at Winter Garden.” New York Times, June 20, 1947. Cullen, Countee. The Black Christ and Other Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Curtis, Edward E., IV, and Danielle Brune Sigler, eds. The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Davenport, Lisa E. “Jazz and the Cold War: Black Culture as an Instrument of American Foreign Policy.” In Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, edited by Darlene C. Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, 282–316. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Davis, David A. “Not Only War Is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives.” African American Review 42, nos. 3–4 (2008): 477–91. Davis, Francis. “Our Lady of Sorrows.” Atlantic, November 2000, 104–8. Day, Dorothy. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008. ———. The Eleventh Virgin. Chicago: Cottager Press, 2011. ———. House of Hospitality. Reprint ed. Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 2015. ———. “On Pilgrimage.” Catholic Worker, March 1968, 1–2, 8. ———. “On Pilgrimage.” Catholic Worker, May 1973, 1, 8. ———. “Wealth, the Humanity of Christ, Class War.” Catholic Worker, June 1935, 4. Delaunay, Charles. Django Reinhardt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997. De Veaux, Alexis. Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Dexter, Dave, Jr. “I’ll Never Sing with a Dance Band Again.” Down Beat, November 1, 1939. Reprinted in Down Beat, July 2009, 96–97. Didion, Joan. “Joan Didion: The Art of Fiction No. 71.” Interview by Linda Kuehl. Paris Review 20 (Fall–Winter 1978): 143–63. Diner, Hasia R. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Dove, Rita. Grace Notes: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

229  }

Down Beat. “Broke, Alone, Billie Goes Back to Work.” July 15, 1949, 3. ———. “Studios ‘Find’ Billie Holiday.” July 1, 1944, 2. Downes, Olin. “A Concert of Jazz.” New York Times, February 13, 1924. DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClung, 1903. Dudziak, Mary. “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative.” Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988): 61–120. Dufty, William. “Billie Holiday: Did Old Addiction Cause a Hospital Runaround?” New York Post, June 4, 1959. ———. “Billie Holiday Dies After Relapse; First Lady of the Blues Was 44.” New York Post, July 17, 1959. ———. “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 1.” New York Post, July 20, 1959. ———. “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 2.” New York Post, July 21, 1959. ———. “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 3.” New York Post, July 22, 1959. ———. “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 6.” New York Post, July 26, 1959. Dufty, William, and Fern Marja. “The Czar Nobody Knows.” New York Post, January 17, 1958. Dugan, James, and John Hammond. “An Early Black-​Music Concert: From Spirituals to Swing.” Black Perspective in Music 2, no. 2 (1974): 191–207. Dyer, Geoff. But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. New York: North Point Press, 1996. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. East Cambridge (Mass.) Sacred Heart Review. “Ecclesiastical Items.” January 7, 1911. Ebony. “Billie Holiday’s Tragic Life.” September 1956, 47–51. Eckstine, Billy. Audio interview, September 8, 1971. On Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Leo Robin, Harry Woods, Gus Arnheim, Fred E. Ahlert, et al., Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection. 2005. Hip-​O Records B0005273-09. Edwards, Brent Hayes. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Ellington, Duke. Music Is My Mistress. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Ellis, Marc H. Peter Maurin: Prophet in the Twentieth Century. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations. Vol. 1. London: George Bell, 1883. Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Evans, David. “The Guitar in the Blues Music of the Deep South.” In Guitar Cultures, edited by Andy Bennett and Kevin Dawe, 11–26. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Exhibitors Herald. “Official Cut-​Outs by the Chicago Board of Censors.” January 12, 1918, 31. Farnsworth, Clyde H. “Blacks Accuse Jews in ‘Show Boat’ Revival.” New York Times, May 1, 1993. Feather, Leonard. Liner notes to Billie Holiday, Ladylove. Sound recording. United Artists, 1962. UAJ 14014. ———. “Requiescat in Pace.” Down Beat, August 20, 1959, 20–21. ———. “Trumpeters Jubilee.” New York Times, October 26, 1941.

{  230  } 

Bibliography

Ferraro, Thomas J., ed. Catholic Lives, Contemporary America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America. New York: New York University Press, 2005. ———. “ ‘My Way’ in ‘Our America’: Art, Ethnicity, Profession.” American Literary History 12, no. 3 (2000): 499–522. Fessenden, Tracy. “ ‘Woman’ and the ‘Primitive’ in Paul Tillich’s Life and Thought: Some Implications for the Study of Religion.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 14, no. 2 (1998): 45–76. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Fisher, James Terence. The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. ———. “Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation.” In Ferraro, Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, 76–103. Fisher, Rudolph. “The City of Refuge.” In Locke, New Negro, 57–74. Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner. New York: International Publishers, 1963. Ford, Charles Henri. Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972. Forest, Jim. “What I Learned About Justice from Dorothy Day.” Salt of the Earth, July–August, 1995. http://​www​.uscatholic​.org​/culture​/social​-justice​ /2009​/02​/what​-i​-learned​-about​-justice​-dorothy​-day. Foster, George “Pops,” and Tom Stoddard. Pops Foster: The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman as Told to Tom Stoddard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Franke, Katherine. Comment on Tey Meadow’s review of Katherine Franke, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. Concurring Opinions, March 15, 2016. https://​concurringopinions​.com​/archives​/2016​/03​/our​-precious​ -perversions​.html​#comments. Friedwald, Will. A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. New York: Pantheon, 2010. ———. Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Gellert, Lawrence. “Negro Songs of Protest.” New Masses, January 1931, 16–17. Gibson, Maya. “Alternate Takes: Billie Holiday at the Intersection of Black Cultural Studies and Historical Musicology.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008. Giddins, Gary. Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. Giggie, John M. After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

231  }

Ginsberg, Allen. “The Great Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown.” In Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995, edited by Bill Morgan, 87–106. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Gioia, Ted. “The Red-​Rumor Blues.” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2006. Gitler, Ira. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Godtland, Eric, and Dian Hanson. True Crime Detective Magazines, 1924–1969. Cologne: Taschen, 2008. Good Shepherd Services. “Second House of the Good Shepherd at Calverton and Franklin Streets.” December 18, 2014. https://​www​.facebook​.com​/gsc​ .baltimore​/photos​/a​.973178892695592​.1073741827​.153561284657361​ /973179039362244​/​?type​=3​ ​&​theater. gossett, hattie. “billie lives! billie lives!” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 109–12. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981. Gottlieb, Jack. Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Grafton, Samuel. “I’d Rather Be Right.” New York Evening Post, October 21, 1939. “Grand Jury Report: September Term, 1934.” Criminal Justice Commission Records, Reports and Publications, box S2-B1, folder 2. Langsdale Library Special Collections, University of Baltimore. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: One World/Random House, 2001. Griffin, Susan M. Anti-​Catholicism and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gussow, Adam. “Ain’t No Burnin’ Hell: Southern Religion and the Devil’s Music.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 41, no. 2 (2010): 83–99. ———. Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ———. “Heaven and Hell Parties: Ministers, Bluesmen, and Black Youth in the Mississippi Delta, 1920–1942.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 186–203. ———. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-​ Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Hammond, John. “Did Bessie Smith Bleed to Death While Waiting for Medical Aid?” Down Beat, November 1937, 3. ———. “More Places with Spike.” Melody Maker, April 1, 1933, 271. ———. “Random Notes on the Spirituals to Swing Recordings.” Liner notes to John Hammond, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young, Jo Jones, Buck Clayton, Walter Page, Charlie Christian, et al., From Spirituals to Swing. Sound recording. Vanguard Records, 1973. VSD 47–48.

{  232  } 

Bibliography

Hammond, John, with Irving Townsend. John Hammond on Record. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981. Handy, W. C. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Hardwick, Elizabeth. Sleepless Nights. New York: NYRB Books, 2001. Hardy, Clarence E., III. “ ‘No Mystery God’: Black Religions of the Flesh in Pre-​ War Urban America.” Church History 77, no. 1 (2008): 128–50. Harleston, Edwina. “House of Good Shepherd Provides a Haven for Baltimore’s Homeless Girls.” Baltimore Afro-​American, November 8, 1941. Harriott, Frank. “The Hard Life of Billie Holiday.” PM, September 2, 1945. Harris, Leonard, and Charles Molesworth. Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Harriss, M. Cooper. “From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse: Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race in the ‘Negro Novel.’ ” Journal of Religion 93, no. 3 (2013): 259–90. Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Hendricks, Alfred T. “Jazz Greats Attend Funeral for Billie Holiday.” New York Post, July 21, 1959. Henry, Patrick. “ ‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-​History of a Civil Religion Proof-​Text.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no.1 (1981): 35–49. Hentoff, Nat. Interview by Loren Schoenberg, February 17–18, 2007. Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. http://​amhistory​.si​.edu​/jazz​/Hentoff​-Nat​ /Hentoff​_Nat​_Transcript​.pdf. ———. “The Music That Is New Again.” New York Times, April 14, 1974. Hervieux, Linda. Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-​Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War. New York: Harper, 2015. Herzog, Arthur, and Billie Holiday. “God Bless’ the Child: A Swing-​Spiritual Based on the Authentic Proverb, ‘God Blessed the Child That’s Got His Own.’ ” Sheet music. New York: E. B. Marks, 1941. Hevesi, Dennis. “Ruth Ford, Film and Stage Actress, Dies at 98.” New York Times, August 14, 2009. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s.” In American Studies: An Anthology, edited by Janice A. Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen, 225–32. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Holden, Stephen. “A Lot of Hit Songs from an Unsung Lyricist.” New York Times, February 8, 1989. Holiday, Billie. “How I Blew a Million Dollars.” Our World, March 1953, 32–34. ———. “I’m Cured for Good.” Ebony, July 1949, 26–30. ———. Interview by Mike Wallace, Night Beat, Dumont Television Network, November 8, 1956. On Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection. 2005. Hip-O Records B0005273-09 ———. Interview by Willis Conover. Voice of America Jazz Hour, February 15, 1956. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​5​_4ozuDPCoI.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

