Immerse Yourself in the Music of Billie Holiday - A Playlist
The Arvada Center's production of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, running from September 26 - November 02 tells the story of Billie Holiday, a mid 19th century legendary jazz singer. Holiday’s music is known for its personality, depth, and influence drawn from her own life.
The music will carry you through the story, each song unfolding a piece of Holiday. The richness of each song means every one has a purpose, and the history behind them cannot be understated. See below to learn more about a few songs from Billie Holiday’s work, and then come see them performed live in our Black Box Theatre.
Covered by many but vastly credited to Billie Holiday, “I Wonder Where our Love has Gone” is a piece from the perspective of a lover, left by their love. Despite their begging and pleading, their love will not return. Billie Holiday had many ‘loves’ throughout her life. She was married multiple times, and each husband, in their own ways, left Holiday lower than where they found her.
Drugs, abuse, and sex work were all cycles Holiday was kept in through her husbands. Despite her tumultuous relationships, Holiday often sang about the idea of love and how strong an influence it can be.
“When a Woman Loves a Man” describes, likely from a place of personal experience, how a person will remain in a relationship no matter what the other person is going through or doing. Holiday sings specifically about how “women are funny that way”, how they’ll stay with a man no matter how hard times are and despite anyone telling her to leave.
To Holiday, love is both enduring and foolish. She perfectly understands how irrational it is to stay with someone who isn’t treating you right, but she also knows that leaving when you’re in love is much easier said than done.
Originally sung in the 1934 British crime-comedy movie Road House, “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” is an incredibly romantic song. Early in a relationship, many struggle to say the words ‘I love you’, too nervous and excited by the new connection. Instead, Holiday sings, you can wait until some moonlight peaks through the clouds and emboldens you to kiss them. The power of this moonlight is vast, besting how jittery one may be around their love.
This idea is relatable to many, and gives us as listeners a peek into how Holiday viewed love; she saw it as a sweet affinity that can give us butterflies which can only be calmed by a ray of moonlight.
Written in first person, Billie Holiday takes on a role that many listeners have played in this piece; an individual madly in love with another. It describes the lengths the speaker will happily, albeit metaphorically, go to in order to keep their partner happy. Holiday uses her higher register to emphasize the word “crazy” throughout the song, playing into the role.
A common theme in her work, Holiday discusses the extent that partners, most often women, go to. This is also a recurrent theme throughout Holiday’s own life, as she worked hard to keep her relationships afloat.
Initially sung by Bessie Smith in 1933, “Gimme a Pigfoot” is a piece that Billie Holiday was known to cover live and recorded herself decades later. The song is about simple pleasures and wanting to dance all night, despite higher brow parties happening across town.
Pigsfeet themselves, also known as pig’s trotters, are a popular dish in many cultures. Boiled, fried, pickled, or added into stew, pig feet are a great and cheap way to bolster a meal, particularly in early-mid 1900s juke joints.
Bessie was a big inspiration for Holiday, as she spent much of her youth listening to Bessie’s songs. Holiday’s own music paid homage to Bessie in its structure and style, both of them being credited for helping build and uphold the jazz genre.
Another Bessie Smith song, “Baby Doll” is a song about a deep yearning for a partner, for someone that can provide constant support and love. The song describes the desire as something so intense it may send someone to a doctor, worried that the love they feel in their heart is too much for them and may drive them crazy.
This piece is not generally associated with Billie Holiday, but due to her deep respect for Bessie Smith and the influences she drew from her, it is easy to see how this song may have been something that Holiday could relate to.
One of Billie Holiday’s more famous songs, “God Bless the Child” is a piece on finances, friends, and how each affects the other.
In Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday mentions that it was an argument with her mother over money that inspired the song. As a person comes into financial independence, it is common to begin to notice patterns about how their financial situation affects their relationships with those close to them.
Money, you've got lots of friends
They're crowding around the door
When you're gone and spending ends
They don't come no more
When one has money to go around, friends and family take notice, and may try to use the relationship to get money for themselves. While of course, on the other hand, when one does not have money, suddenly those same friends and family are found absent.
Holiday’s own financial situation fluctuated dramatically throughout her life, from living in boarding houses to performing in Carnegie Hall.
A very poetic song, “Somebody’s On My Mind” is a piece often interpreted as being about (day)dreaming about another person. The lyrics suggest that the speaker knows this dream isn’t realistic, and that maybe this person doesn’t deserve to be dreamed about in this way, but that the speaker doesn’t mind.
Billie Holiday’s romantic life was turbulent. But despite all of this, she continued to see love as something intrinsic to her person and not something she could avoid, even if she wanted to.
Another song from a film, this time the 1937 screwball comedy of the same name, “Easy Living” is a piece on the same repeating themes we often see in Holiday’s music. Themes of love, foolishness, and devotion.
This song also discusses specifically how being in love makes other aspects of life better, too. Holiday sings about how it’s “fun” and while there’s “nothing in life but” her partner, that only makes life as a whole easier.
“Strange Fruit” was a song recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 whose original form was a poem written by Abel Meeropol. One of Holiday’s most well known pieces and a protest song, “Strange Fruit” references the lynchings of African Americans in the South. The lyrics are clear in their intention, building an image for listeners.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
The poem, originally titled “Bitter Fruit” and written by the Russian Meeropol in 1937, was also set to music by him. Meeropol performed the song alongside Laura Duncan, an African American singer.
Billie Holiday was hesitant about performing the song herself, worried about protests and potentially being targeted. But, audiences asked for it, and soon she became known for closing nearly every performance with the song. Though from the initial release of the song all the way to Holiday’s passing, attempts were made to bar her from singing it. Venues would deny her, audience members would leave, and a man named Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner, used his little power to hunt down any reason to stop Holiday from performing.
Holiday was arrested multiple times for drug possession. At the end of her life, as she lay dying of issues brought on by years of drug use, police handcuffed her to her gurney and prevented further treatment from doctors. Billie Holiday died in that New York hospital on July 17, 1959 at the age of 44.
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