E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brawling Billie (continued)
	Related Links Doug Wamble's official Web site Jon Garelick reviews Doug Wamble's Country Libations Billy Holiday's official Web site An unofficial Web site on Billy Holiday: Ladyday.net

But the book does buzz with the vitality Blackburn heard in those printed transcripts and on the tapes. She often paraphrases and condenses interviews, or describes the overall tone, but when she gets a good, coherent story, like that of comedian and tap dancer James "Stump" Cross, she lets him run with it in pages of unbroken direct quote. She highlights contradictory testimony in footnotes; this is especially effective when she presents Holiday’s gay friend Greer Johnson in counterpoint with Johnson’s friend and roommate the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick’s novelistic memoir Sleepless Nights presents overwrought visions of Billie, and she remembers the jazz she heard Billie and others perform in her home town of Lexington, Kentucky, as "something inevitable, effortlessly pushing up from the common soil." For Greer Johnson, Blackburn says, "it was different. He said that when he first heard jazz, he immediately felt at home with it." And Johnson has the best last word on Holiday’s complicated relationship with her mother: "He considered her to be a ‘relatively stupid, sad little woman who had been caught in a relationship and it produced a Phoenix and she didn’t know what to do with a Phoenix.’ " (That’s at odds, by the way, with how Clarke quotes the same material.)

As for Billie, here she is, drunk, sober, stoned, busted, radiant, "a fat slob" in one witness’s description, immaculate in others. "She was very clean, very neat . . . the way she handled a fork," one of her worshipful ex-boyfriends remembers. She had worked as a prostitute. She slept with women, but men were her default choice, and the masochism ascribed to Billie is here too — she needed a man who could physically overpower her in order to feel safe, so it seems. But one witness says he saw one of Billie’s abusive husbands, John Levy, back down from a fight, "terrified of her." She had a tendency to brawl, taking offense at real or imagined slights. In one scene, when a big loudmouth intrudes on a party, Billie smashes her own records over his head and throws him out on the street. When a Merchant Marine insulted her with a racial epithet in a bar, she broke her cocktail glass on his head and cut his face with it. (Billy Eckstine tells the story uproariously on the Ultimate DVD.) Her former pianist Bobby Tucker testifies, "I would stop her from doing things, like if she wanted to get violent with somebody. I’d grab her and hold her and say, ‘All right, you cool it,’ and she’d try to break loose and she’s as strong as a mule, but I’d tilt her to one side so she couldn’t plant both feet; and she’d relax and she’d try again and I’d say, ‘Aha!’ and she’d finally break up laughing."

Billie’s junkiedom was oversold in the autobiography ghosted by William Dufty — she kicked easily and often — but she drank continuously, starting with a big glass of gin at breakfast. To paraphrase Keith Richards, Billie didn’t have a heroin problem, she had a police problem. Despite various scrapes with the law, her serious trouble didn’t begin until she recorded her famous anti-lynching tune "Strange Fruit" in 1939. After that, the cops never got off her back.

As for musicians, they loved her and she loved them. (See Rowles’s bawdy, loving tribute). The book is more about Billie the person than about Billie the musician. She was proud of her ability to sing well over any accompaniment. ("You’re not going to have any trouble with me," she told Tucker when he was hastily recruited.) As for her power as a vocalist, the oft-repeated tribute by musician Tony Scott is here too: "When Ella sings ‘My man he’s left me,’ you think the guy went down the street for a loaf of bread. But when Lady sings, you can see that guy going down the street. He’s got his bags packed and he ain’t never coming back."

The film clips on the DVD show Billie singing in a variety of situations, but the best is still the famous segment from the Sound of Jazz TV show, Billie singing late in her career with old friends like Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and her beloved Pres. Unlike a lot of static concert films, this one catches a performance of "Fine and Mellow" as it unfolds in real time: Billie singing, Lester playing, Billie listening and smiling. She’s a happy musician at work.

CAUGHT LIVE. At Scullers a week ago last Wednesday night, Doug Wamble introduced his band’s performance of "Rockin’ Jerusalem" as a "cross between Mahalia Jackson and John Coltrane" — which is as good a summation as any of his new Bluestate, his second album for Marsalis Music (distributed by Cambridge outfit Rounder Records). Wamble’s 2003 release, Country Libations, was more of a mix of Delta blues, gospel, and straight country played as jazz. This time, from "Rockin’ Jerusalem" to Peter Gabriel’s "Washing of the Water" and Stevie Wonder’s "Have a Talk with God," the gospel is prominent. But it’s gospel as adopted to a post-Coltrane jazz vocabulary, even when Wamble is taking a slide to his big hollow-bodied acoustic guitar. At Scullers, the thump of a shuffle beat backed by tambourine gave way to straight-ahead grooves, expansive harmonic progressions, and free passages. There was a bit of the profane in Wamble’s fast, boppish "The Homewrecker’s Hump" and as on the first album, some fierce political commentary, here on "If I Live To See the Day." Wamble’s Tennessee Baptist–infused tenor voice is as big as his guitar sound, and his band — pianist Roy Dunlap, bassist Jeff Hanley, and drummer Peter Miles — have helped him create one of the most distinctive current conceptions in jazz.