233  }

———. “Me and My Old Voice: Billie Holiday in Her Own Words.” Produced by Peter Neff, 2004. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​ALKIe8n9Vv0. Holiday, Billie, and William Dufty. Lady Sings the Blues. New York: Broadway Books, 2011. Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Hoover, J. Edgar. “Law Enforcement on the March.” True Detective, March 1943, 36, 101. Howland, John. “Jazz Rhapsodies in Black and White: James P. Johnson’s ‘Yamekraw.’ ” American Music 24, no. 4 (2006): 445–509. Huang, Hao, and Rachel Huang. “She Sang as She Spoke: Billie Holiday and Aspects of Speech Intonation and Diction.” Jazz Perspectives 7, no. 3 (2013): 287–302. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. ———. “Christ in Alabama.” Contempo: A Review of Books and Personalities 1, no. 13 (1931): 1. ———. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 6, Gospel Plays, Operas, and Later Dramatic Works. Edited by Leslie Catherine Sanders. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. ———. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 14, Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander. Edited by Joseph McLaren. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. ———. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 15, The Short Stories. Edited by R. Baxter Miller, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. ———. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Nation, June 23, 1926, 692–94. ———. “A New Song.” Crisis, March 1933, 59. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Spirituals and Neo-​Spirituals.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, 2nd ed., edited by Nathan Irvin Huggins, 344–46. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Jackson, Jeffrey H. Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Jagger, Mick, Dora Loewenstein, Philip Dodd, and Charlie Watts. According to the Rolling Stones. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003. “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World.” Touring exhibit produced by the Meridian International Center and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, 2011. http://​www​.meridian​.org​ /jazzambassadors/. Jessamy, Ken. “Attention, Please! Have You Noticed the Jewish-​Negro Tie-​Up in Entertainment?” Cleveland Call and Post, July 20, 1939.

{  234  } 

Bibliography

Jet. “Billie’s Estate Will Go to Husband Louis McKay.” August 6, 1959, 60. Jewett, Andrew. “The Columbia Naturalists and the Birth of Religious Studies in America.” Unpublished paper. Johnson, J. C., and Andy Razaf. “A Yankee Doodle Tan: (The ‘Double V’ Song).” Sheet music. New York: Broadway Music Corp., 1942. Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. ———. “The Creation.” In Locke, New Negro, 138–41. ———. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Viking Press, 1927. Johnson, Lillian. “Some Bringing Down Things Happened to Billie Holiday.” Baltimore Afro-​American, October 23, 1937. Jones, Dalton Anthony. “Louis Armstrong’s ‘Karnofsky Document’: The Reaffirmation of Social Death and the Afterlife of Emotional Labor.” Music and Politics 9, no. 1 (2015). http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.3998​/mp​.9460447​.0009​.105. Jones, Max. Jazz Talking: Profiles, Interviews, and Other Riffs on Jazz Musicians. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. ———. “Max Jones Spends a Holiday with Billie.” Melody Maker, February 20, 1954. Jordan, Mark. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Jubilee and Plantation Songs: Characteristic Favorites, as Sung by the Hampton Students, Jubilee Singers, Fisk University Students, and Other Companies. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1887. Kahn, E. J., Jr. “Young Man with a Viola.” New Yorker, July 29, 1939, 19–24. Kahn, Henry. “They Call Me an Artist in Britain, Says Billie Holiday.” Melody Maker, November 22, 1958, 3. Kaminsky, Max, and V. E. Hughes. Jazz Band: My Life in Jazz. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Kammen, Michael. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kaplan, Fred. “When Ambassadors Had Rhythm.” New York Times, June 29, 2008. Karp, Jonathan. “Performing Black-​Jewish Symbiosis: The ‘Hasidic Chant’ of Paul Robeson.” American Jewish History 91, no. 1 (2003): 53–81. Karst, James. “Louis Armstrong, 11, Parading on Memorial Day in 1913.” New Orleans Times-​Picayune, May 29, 2017. http://​www​.nola​.com​/vintage​ /2017​/05​/louis​_armstrong​_11​_parading​_on​.html. Kear, Jon. “Vénus noire: Josephine Baker and the Parisian Music Hall.” In Parisian Fields, edited by Michael Sheringham, 46–70. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 2003. ———. “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” Playboy, June 1959, 31–32, 42, 79. Key of Heaven: A Manual of Prayers and Instructions for Catholics. New York: Catholic Publications Press, 1921. Kolve, V. A. “Ganymede/Son of Getron: Medieval Monasticism and the Drama of Same-​Sex Desire.” Speculum 73, no. 4 (1998): 1014–67.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

235  }

Kuehl, Linda. Book manuscript, ca. 1974. Collection #MC-079, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University–Newark. Kuehl, Linda, Ellie Schocket, and Dan Morgenstern. Billie Holiday Remembered. New York: New York Jazz Museum, 1973. Kun, Josh. “The Recordings.” In Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hartman, Libby Holman, Alberta Hunter, Eartha Kitt, Marlena Shaw, et al., Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-​Jewish Relations. 2010. Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. RSR-018. Liner notes. Larkin, Philip. Interview by Ray Plomley. Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, July 17, 1976. http://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/programmes​/p009n0l8. Le Berthon, Ted. “White Man’s Views.” Pittsburgh Courier, November 4, 1944. Lee, Ulysses. The Employment of Negro Troops. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1966. Lees, Gene. Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Lehman, David. A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. New York: Schocken Books, 2009. Leland, John. Hip: The History. Reprint ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Lethem, Jonathan. “We Happy Fakes.” Guardian, September 1, 2007. Levine, Henry. “Gershwin, Handy, and the Blues.” Clavier 9, no. 7 (1970): 10–20. Lieb, Sandra. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Life. “Lead Belly: Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.” April 19, 1937, 38–40. Lincoln, Abbey. “Abbey Lincoln: Development of a Jazz Singer.” Interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, March 25, 1986. http://​www​.npr​ .org​/templates​/story​/story​.php​?storyId​=​99738663. Lipscomb, Mance. I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman. Edited by Glen Alyn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1999. ———. The Works of Alain Locke. Edited by Charles Molesworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Lofton, Kathryn. “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography.” In Curtis and Sigler, New Black Gods, 171–91. Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz.” New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950. ———. “ ‘Sinful’ Songs of the Southern Negro.” Southwest Review 19, no. 2 (1934): 105–31. Lomax, John A. “ ‘Sinful Songs’ of the Southern Negro.” Musical Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1934): 177–87. Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax, eds. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan, 1934. ———, eds. Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, “King of the Twelve-​String Guitar Players of the World,” Long-​Time Convict in the Penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

{  236  } 

Bibliography

Longo, Gabriel. Spoiled Priest. New York: Bantam, 1966. Lott, Eric. “Double V, Double-​Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style.” In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, 457–68. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Luhrssen, David. “Blues in Wisconsin: The Paramount Records Story.” Wisconsin Academy Review 45 (1998): 17–21. Maffly-​Kipp, Laurie F. Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-​American Race Histories. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Mailer, Norman. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Esquire, November 1960, 119–27. Margolick, David. “Performance as a Force for Change: The Case of Billie Holiday and ‘Strange Fruit.’ ” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 11, no. 1 (1999): 91–109. ———. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000. Martin, Lerone. Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Mathews, Donald G. “Lynching Is Part of the Religion of Our People: Faith in the Christian South.” In Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, edited by Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews, 153–94. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Mays, Benjamin E. Born to Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. McKay, Claude. “ ‘There Goes God!’ The Story of Father Divine and His Angels.” Nation, February 6, 1935, 151–53. McLellan, John. “Billie Holiday Can Teach ’Em.” Boston Traveler, April 27, 1959. McWilliam, David. “Fear and Loathing in Suburbia.” In Violence in American Popular Culture, vol. 1, edited by David Schmid, 183–202. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016. Meeropol, Abel. “Goin’ to Build My Heaven.” Typescript dated 1940 in the Abel Meeropol Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. ———. “The House I Live In.” Undated typescript in the Abel Meeropol Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. ———. Untitled (“I Am a Jew”). Undated typescript in the Abel Meeropol Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Meeropol, Michael, and Robert Meeropol. Letter to the Editor. New York Times, July 23, 1986. ———. Letter to the Editor. New York Times, November 26, 1995. Melnick, Jeffrey P. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Merton, Thomas. Cold War Letters. Edited by Christine M. Bochen and William H. Shannon. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2006. Milinkoff, Jodi. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

