Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth

John Szwed's Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth should be required reading for anyone interested in Billie Holiday. Not only does it function very well as a succinct and useful introduction and explanation of her music and influences, Szwed avoids the path of other biographers who focused on the sensationalism surrounding her personal life and difficulties she faced. Moreover, as an established jazz biographer who impressed me with his stunning (and serious) look at Sun Ra, Szwed is clearly familiar with jazz, its history, and the social context which produced Billie Holiday in a way that one does not often find in others. For example, Angela Davis, whose excellent black feminist look at Billie Holiday is also worthwhile, should not have tried to fit or categorize Holiday into the blues woman category, but someone like Szwed properly places her in a separate "category" as a jazz musician who brought a blues sensibility to torch songs and standards. In a sense, Davis is right about Billie Holiday recognizing herself as someone influenced by Bessie Smith and the blues, but as Szwed argues, she is just as much influenced by Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, earlier women singers from the minstrel era, and her own innovative approach to jazz. For a book under 200 pages, there is a depth of commentary and explication on Holiday's life and art that is surely rare to come across. I have not not read a similarly great work on a jazz musician since Kelley's biography of Monk or Mercer's biography of Wayne Shorter.