BILLIE HOLIDAY

Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talent.

When 18-year-old Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November of 1933 to record “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” with the Benny Goodman band, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Dozens of singers were influenced by her in her own time, including Frank Sinatra, who said she was the most important influence on singing in twenty years. Today she and Sinatra are the only singers still alive to us from that period. Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, has been in print since it was first published fifty-five years ago, and most of her recordings are still available. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life – her prostitution at the age of 14, a her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships, the ravages of her voice by the time she was 44 – or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. John Szwed’s Billie Holiday will be a different book, one that stays close to her music, to her performance style, to the self she created and put on record and on stage. It will not be a biography in the strictest sense, but rather a meditation on her art and how it made sense of her life. Szwed will draw on much new material on Holiday (including unpublished memoirs and interviews) that has surfaced in the last decade and will consider how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, her singing style, a number of her signature songs (“Strange Fruit,” “Gloomy Sunday”), and her legacy.

Published as a celebration of Holiday’s centenary on April 7, John Szwed’s Billie Holiday will be certain to be a widely and well reviewed portrait of this inimitable artist.

John Szwed is Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. As a jazz musician, he played professionally for over a decade. Szwed has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and in 2006 was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings. He is the author of sixteen books, most recently Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking, 2010).