237  }

Miller, Lina D. The New York Charities Directory. 28th ed. New York: Charity Organization Society, 1919. Mills, Alexa. “A Lynching Kept Out of Sight.” Washington Post, September 2, 2016. Millstein, Gilbert. Liner notes to Billie Holiday, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Al Cohn, Tony Scott, and Carl Drinkard, The Essential Billie Holiday Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live. Sound recording, 1989. Verve 838 767-2. ———. “Books of the Times.” Review of Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Viking, 1957). New York Times, September 5, 1957. ———. “Troubled Song.” Review of Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (Doubleday, 1956). New York Times, July 15, 1956. Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 396–422. Moore, Marianne. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller. New York: Knopf, 1997. Morgenstern, Dan. “The Night Ragtime Came to Carnegie Hall.” New York Times, July 9, 1989. Morton, Baker E. “Billie Holiday’s Book ‘Frank and Interesting.’ ” Chicago Defender, July 14, 1956. Morton, Jelly Roll, Alan Lomax, and John F. Szwed. Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. Cambridge, Mass.: Rounder Records, 2006. Transcription by Michael Hill, Roger Richard, and Mike Meddings. http://​www​.doctorjazz​.co​.uk​/locspeech1​.html​#locaafs. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Munden, Kenneth W. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1921–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Murakami, Haruki. “Three Short Essays on Jazz: Holiday, Getz, Monk.” Believer, July–August 2008. http://​www​.believermag​.com​/issues​/200807​/​?read​=​ article​_murakami. Murray, Charles Shaar. Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Nalty, Bernard C. Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military. New York: Free Press, 1986. National Public Radio. “Django Reinhardt, 100 Years of Hot Jazz.” January 22, 2010. http://​www​.npr​.org​/templates​/transcript​/transcript​.php​?storyId​ =​122865782. Newman, Richard. “Florence Mills.” In Black Heroes, edited by Jessie Carney Smith, 481–87. Canton, Mich.: Visible Ink Press, 2001. New Masses. “Between Ourselves.” November 8, 1938, 2.

{  238  } 

Bibliography

———. “The New Masses Presents an Evening of American Negro Music ‘From Spirituals to Swing.’ ” December 20, 1938, 23. New Orleans Times-​Democrat. “Juvenile Court.” April 5, 1910. ———. “School Board Meets.” November 12, 1904. ———. “The Waifs’ Home.” July 18, 1893. New Orleans Times-​Picayune. “A Fine New Home for Outcast Waifs.” November 11, 1896. New York Amsterdam News. “Billie Holiday Strikes Back in USO Show Dispute.” October 23, 1943. ———. “European Correspondent of ‘News’ Threatens to Become a Philosopher; Finds ‘Show Boat’ Snappy and Sparkling, but Is Disappointed in Finding Negro Performers Buried in Obscure Parts.” October 3, 1928. ———. “Langston Hughes—The Sewer Dweller.” February 9, 1927. ———. “World Weeps as Florence Goes to Rest: 200,000 Persons of High and Low Estate, and of All Races, Watch Procession.” November 9, 1927. New York Herald-​Tribune. “Lomax Arrives with Lead Belly, Negro Minstrel.” January 3, 1935. New York Times. “All Rome Admires St. Peter’s Aglow for a New Saint.” May 18, 1925. ———. “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation, Strange Situation Which Led the Oriole City to Adopt the Most Pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ Measure on Record.” December 25, 1910. ———. “ ‘Coffee’ Concerts Close.” June 5, 1941. ———. “Joseph G. Glaser Is Dead at 72; Booking Agent for Many Stars.” June 8, 1969. ———. “Mob of 2,000 Hangs Negro in Maryland.” October 19, 1933. ———. “Polk News Awards Announced by L.I.U.” March 15, 1956. Nicholson, Stuart. Billie Holiday. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Norfolk (Va.) New Journal and Guide. “Nightclub Singer Waxes First Song About Lynching.” June 17, 1939. O’Connor, Norman J. “Singer Billie Holiday Was Genuine Person, Tremendous Talent.” Boston Globe, August 2, 1959. O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014. Oliver, Paul. Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition. New York: Da Capo Press, 1989. O’Meally, Robert. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991. Orodenker, Maurice H. “On the Records.” Billboard, May 30, 1942, 25. Orsi, Robert A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion.” In Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, edited by David D. Hall, 3–21. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pareles, Jon. “Ornette Coleman Gets the Treatment.” New York Times, July 6, 1997. Paulist Archives. Memorial page for Reverend Father Norman Joseph O’Connor (November 27, 1921–June 29, 2003). Find a Grave memorial

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

239  }

no. 94146210. https://​www​.findagrave​.com​/memorial​/94146210​ /norman​-joseph​-o’connor. Le Petit Journal (Paris). “Comment Debarrasser Paris des Apaches?” January 23, 1910. Petrusich, Amanda. Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records. New York: Scribner, 2014. Philadelphia Public Ledger. “Miss Drexel’s Profession.” February 12, 1891. Philadelphia Times. “St. Magdalen’s Convent: An Institution for the Reformation of Colored Girls.” March 26, 1892. Philadelphia Tribune. “Find Billie’s Well Hidden Dope Supply.” February 26, 1956. Phillips, Nancymarie. “Education for Girls in the House of the Good Shepherd in the United States, 1940–1980.” PhD diss., Cleveland State University, 2008. Pittsburgh Courier. “The Double V Campaign.” March 28, 1942. ———. “Easter as National Negro Double V Day Gaining Support.” March 28, 1942. ———. “NBC Baptists Endorse Courier’s ‘Double V’ Drive.” March 21, 1942. ———. “New Vibe Star Set with Trio.” May 16, 1942. ———. “Ten Best Records of 1939 Listed by F. M. Davis: ‘Blues’ Heads ANP’s ’39 List.” December 30, 1939. ———. “United Automotive Workers Resolution Adopting ‘Double V’ Slogan and Campaign.” August 15, 1942. Pius X. “Tra le sollecitudini.” November 23, 1903. https://​adoremus​.org​/1903​/11​ /22​/tra​-le​-sollecitudini/. Pius XII. Mystici Corporis Christi. In The Liturgy Documents: Foundational Documents on the Origins and Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, vol. 3, edited by Robert L. Tuzik, Jakob K. Rinderknecht, Anthony Ruff, Michael R. Prendergast, Judith M. Kubicki, Richard Fragomeni, David W. Fagerberg, et. al., 61–97. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2013. Porter, Lewis, ed. A Lester Young Reader. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Powers, Richard. “The Hidden Story of the Apache Dance, Part 2.” http://​ socialdance​.stanford​.edu​/syllabi​/Apache2​.htm. Primiano, Leonard Norman. “ ‘The Consciousness of God’s Presence Will Keep You Well, Healthy, Happy, and Singing’: The Tradition of Innovation in the Music of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement.” In Curtis and Sigler, New Black Gods, 91–115. ———. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 37–56. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ramshaw, Sara. “The Creative Life of Law: Improvisation, Between Tradition and Suspicion.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 6, no. 1 (2010). http://​www​ .criticalimprov​.com​/article​/view​/1084​/1733. ———. “ ‘He’s My Man!’ Lyrics of Innocence and Betrayal in The People v. Billie Holiday.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 86 (2004): 86–105.

{  240  } 

Bibliography

Ransom, Reverdy C. “The New Negro.” New York Amsterdam News, January 3, 1923. Rea, E. B. “Encores and Echoes.” Baltimore Afro-​American, October 16, 1943. Redding, Saunders. Review of Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Doubleday, 1951). Baltimore Afro-​American, April 7, 1951. ———. Review of Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (Doubleday, 1956). Baltimore Afro-​American, March 16, 1957. Reed, Ishmael. “Who Are the Jazz Martyrs?” Black Renaissance 14, no. 1 (2014): 42–49, 183. Reed, Theresa L. The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Rimler, Walter. The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Robbins, Michael. “Equipment for Living: Poetry’s Complex Consolations.” Poetry Magazine, April 2015. https://​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​ /poetrymagazine​/articles​/detail​/70208. Rogers, J. A. “Jazz at Home.” In Locke, New Negro, 216–24. ———. “Ruminations: ‘The Green Pastures’ and Theologian.” New York Amsterdam News, April 13, 1935. Rolland-​Diamond, Caroline. “A Double Victory? Revisiting the Black Struggle for Equality During World War II.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 137, no. 3 (2013): 94–107. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Executive Order 8840 Establishing the Office of Coordinator of Inter-​American Affairs.” July 30, 1941. The American Presidency Project. http://​www​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu​/ws​/?​ pid​=​16152. ———. “Help Them Go Straight!” True Detective Mysteries, July 1930. Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Rouse, Michael Francis. A Study of the Development of Negro Education Under Catholic Auspices in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935. Ruff, Anthony, OSB. Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform: Treasures and Transformations. Chicago: Hillenbrand Books/Liturgy Training Publications, 2007. Sagan, Françoise. With Fondest Regards. Translated by Christine Donougher. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Schneider, Eric C. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Schoettler, Carl. “ ‘Lady Day’ Doesn’t Really Resolve Question of Billie Holiday’s Birthplace.” Baltimore Evening Sun, November 6, 1992. Shack, William A. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Shapiro, Nat, and Nat Hentoff, eds. Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It. New York: Dover, 1966. Sheed, Wilfrid. The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. New York: Random House, 2008.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

241  }

Sisters of the Good Shepherd. “Contemplative Communities Nourished by Rhythm of Prayer.” http://​sistersofthegoodshepherd​.com​/what​-is​-contemplative/. ———. Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious of the Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes. Angers, France: Lecoq, 1898. ———. Rules and Observances of the Sisters Magdalens of the Good Shepherd of Angers. Roehampton: J. Griffin, 1901. Slobin, Mark. Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of Jewish Immigrants. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Smith, Isadora. “Nation Singing ‘Yankee Doodle Tan,’ New ‘VV’ Song, After Introduction on Radio.” Pittsburgh Courier, May 16, 1942. Sorett, Josef. “Secular Compared to What? Toward a History of the Trope of Black Sacred/Secular Fluidity.” In Race and Secularism in America, edited by Jonathon S. Kahn and Vincent W. Lloyd, 43–76. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. ———. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Spencer, Jon Michael. “The Black Church and the Harlem Renaissance.” African American Review 30, no. 3 (1996): 453–60. Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of America’s Vernacular Dance. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Stephens, Christopher P. “A Conversation with Fran McCullough—Editor.” Riverrun Bookshop Blog, April 3, 2009. http://​riverrunbookshop​.blogspot​.com​ /2009​/04​/conversation​-with​-fran​-mccullough​.html. Stowe, David W. Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Suiter, John. “Kerouac’s Lowell: A Life on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” http://​www​.jackkerouac​.com​/photo​-essay​-15/. Sullivan, John Jeremiah. “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.” New York Times, April 13, 2014. Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Penguin, 2010. ———. Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth. New York: Penguin, 2015. Taubman, H. Howard. “Negro Music Given at Carnegie Hall.” New York Times, December 24, 1938. Teachout, Terry. “Top Brass.” New York Times, August 3, 1997. Thérèse of Lisieux, and Mother Agnès de Jésus. The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated by Michael Day. Charlotte, N.C.: St. Benedict Press, 2010. Thompson, James G. Letter to the Editor. Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942. Thredgill, Jacob. “Mississippi Trailblazer: Charles Henri Ford.” Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-​Ledger, February 27, 2016. Tillich, Hannah. From Time to Time. New York: Stein & Day, 1973. Tillich, Paul. “The Demonic.” In The Interpretation of History, translated by N. A. Rasetzki and Elsa L. Talmey, 77–122. New York: Scribner’s, 1936. ———. Theology of Culture. Edited by Robert C. Kimball. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

{  242  } 

Bibliography

Time. “Beat Mystics.” February 3, 1958, 58. ———. “Milestones.” July 27, 1959, 68. ———. “New Life.” April 12, 1948, 70. ———. “Protagonist.” November 15, 1926, 26–27. ———. “Spirituals to Swing.” January 2, 1939, 29. Tucker, Sherrie. “ ‘But This Music Is Mine Already!’: ‘White Woman’ as Jazz Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947).” In Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, edited by Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, 235–66. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Tuttle, Hudson. Career of Religious Ideas: Their Ultimate: The Religion of Science. London: J. Burns, 1872. ———. “The Psychograph: An Explanation.” Religio-​Philosophical Journal (December 3, 1887): 5. ———. Secrets of the Convent. Philadelphia: Carter Publishing, 1892. Tuttle, Hudson, and Emma Rood Tuttle. Stories from Beyond the Borderland. Berlin Heights, Ohio: Tuttle Publishing, 1910. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1873. Ulanov, Barry. A History of Jazz in America. New York: Viking, 1955. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Benevolent Institutions 1910. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1910. U.S. Department of Education. Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia: Submitted to the Senate, June 1868, and to the House, with Additions, June 13, 1870. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1871. Vail, Ken. Lady Day’s Diary: The Life of Billie Holiday, 1937–1959. Chessington, Surrey: Castle Communications, 1996. van der Tuuk, Alex. Paramount’s Rise and Fall: A History of the Wisconsin Chair Company and Its Recording Activities. Denver: Mainspring Press, 2003. Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Wald, Elijah. Josh White: Society Blues. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Wald, Gayle. “From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover.” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 387–416. ———. Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-​and-​Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Walton, Jonathan. “Preachers’ Blues: Religious Race Records and the Reclamation of Authority on Wax.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 20, no. 2 (2010): 205–32. Walton, Lester A., A. W. K. White, and Lucien H. White. “Black-​Music Concerts in Carnegie Hall, 1912–1915.” Black Perspective in Music 6, no. 1 (1978): 71–88. Washburn, Pat. “The Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign in 1942.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

243  }

Journalism, East Lansing, Michigan, August 8–11, 1981. http://​files​.eric​ .ed​.gov​/fulltext​/ED205956​.pdf. Washington Post. “Girl Dies in Escape.” August 9, 1913. Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. Weiner, Isaac. Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Weisenfeld, Judith. New World A-​Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2017. West, Mae. Three Plays by Mae West. Edited by Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997. Whalen, Doretta Lonnett. “A Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study of Billie Holiday and Her Music.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1999. Whiteman, Paul, and Mary Margaret McBride. Jazz. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Wilson, John S. “Handy’s Night, 50 Years Later.” New York Times, March 9, 1981. ———. “Recreating a Famed Concert.” New York Times, April 25, 1982. Wilson, Teddy, with Arie Ligthart and Humphrey van Loo. Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz. New York: Continuum, 2001. Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, 97–106. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Yaffe, David. Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Young, Lester. “Interview with Lester Young.” Interview by François Postif. In Porter, Lester Young Reader, 173–92. Ziegler, Hans Severus. Entartete Musik: Eine Abrechnung von Staatsrat Dr. H. S. Ziegler. Düsseldorf: Völkischer Verlag, 1938. D i sco g ra p hy Lyrics of individual songs are credited to the recording artist unless otherwise noted. Armstrong, Louis. Disney Songs the Satchmo Way. Recorded May 1968. Buena Vista Records STER-4044. Brown, Hi Henry. “Preacher Blues.” Recorded 1932. On Mississippi Blues No. 2: The Delta. Origin Jazz Library OJL-11. Hammond, John, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young, Jo Jones, Buck Clayton, Walter Page, Charlie Christian, et al. From Spirituals to Swing. Vanguard Records, 1973. VSD 47–48.

{  244  } 

Bibliography

Holiday, Billie. “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” Lyrics by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins. Recorded August 17, 1949. Decca 24726B. ———. “Any Old Time.” Lyrics by Artie Shaw. Recorded July 24, 1938. Bluebird B7759. ———. “April in Paris.” Lyrics by Vernon Duke. Recorded August 18, 1956. Verve MGV 8329. ———. “Autumn in New York.” Lyrics by Vernon Duke. Recorded April 24, 1952. Clef MGC 161. ———. “Billie’s Blues.” Recorded July 10, 1936. Vocalion 3288. ———. “Blue Moon.” Lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Recorded April 21, 1952. Mercury-​Clef 89004. ———. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Recorded November 1, 1937. Brunswick 8008. ———. “Cheek to Cheek.” Lyrics by Irving Berlin. Recorded August 14, 1956. Verve MGV 8197. ———. “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Recorded August 25, 1955. Clef MGC 669. ———. The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945–1959. Polygram, 1993. ———. “Don’t Explain.” Recorded August 14, 1945. Decca 23565B. ———. “Fine and Mellow.” Recorded April 20, 1939. Commodore C-526. ———. “A Fine Romance.” Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Recorded September 29, 1936. Vocalion 3333. ———. “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer).” Lyrics by Wesley Wilson. Recorded August 9, 1949. Decca 24947. ———. “Glad to Be Unhappy.” Lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Recorded February 2, 1958. Columbia CL1157. ———. “Gloomy Sunday.” English lyrics by Sam M. Lewis, from the Hungarian “Vége a világnak,” lyrics by László Jávor. Recorded July 8, 1941. Okeh 6451. ———. “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own).” Recorded May 9, 1941. Okeh 6270. ———. “He Ain’t Got Rhythm.” Lyrics by Irving Berlin. Recorded January 25, 1937. Brunswick 7824. ———. “I Can’t Get Started.” Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Recorded September 15, 1938. Vocalion 4457. ———. “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Recorded November 19, 1936. Brunswick 7781. ———. “I Cover the Waterfront.” Lyrics by Edward Heyman. Recorded August 7, 1941. Columbia 37493. ———. “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” Lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Recorded January 4, 1957. Verve MGV 8257. ———. “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues.” Lyrics by Ted Koehler. Recorded April 20, 1939. Commodore C-527-A. ———. “I Must Have That Man.” Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Recorded January 25, 1937. Brunswick 7859.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

245  }

———. “I Wished on the Moon.” Lyrics by Dorothy Parker. Recorded July 2, 1935. Brunswick 7501. ———. “Lady Sings the Blues.” Recorded June 6, 1956. Clef MGC 721. ———. “Laughing at Life.” Lyrics by Nick and Charles Kenney. Recorded June 7, 1940. Okeh 5719. ———. “Long Gone Blues.” Recorded March 21, 1939. Columbia 37586. ———. “Love for Sale.” Lyrics by Cole Porter. Recorded April 24, 1952. Clef MGC 161. ———. “Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?)” Lyrics by Jimmy Davis, Roger “Ram” Ramirez, and James Sherman. Recorded October 4, 1944. Decca 23391A. ———. “Mandy Is Two.” Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Recorded February 10, 1942. Columbia CL6163. ———. “Me, Myself, and I.” Lyrics by Allan Roberts and Alvin S. Kaufman. Recorded June 15, 1937. Vocalion 3593. ———. “Miss Brown to You.” Lyrics by Leo Robin. Recorded February 7, 1935. Brunswick 7501. ———. “Moanin’ Low.” Lyrics by Ralph Rainger. Recorded March 31, 1937. Brunswick 7877. ———. “My Man.” English lyrics by Channing Pollock, from the French “Mon Homme” by Albert Willemetz, Maurice Yvain, and Jacques Charles. Recorded December 10, 1948. Decca 24638. ———. “My Yiddishe Momme.” Lyrics by Jack Yellen. Recorded 1956. On Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hartman, Libby Holman, Alberta Hunter, Eartha Kitt, Marlena Shaw, et al., Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-​Jewish Relations. 2010. Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. RSR-018. ———. “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Recorded November 1, 1937. Brunswick 8015. ———. “No Regrets.” Lyrics by Harry Tobias. Recorded July 10, 1936. Vocalion 3276. ———. “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Recorded April 8, 1944. Commodore C-614. ———. “Pennies from Heaven.” Lyrics by John Burke. Recorded November 19, 1936. Brunswick 7789. ———. “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” Lyrics by Sidney Clare. Recorded August 23, 1955. Clef MGC 713. ———. “Porgy (I Love You).” Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Recorded December 10, 1948. Decca 24638B. ———. “The Saddest Tale.” Recorded March 12, 1935. On Billie Holiday: The Legacy 1933–1958. Legacy C3K 47724. ———. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight.” Lyrics by John Jacob Loeb and Carmen Lombardo. Recorded June 15, 1937. Vocalion 3605. ———. “St. Louis Blues.” Lyrics by W. C. Handy. Recorded October 15, 1940. Okeh 6064.

{  246  } 

Bibliography

———. “Stormy Weather.” Lyrics by Ted Koehler. Recorded July 27, 1952. Clef 89064. ———. “Strange Fruit.” Lyrics by Lewis Allan [Abel Meeropol]. Recorded April 20, 1939. Commodore C-526. ———. “Summertime.” Lyrics by DuBose Heyward, Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin. Recorded July 10, 1036. Vocalion 3288. ———. “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” Lyrics by Eric Maschwitz. Recorded June 30, 1936. Brunswick 7699. ———. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Recorded April 1, 1937. Vocalion 3520. ———. “Things Are Looking Up.” Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Recorded November 1, 1937. Brunswick 8015. ———. “This Year’s Kisses.” Lyrics by Irving Berlin. Recorded January 25, 1937. Brunswick 7824. ———. “Trav’lin’ All Alone.” Lyrics by J. C. Johnson. Recorded September 13, 1937. Vocalion 3748. ———. “The Way You Look Tonight.” Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Recorded October 21, 1936. Brunswick 7762. ———. “What a Little Moonlight Can Do.” Lyrics by Harry Woods. Recorded July 2, 1935. Brunswick 7498. ———. “Yesterdays.” Lyrics by Otto Harbach. Recorded April 20, 1939. Commodore C-527-B. ———. “You Go to My Head.” Lyrics by J. Fred Coots. Recorded May 11, 1938. Vocalion 4126. Holiday, Billie, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Leo Robin, Harry Woods, Gus Arnheim, Fred E. Ahlert, et al. Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection. 2005. Hip-​O Records B0005273-09. Holiday, Billie, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Al Cohn, Tony Scott, Carl Drinkard, et al. The Essential Billie Holiday Carnegie Hall Concert. 1961. Verve V-8410. Holiday, Billie, Buddy DeFranco, Jimmy Raney, Red Mitchell, Carl Drinkard, Sonny Clark, Beryl Booker, et al. Ladylove. 1962. United Artists UAJ 14014. Jefferson, Blind Lemon. “All I Want Is That Pure Religion.” Released under the name of Deacon L. J. Bates. Recorded ca. 1926. Paramount 12386-A. Johnson, Robert. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Recorded June 19, 1937. Vocalion 04108. Morton, Jelly Roll, Alan Lomax, and John F. Szwed. Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. Released 2006. Rounder Records, 11661-1898-2. Nix, Rev. A. W., and His Congregation. “Black Diamond Express to Hell.” Part 1. Recorded 1926. Decca F9720. Rainey, Ma. “Broken Hearted Blues.” Recorded 1926. Paramount 12364. Robeson, Paul. Spirituals. Released 1945. Columbia Masterworks M-610. Sinatra, Frank. “The House I Live In.” Lyrics by Lewis Allan [Abel Meeropol]. Recorded 1945. Columbia 36886.

B i b l i o g r a p h y   { 

247  }

———. “If You Are but a Dream.” Lyrics by Nathan Bonx, Jack Fulton, and Moe Jaffe. Recorded 1944. Columbia 36756. Smith, Bessie. “Ticket Agent Ease Your Window Down.” Lyrics by Spencer Williams. Recorded April 5, 1924. Columbia 14025. Smith, Bessie, with Louis Armstrong. “St. Louis Blues.” Lyrics by W. C. Handy. Recorded January 14, 1925. Columbia, 14064-D. Smith, Kate. “God Bless America.” Lyrics by Irving Berlin. Recorded 1939. Victor 26198A. Smith, Mamie, and Her Jazz Hounds. “Crazy Blues.” Lyrics by Perry Bradford. Recorded August 10, 1920. Okeh 4169A. van der Tuuk, Alex, Jack White, and Dean Blackwood. Paramount: The Rise and Fall, vol. 1, 1917–1927. Third Man Records and Revenant Records, 2013. TMR 203. Waters, Ethel. “Supper Time.” Lyrics by Irving Berlin. On The Favorite Songs of Ethel Waters, Mercury Records, 1954. MG 20051. White, Josh. “Strange Fruit.” Lyrics by Lewis Allan [Abel Meeropol]. Recorded 1942. Brunswick 03749. F i lmo g ra p hy Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day. Directed by John Jeremy. BBC-​TV Productions, 1984. The Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith. David W. Griffith Corp., 1915. Hit Parade of 1943. Directed by Albert S. Rogell. Republic Pictures, 1943. The House I Live In. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Frank Ross Productions, 1945. The Jazz Singer. Directed by Alan Crosland. Warner Brothers, 1927. Lady Sings the Blues. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Paramount Pictures, 1972. New Orleans. Directed by Arthur Lubin. United Artists, 1947. A Rhapsody in Black and Blue. Directed by Aubrey Scotto. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Reputations: Billie Holiday, Sensational Lady. Directed by David F. Turnbull. BBC, 2001. The Seven Lively Arts: The Sound of Jazz. Directed by Jack Smight. CBS Studios, 1957. St. Louis Blues. Directed by Dudley Murphy. RKO Pictures, 1929. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. Directed by Fred Waller. Paramount Pictures, 1935. Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. Directed by Christine Dall. Calliope Films, 1989.

{  248  } 

Bibliography

Index

Note: BH refers to Billie Holiday; SF refers to Sadie Fagan addiction of BH, 64, 182. See also heroin Africa, jazz ambassadors in, 203n95 African American cultural flows, 15–16 African American-​Jewish vibe in music, 10–12, 148–51 Afro-​Protestant preachers and preaching, 4, 15, 23-28, 102, 113–116, 126–127, 129, 146, 152–155, 159, 167, 216n18 “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” 122, 175 Albertson, Chris, 108 Allen, Steve, 169 Als, Hilton, 145 American history, as history of freedom, 20 Ammons, Albert, 39–40 Amsterdam News, 147 Anderson, Ernie, 60 Angelou, Maya and Guy, 165–66 Anslinger, Harry Jacob, 59, 60–61, 63–64, 143–44 Apache performance style, 176–77 Arlen, Harold, 135 Armstrong, Louis autobiography of, 9 baptism of, 99 BH and, 103 Colored Waifs’ Home and, 99–100, 135 Dufty on, 139



on first cornet, 134–35 Glaser and, 143–44 Henderson’s band and, 129 on jazz, 106–7 as jazz ambassador, 21, 51, 52, 100 “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” 133–40 minstrel shows and, 122 on mother, 101–2 in New Orleans, 103–4, 106 on New Orleans, 101 Paramount and, 24 Pope Paul VI and, 141 religion and, 102–3 in A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, 25 Smith and, 110 Swing That Music, 104 Armwood, George, 150 asceticism, late medieval, 179–80 As Thousands Cheer (Berlin), 150 authenticity of black musicians, 36–44, 53 religion and, 107, 125–26 Bailey, Bill, 127 Baker, Josephine, 37, 122 Baldwin, James, 19, 48, 50, 149 Balliett, Whitney, 170 Baltimore. See also House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls BH in, 57, 73, 76, 190 black Catholics in, 101 Fell’s Point, 57, 73, 76 zoning ordinances in, 101

Baltimore Afro-​American, 163 Bandy, Robert, 50 Bankhead, Tallulah, 62–63, 131 Banks, Russell, 171, 173, 193 baptism, 70, 91–92 Baptist churches, black, 42, 113, 114, 126, 129, 136, 195 Baraka, Amiri, 19, 32, 68, 203n99 Barker, Danny, 66–67, 113, 194–95, 196 Barker, Lee, 62 Barnes, Mae, 103, 182–83 Basie, Count, 22, 55–56, 60, 61, 122 Beals, Melba Pattillo, 118–19 Beat, Kerouac on, 181 Beat poets, 187–88 Bechet, Sidney, 40 Beecher, Lyman, 96–97 Bergreen, Laurence, 102–3 Berlin, Irving “Any Bonds Today?,” 163 Mammy, 148 “Russian Lullaby,” 135, 137, 139–40 “Supper Time,” 150 “White Christmas,” 128 Bernstein, Arthur, 45 Bigard, Barney, 136 “Billie Holiday’s Tragic Life” (Ebony magazine), 172 “Billie’s Blues,” 4, 55, 130–31, 163 Birth of a Nation (film), 86 Bishop, Elizabeth, 110 Bivins, Jason, 6, 125, 128, 198n1 black American soldiers, 19, 46–49, 50, 160, 164–65 black artists, stereotypes of, 172–73 black Christ, image of, 154 Black Church, 107 black music. See also blues; jazz; spirituals beyond church walls, 114 gospel, 26 guitars and, 101 hearing religion in, 203n99 marketing of, to white audiences, 32 primitivism of, 41–42, 121–22

{  250  } 

index

black musicians authenticity of, 36–44, 53 BH on, 191 government-​sponsored, 21, 51, 52, 136 natural talent of, 32, 126 revocation of cabaret cards of, 60 rhythm & blues charts and, 56 blackness, Jews channeling, 11, 148–51 Blind Blake, 25 blues. See also jazz BH and, 18–19 careers in, 114–15 church sounds and, 26–28 as devil’s music, 114, 115 first commercial recording of, 23 Handy on, 145–46 Jewish songwriting and, 140–45 Locke and, 120 “moving spirit” and, 146 as primitive and retrograde, 30–31 Rainey and, 113 scoring of, 56 themes of, 23–24 Boas, Franz, 31, 33 Bolden, Buddy, 99 Bonx, Nat, 161–62 Bourne, George, 96 Brice, Fanny, 148, 177 Broadway, 148–49, 151–52 Broonzy, Big Bill, 40 Brothers, Thomas, 102 Bryant, Sam, 42, 43 Burnett, J. C., 26 Butler, Judith, 175 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 13, 179–80, 184, 190 cabaret cards, 60, 97, 144 Café Society, 44–45, 110, 191 call-​and-​response, 26 “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” 122 Carnegie Hall, BH performance at, 60, 69, 92, 172. See also “From Spirituals to Swing” concert

Carpenter, Thelma, 81–82 Carroll, Charles Borromeo, The Priest’s Voice, 75–76, 77–79, 170 Catholicism. See also House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls; specific popes in Baltimore, 101 of BH, 70–71, 74–75, 132, 168, 180, 182 black population and, 98–99 confession and, 70–72, 87–88 of Day, 186–90 Josephite Fathers, 75–76 of Kerouac, 177 lives of women saints in, 9, 207n63 in New Orleans, 99–100 seeking meaning in pain in, 179–82, 183 of SF, 74–75, 129–30, 131 training in, 6 Catholic Worker movement, 186–88, 189–90 chanson réaliste form, 67–68 Cheatham, Doc, 194, 196 Chelsea at Nine (television show), 168, 182, 183–84 Christian, Charlie, 22 church. See also Afro-​Protestant preachers and preaching; Catholicism; religion; and individual denominations blues, jazz, and music of, 112–16, 126–31 New Negro and, 119–21 civil religion and jazz, 19–20, 21, 52–53 Clarke, Donald, 194 Clayton, Buck, 142 Clayton, Merry, 28 Clooney, Rosemary, 87 Coffin, Henry Sloane, 33, 35, 36 Cold War soundtrack of American civil religion, 19, 20, 21, 52–53 Coleman, Ornette, 193 Communism, 34–35 Comstock, Anthony, 97

Cone, James, 23–24, 156 confession, 70–72, 87–88 Conforth, Bruce, 155 Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd, 83 convent exposé genre, 95–99 Copeland, M. Shawn, 156 Cotton Club, 32, 41, 103, 118, 121, 128 Coviello, Peter, 193–94 Cowell, Henry, 10 Cowley, Malcolm, 186 Cox, Ida, 24 Crane, Louise, 109–10, 126 Crawford, Kathryn, 148 Cross, James “Stump,” 103, 164, 190–91, 196 “crossing Jordan,” meaning of, 11 Crouch, Stanley, 52 crucifixion, analogy of lynching to, 154–56 Cullen, Countee “The Black Christ,” 126, 154 “Christ Recrucified,” 155 Dandridge, Dorothy, 49 danse Apache, 176 Davenport, Skinny “Rim,” 175–76 Davis, Angela, 19, 141–42, 172 Davis, Francis, 168 Davis, Peter, 135 Day, Dorothy, 177, 186–90 Dean, Alice, 89, 110 Delaunay, Charles, 19 De Veaux, Alexis, 64 Dewey, John, 33 Didion, Joan, 1, 2 Divine, Father, 20, 126, 127–28 “Don’t Explain,” 47 Dorsey, Thomas, 27 Doubleday, 62–63 Double V campaign, 46–47, 48, 50, 52 Douglas, Ann, 151 Dove, Billie, 58, 86, 178 Dove, Rita, 174 Drexel, Katharine, 75, 95

i n d e x   { 

251  }

Drinkard, Carl, 65, 174–75 DuBois, W. E. B., 121 Dufty, Bevan, 142, 144 Dufty, Maely, 63, 142–43 Dufty, William on Beat Generation, 188 on BH, 21, 64, 182, 183 as ghostwriter/collaborator, 7, 9, 62, 63, 66 hospitalization of BH and, 167, 168 on relationship with BH, 71, 142–43 on “Strange Fruit,” 53 “The True Story of Billie Holiday,” 139 Dyer, Geoff, 164–65 Dyer, Richard, 86 Ebony magazine “Billie Holiday’s Tragic Life,” 172 “I’m Cured for Good,” 62, 69–70 Eckstine, Billy, 7 economic abuse of BH, 63, 167, 185 Edison, Harry “Sweets,” 22 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 5, 52, 203n95 Eldridge, Roy, 196 Ellington, Duke BH and, 110, 111 as jazz ambassador, 51 minstrel shows and, 122 religion and, 128 Symphony in Black, 18, 68, 111–12 Ellison, Ralph, 51, 88, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 165 Emperor Jones (film), 37 Entartete Musik traveling exhibit, 44 ethnography and local cultures, 31 Europe, James Reese, 30, 40 Europe, tours of, 21, 61, 166–67 Evans, David, 101 Fagan, Charles, 74, 216n116 Fagan, Johnnie, 57, 90 Fagan, Sadie (SF, mother) apartment shared with, 184, 185 in Baltimore, 76 Catholicism of, 74–75, 129–30, 131

{  252  } 

index



on giving now, getting back later, 185–86 C. Holiday and, 216n116 at House of the Good Shepherd, 2 G. Johnson on, 7 in New York, 58 tribute to, 130–31 Webster and, 195 Young and, 147 fan base, 7, 21, 67, 166 Father Divine’s Peace Mission, 126, 127–28 Feather, Leonard, 166, 169–70 Federal Reformatory for Women, Alderson, West Virginia, 59–60 Federal Writers’ Project, 35 Ferraro, Thomas J., 181, 190, 195 “Fine and Mellow,” 194–96 Fisher, James T., 131 Fisher, Rudolph, “The City of Refuge,” 120 Fitzgerald, Ella, 21, 51 food music compared to, 190–91 provision of, to friends and musicians, 184–86, 193, 196 Ford, Charles Henri, “Chanson pour Billie,” 6, 64 Ford, Ruth, 206n37 forgiveness, advancement of, 179 Foster, Clarence “Pops,” 58 Foster, George “Pops,” 115 France, blues in, 30 Franke, Katherine, 175 freedom American history, as history of, 20 of BH, 174, 175 jazz and, 51–53, 199n4 in postwar U.S., 51 of religion, 162 Friedwald, Will, 7, 194 “From Spirituals to Swing” concert Hammond and, 35–36 narrative of, 19, 107 performers in, 22, 37, 38



precursors to, 40–41 press for, 41–42 program for, 39–40, 108

Gajard, Joseph, 20 Garcia Gensel, John, 129 Gates, J. M., 27, 29 Gellert, Lawrence, 155 Gershwin, George, “Rhapsody in Blue,” 31, 40 Gillespie, Dizzy, 51 Ginsberg, Allen, 187–88 Gish, Lillian, 86 Glaser, Joe, 103, 118, 143–44 “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own),” 4, 20, 125–26 Golden Gate Quartet, 43, 49, 51, 52, 158 Goldwyn, Samuel, 5, 81 Gonzales, Babs, 184, 185 Goodman, Benny, 4, 20, 22, 39, 45 Goodson, Ida, 114–15, 129 gospel, rise of, 26 gossett, hattie, 194 Gough, Elenora/Eleanora, 58, 70, 73, 85. See also Holiday, Billie Gough, Philip, 74 Grace, Michael, 6, 187 Great Migration, 19, 20, 29, 35, 132 Green, Freddie, 190, 221n33 Gregorian chant, 3, 20, 77 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 171–72, 194, 195 Griffith, D. W., Birth of a Nation, 86 Gussow, Adam, 115–16, 146 Guthrie, Woody, 35, 158 Hall, Felix, 46 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 117 Hammerstein, Oscar, Show Boat, 147, 151–52 Hammond, John. See also “From Spirituals to Swing” concert on appearance of BH, 183 BH and, 3–4, 43–44 black authenticity and, 39 Café Society and, 44

childhood and career of, 35–36 Coffin and, 33 on Gershwin, 40 preservationist impulse of, 21 Smith and, 108 on “Strange Fruit,” 107 talent scouting of, 22, 37–38 Hampton, Lionel, 48 Handy, W. C., 31, 40, 99, 111, 114, 145–46 happiness, BH on, 65–66 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 61 Hardy, Clarence, 126 Harlem BH in, 58 music scene in, 66–67 popular dances in, 36–37 population of, 116, 118 religious communities in, 126–28 riots in, 50, 164 Van Vechten on, 123 white pilgrimages to, 32–33 Harlem Renaissance, 152–54 Harriott, Frank, 62, 64–65 Harris, Sussie, 74 Harriss, Cooper, 119 Harte, Roy, 12 Hawkins, Coleman, 129, 163, 169, 194–95, 196 Hazan, Marcella, 190 Heart of a Woman (Angelou), 165–66 Helena, Ruby, 89, 185 Henderson, Bobby, 90 Henderson, Fletcher, 129 Hentoff, Nat, 196 Herman, Woody, 103 heroin, 64, 67, 164, 167, 169, 182–83 Herzog, Arthur, Jr., 47, 125 Hill, Wee Wee, 76, 221n33 Hinton, Milt, 168, 196 His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Waters), 8–9 Hit Parade of 1943 (film), 49–50, 52 Holiday, Billie (BH). See also Lady Sings the Blues (B. Holiday) appearance of, 59, 90, 168–69, 182, 183–84

i n d e x   { 

253  }

Holiday, Billie (cont’d) on authenticity, 53 death of, 60–61, 167–68 decency of, 89–90 discovery of, 22 early life of, 57–58, 65–66 education of, 72–73 as female vocalist of year, 162–63 as godmother, 87, 142 obituary of, 63 oeuvre of, 56 on singing career origins, 142 as “Spanish,” 117 stories told by, 64–65 Holiday, Clarence (father) career of, 129, 196 death of, 46, 108–9, 160 good-​time place of, 22 guitar and, 101 life of, 58 Holiday, Fannie, 22, 58 Holiness churches, 102, 115, 129 Holman, Libby, 148, 158 Holmes, John Clellon, 188 Hooker, John Lee, 116 Horn, Shirley, 78 Horne, Lena, 121, 136 hospitality, no-​strings-​attached, 184–87, 188 House, Son, 25 “The House I Live In” (Meeropol), 157–58, 159, 161, 165 The House I Live In (film), 157, 160–62 House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls BH at, 3, 57, 72–74, 182 BH on enclosure at, 88–89 BH return to, 91–92 closure of, 92–93 Magdalens of, 79, 80–81, 83–84, 85, 178–79 musical training at, 77–78, 79 red dress shaming at, 84–85 religious devotions at, 90–91 residents of, 79–81, 87

{  254  } 

index

rules for confession at, 70–71 SF at, 2, 74 singing at, 91 Thérèse of Lisieux and, 177 Houses of the Good Shepherd in Ireland and Australia, 210n118 in Nancy, France, 180 Huang, Hao, 8, 112 Huang, Rachel, 8, 112 Hughes, Langston “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” 50 “Big Meeting,” 154 “Christ in Alabama,” 154 on Congo Square, 100 on Fine Clothes to the Jew, 147 “Jazzonia,” 122–23 “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 124 “A New Song,” 152 Popular Front and, 35 religion and, 124 “Song for Billie Holiday,” 124–25 on spirituals, 146 Hunter, Alberta, 24 Hurston, Zora Neale, 26, 35, 120 Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, 144–45 “If You Are but a Dream” (Jaffe, Fulton, and Bonx), 161–62 “I’m Cured for Good” (Ebony magazine), 62, 69–70 Jaffe, Moe, 161–62 Jagger, Mick, 28 Jarrett, Vernon, 160 jazz. See also blues civil religion and, 19–20, 21, 52–53 cultural influences on, 132 early descriptions of, 10–11 freedom and, 51–53, 199n4 liturgical, 128–29 Mailer on, 5 Morton on, 117–18 in New Orleans, 106–7

in 1950s, 66–67 religion compared to, 198n1 spiritual energies surrounding, 6 Whiteman on, 30 jazz martyr, BH as, 12 jazz singer, BH as, 55 Jewish American songbook, 141–42, 145 Jewish musicals, landscape of, 165 Jewish songwriting, and blues, 140–45 Jewishness, invisibility of, in Jewish popular song, 152–53 Jewishness and blackness in music, 10–12, 148–51 Jim Crow, 17 Johnson, Greer, 7 Johnson, James P., 40 Johnson, James Weldon, 149, 153 Johnson, J. C., 47–48, 142 Johnson, Robert, 40, 115 Johnson, Walter, 22, 58 Jolson, Al, 148 Jones, Jo, 43–44, 192–93 Joplin, Scott, 99 Josephite Fathers, 75–76 Josephson, Barney, 7, 44, 165, 172 jukeboxes, 4 Kaminsky, Max, 59, 193 Kane, Mary “Pony,” 28, 76, 88, 89, 91, 175 Karnofsky family, 134–36, 137, 139 Kennedy, John F., 5 Keppard, Freddie, 137 Kern, Jerome, 147, 151–52, 163 Kerouac, Jack on Beat, 12, 181 Catholicism of, 177 on hospitality, 186 On the Road, 67, 69, 188 Key of Heaven prayer book, 180–81, 186 Kitchings, Irene, 7, 44, 109 Kolve, V. A., 81 Krenek, Ernst, Jonny Spielt Auf, 44 Krupa, Gene, 39 Kuehl, Linda, 1–2

Lady in Satin (album), 170 Lady Sings the Blues (B. Holiday) blues in, 18 concert to promote, 69, 92, 172 as confessional narrative, 66 Dufty and, 7, 62, 63, 66 early life account in, 57–58 as genre piece, 66–67 on great-​grandmother, 125 His Eye Is on the Sparrow compared to, 8–9 Millstein review of, 55, 56, 69 on mother, 131 organization of, 69 overview of, 56–57 Pelletier story and, 82–83 print ad for, 172 reliability of, 62–63 as spiritual biography, 9 as story of survival, 67 on “Strange Fruit,” 156 title of, 56 touring life account in, 61 on war years, 162–63 on words and memories, 88 Lady Sings the Blues (film), 171, 192 Larkin, Philip, 192 Last Recording (album), 170 Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter), 21–22, 32, 158 Lees, Gene, 10 legal issues of BH, 21, 59, 62, 63–64, 167, 173–74 Lehman, David, 141, 145, 165 Leland, John, 132 Lethem, Jonathan, 27 Levy, John (bass player), 143, 167 Levy, John (manager-​boyfriend), 62–63, 92, 143, 173–74, 175 Lewis, Meade Lux, 104 Liber Usualis, 3, 77 Lincoln, Abbey, 87–88 Lipscomb, Mance, 129 Little, Wilbur, 160 lived religion, 5

i n d e x   { 

255  }

“Livery Stable Blues,” 31, 40 Locke, Alain, 118, 119–21, 124 Lofton, Kathryn, 107 Lomax, Alan, 21, 34–35, 116–17 Lomax, John, 21, 31–32, 34–35 Long, James B., 42 Lost Generation, 116, 119 lost generation, Catholic, 131 “Love for Sale” (Porter), 148, 176 “Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?),” 56 lynching, 150, 154–56, 157–58, 160, 181. See also “Strange Fruit” Maffly-​Kipp, Laurie, 152 Mailer, Norman, 5 Margolick, David, 182 Mary Magdalene, 79, 83, 98 Mary rosary beads, 180, 182 Maurin, Peter, 187, 188 Mays, Benjamin, 115 McCullough, Frances, 2 McDaniel, Hattie, 103 McKay, Claude, 127 McKay, Louis in autobiography, 63 BH and, 4, 174–75, 184 death of BH and, 6–7, 167–68 M. Dufty on, 142–43 European tour with, 61 McKune, Jim, 17 Meeropol, Abel “Goin’ to Build My Heaven,” 158 “The House I Live In,” 157–58, 159, 161, 165 “Strange Fruit,” 11, 46, 156–57, 158 Meeropol, Michael and Robert, 156, 157, 158 Merton, Thomas, 187 Methodist churches, black, 74, 126, 129, 146 Metropolitan Opera House, 163 Midgett, Memry, 184 Miller, Eva, 74, 130 Mills, Florence, 37

{  256  } 

index

Millstein, Gilbert, 55, 56, 69, 92, 172, 181 Mingus, Charles, 90 minstrel shows, 16, 121–22, 150–51, 176 “Miss Brown to You,” 112, 192 Miss Lou, 76, 89, 221n33 Mistinguett, 176–77 Mitchell’s Christian Singers, 42–43 “Moanin’ Low” (Rainger), 176 mobility, 15–17, 28–30. See also Great Migration Monette’s Supper Club, 3 Monk, Maria, 96 Monson, Ingrid, 66 Moore, Ethel, 76 Morton, Jelly Roll Armstrong on, 137 as Creole, 116–17, 118 on jazz, 117–18 on Kress horns, 134 Paramount and, 24 religion and, 99 on “Spanish tinge,” 10 Moses Stokes Traveling Show, 113–14 Most, Andrea, 151 Mother Euphrasia. See Pelletier, Euphrasia Mulligan, Gerry, 194–96 Murakami, Haruki, 179 Murray, Albert, 140 Museum of Modern Art, concerts at, 109 music. See also black music; blues; jazz; spirituals black vernacular, 8 church music, 112–16 cooking compared to, 190–91 in Harlem, 66–67 Jews channeling blackness in, 10–12, 148–51 sales of, 217n25 musical training of BH, 77–78, 79 “My Man,” 174, 175, 177, 178 Mystical Body of Christ doctrine, 188–89, 195

myths about BH, 171–77 “My Yiddishe Momme,” 4, 144–45 natural talent BH as, 68–69, 171–72, 193–94 of black musicians, 32, 126 primitive Negro stereotype and, 122 Newman, Richard, 37 New Masses Day and, 186 “From Spirituals to Swing” concert and, 19, 35, 39, 41, 42 “Negro songs of protest,” 155 “The New Negro” (Ransom), 159–60, 181 The New Negro (Locke), 118, 119–21 New Negroes, 116, 118–19 New Orleans Colored Waifs’ Home in, 99–100, 135 Creoles of, 116–17, 118 Morton on sound of, 134 Storyville district of, 99, 106 New Orleans (film), 10, 103–4, 105–6 Nicholson, Stuart, 172 Nix, A. W., 27 obituary, 18–29 Oblate Sisters of Providence, 6, 73, 101 O’Connor, Norman, 6, 169, 170, 182 O’Hara, Frank, “The Day Lady Died,” 63 Okeh records, 23 Old Negro, 118, 122, 126, 149, 153 Oliver, Joe “King,” 99, 137 “Ol’ Man River,” 149 O’Meally, Robert, 12, 170, 173 On the Road (Kerouac), 67, 69, 188 Ory, Kid, 99, 103 pain, seeking meaning in, 179–82, 183 Paramount Records, 23–25, 24, 27 Parnell, Jack, 169 Patrick, Dorothy, 104, 105 Patton, Charley, 24, 25

Paul, Elliot, 105 Paul VI, 141 Pelagia of Antioch, 81 Pelagius of Cordova, 81 Pelletier, Euphrasia, 80–81, 82–83, 84, 89, 178, 180 perpetual primitive, figure of, 107 Phoenix Theatre, East Village, 169–70 physical abuse of BH, 4, 61, 142–43, 173–76, 184 at House of the Good Shepherd, 84–85 Piaf, Édith, 68, 177 piety of medieval women, paradox of, 12–13 Pittsburgh Courier, 46–47 Pius X, 190 Pius XII, 189 “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” 168 Popular Front, 35 popular idiom, BH as working in, 191–92 Porter, Cole, “Love for Sale,” 148, 176 Powell, Specs, 3 Powers, Richard, 176 “Preacher Boy,” 4 preaching, see Afro-​Protestant preachers and preaching, sermons Primiano, Leonard Norman, 128 primitive Negro stereotype, 121–23 Prince, Harold, 152 race records, 15, 18, 22–26 racial terror Armstrong on, 138, 139 critique of, 155 lynching, 150, 154–56, 157–58, 160 popular sound as sharing history with, 152 Red Summer, 160 Rainey, Ma blues and, 18, 28 “Broken Hearted Blues,” 140 minstrel shows and, 122

i n d e x   { 

257  }

Rainey, Ma (cont’d) Moses Stokes Traveling Show and, 113–14 Paramount and, 24 “Prove It on Me Blues,” 27 Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues, 140 Rainger, Ralph, “Moanin’ Low,” 176 Rampersad, Arnold, 125 Ramshaw, Sara, 173–74 Ransom, Reverdy, “The New Negro,” 159–60, 181 Raper, Arthur, Tragedy of Lynching, 154–55 Razaf, Andy, 47–48, 148 Red Summer, 160 Reed, Ishmael, 12 Reinhardt, Django, 199n4 religion. See also Afro-​Protestant preachers and preaching; Catholicism; Jewish songwriting; and individual religious figures and denominations Armstrong and, 102–3 authenticity and, 107, 125–26 civil, and jazz, 19–20, 21, 52–53 Ellington and, 128 freedom of, 162 Hammond on, 36 hearing in black music, 203n99 in The House I Live In, 161–62 Hughes and, 124 jazz compared to, 198n1 listening for, 18–20 lived, 5 lynching and, 154–55 Morton and, 99 Tillich on, 33–34 religious climate, as pluralism, 4–5 A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (short film), 25 “Rhapsody in Blue” (Gershwin), 31, 40 Rich, Wilbert, 73 ring shout, 195 Robbins, Jerome, West Side Story, 145

{  258  } 

index

Robbins, Michael, 192 Robeson, Paul, 37, 147, 149 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 122, 136 Rockefeller, Nelson, 105 Rogers, J. A., “Jazz at Home,” 120 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 51, 158 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 157, 158 Roth, Philip, 128 Rowles, Jimmy, 175, 194 “Russian Lullaby” (Berlin), 135, 137, 139–40 sacred past BH and, 159 setting down, 152–54 Sagan, Françoise, 60, 169 “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” 217n25 Sampson, Black, 34, 42 Sanctified Church, 102 Savoy Ballroom, 50 Schultz, Dutch, 148 Scott, Christine, 87, 91, 92, 180 Scottsboro defendants, 154 séance spiritualism, 17 Secrets of the Convent (Tuttle), 95, 97–99 segregation, 17, 45, 51 self-​injury and self-​starvation, 179–80, 183–84 sermons, recorded, 26–28 “setting down the sacred past,” 152–54 Shaw, Artie, 20, 39, 163 sheet music, sales of, 217n25 Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein), 147, 151–52 Simmons, John, 221n38 Sinatra, Frank, 144, 157, 158, 160–61, 191, 195 “Sistern and Brethren,” 155 Sisters of St. Magdalen, 178–79 Smith, Bessie Barker on, 113 BH as playing, 9 BH on, 110–11 blues and, 18, 28 death of, 108



“From Spirituals to Swing” concert and, 43 “Gimme a Pigfoot,” 122 minstrel shows and, 122 Rainey and, 113–14 in St. Louis Blues, 111–12 Van Vechten and, 123 voice of, 111 Smith, Clarence, 113 Smith, Mamie, “Crazy Blues,” 23 Smith, William, 113 Snowden, Elmer, 186 Solesmes method of Gregorian chant, 3, 20 Sorett, Josef, 115 sound of New Orleans, Morton on, 134 popular, as sharing history with racial terror, 152 as porous and transgressive, 16–17 recorded, 17–18 as religion around, 18 The Sound of Jazz (CBS production), 194–96 South, church allegiance in, 146 spirituals, 120–21, 146, 149. See also “From Spirituals to Swing” concert spirituals-​to-​swing narrative, 19, 35–36 Springsteen, Bruce, on Sinatra’s voice, 131 Stafford, Jo, 192 State Department, jazz tours for, 21, 43, 51, 52–53, 100, 136 St. Frances Academy for Colored Girls, 73, 101 St. Louis Blues (film), 111–12, 177 “St. Louis Blues,” 55, 110, 112 The Story of Jazz (film), 9–10, 104–5 Strand Theatre, performances at, 60 “Strange Fruit” Angelou and, 165–66 BH as laying claim to, 191 BH on father’s death and, 108–9, 160



BH performances of, 7, 45–46, 182 Dufty on, 53 Hammond and, 107 Meeropol poem and, 11–12, 156–57, 158 “The New Negro” compared to, 181 White and, 159 “Supper Time” (Berlin), 150 swing, 38–39 Symphony in Black (film), 18, 68, 111–12, 177 Szwed, John, 68–69, 78 Tatum, Art, 163 Terry, Sonny, 22, 40 Thaïs of Egypt, 81 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 5, 41, 43, 44 Thérèse of Lisieux, 81–82, 177, 182, 186 “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You),” 192 Thompson, James G., 46–47 Tillich, Hannah, 32–33 Tillich, Paul, 32, 33–34 Tin Pan Alley, 142, 144, 145, 148–49 torch songs, 56, 150, 176 tragic, BH life as, 171–73 train travel, 28–30 “Trav’lin’ All Alone” (J. C. Johnson), 47, 142 Tucker, Bobby, 65, 89, 174 Tucker, Sophie, 144, 148 Tuttle, Hudson, 95–96, 97–99 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 31 Van Vechten, Carl, Nigger Heaven, 123 violence, gendered, 173–77 Voice of America, Jazz Hour, 21, 51 voice of BH, 58–59, 78 Vrbsky, Alice, 183, 185 Wald, Elijah, 159 Wald, Gayle, 41 Waldron, Mal, 194–95 Walker, Ruby, 43 Wallace, Michele, 183

i n d e x   { 

259  }

Waller, Fats, 38, 40, 122 Waters, Ethel, 8–9, 28, 37, 103, 150 Webster, Ben, 169, 194–95 Weiner, Isaac, 17 Weisenfeld, Judith, 116, 117 Welch, Elisabeth, 148 Welles, Orson, 9–10, 62–63, 104–5, 110 West, Mae, 97 White, Josh, 158–59 White, Walter, Rope and Faggot, 154 Whiteman, Paul, “An Experiment in Modern Music” concert, 30–31, 40–41 Williams, Mary Lou, 5, 128–29, 182, 187, 188 Williams, Mayo “Ink,” 24 Wilson, Teddy, 55, 68, 78, 192, 217n25 women as blues singers, 26–28 late medieval, paradox of piety of, 179–80

{  260  } 

index



under siege, 174–75 as songbirds or canaries, 55 as torch singers in chanson réaliste tradition, 67–68 white, model for, 86 World War II, BH during, 162–64 Wright, Richard, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 120 “Yankee Doodle Tan” (Razaf and Johnson), 48–49, 163 Young, Lester BH apartment and, 185 BH performances with, 142, 146–47, 169 “Lady” and, 57 The Sound of Jazz and, 194–95 in World War II, 164–65 Zaidins, Earle, 65

Religion Around

bo o ks i n th e s e r ies :

volume 1 Religion Around Shakespeare Peter Iver Kaufman volume 2 Religion Around Emily Dickinson W. Clark Gilpin