Billie Holiday (1915–1959), also known as Lady Day, is one of the 20th century’s great musical geniuses. She brought to every song she sang something special, unpredictable, and unreproducible, some unique interpretation and styling, playful rendering of the text, and evocative turn of melody and expression.
Her music is really for the ages, and it has inspired countless others who came after.
She famously lived a hard life and spent time in the heart of her career in prison because of drug addiction. But as an artist, she stands out for all time as a paragon of authentic artistry that no popular singer has been able to equal. Not Frank Sinatra. Not even Taylor Swift. Not even close.
If you doubt it, go to your playlist right now and add anything sung by Lady Day. You will be amazed at the interpretative freedom, the mastery of the text, and an incomparable capacity to present even the oldest pop songs with a new and still-fresh understanding.
She was born Eleanora Fagan, and she was an American black woman raised in poverty who experienced repeated tragedy and suffering. She was discovered singing in a Harlem nightclub in 1933 by record producer John Hammond. She was an immediate hit, and her fame took her to the top, performing with the best bands and making one popular record after another.
You know what I find rather remarkable? Holiday had no musical training. She played no instrument but her voice. Even her voice had a limited range. She could not read music. This might have been to her advantage.
As a lifetime musician, raised in a family of extremely talented instrumentalists and composers, I find this astonishing. Perhaps I should not. In the end, music does not exist on the page. It lives in the air and in the heart.
For my part, I learned to read music at the same time as words. I chose this path not as a career but only as an avocation. I’ve taught musical technique to children and adults for many years. There are three main parts to creating a great musician: learning to read and then play music, forgetting all that you have learned and freeing the music from the page, and finding an audience that cares. Those three points can take a lifetime.
Let’s discuss the first point: reading music. It’s an extremely complicated task. You learn the notes and their names, usually demarcated by a treble clef and bass clef. Already we are dealing with something like manufactured fiction. The clefs are typically taught as languages, like French and German. This is wrong for a simple reason: These signs are an artifice structured to symbolize an infinite range of pitches.
I’m not arguing with this pedagogy, because it is probably essential, but it already introduces limits to understanding in a way that the system of the Middle Ages did not. In the Middle Ages, it was obvious that printed music was not the music but merely the signs. After all, the system of lines and notes had only been invented in the 11th century. Before and after this, singers were taught movable pitches with names like do, re, mi—a vocal rendering of physical reality—not letters of the alphabet as if they were assigned.
In modern printed music, you have rhythm, which is marked by different signs such as quarter notes, eighth notes, and half notes and demarcated by lines called measures, which note only whether the tempo is following patterns of two, three, or four, or some combination.
This is further complicated by ties and syncopation and anomalies such as triplets that fall outside the assigned markers. You also have signs to indicate interpretation such as tempo, articulation, dynamics, and mood.
Just imagine presenting all of this to a 10-year-old and trying to figure out in what order to teach all of this. You can work years on learning the notes, the clefs, the seemingly endless complications over accidentals and key signatures, not to mention time signatures and various other markings, all with the goal of producing sounds of some sort that reach from you to the listener. It’s a massive undertaking.
The next step is actually more difficult still. You have to emancipate all this machinery, all this apparatus, all this knowledge, from the page and from the ink and make it real and meaningful, excluding all artifice. That is a step that vast numbers of musicians can never achieve. This stage of unlearning is actually more difficult than learning.
It’s a bit like learning to read and then finding yourself acting in a play. The entire goal is to transcend the text on the page and make the script seem like it is coming authentically from one’s mind and heart. The ability to do that is what separates amateurs from great performers.
It’s exactly the same with music.
The music must be liberated from the page, else it doesn’t really happen. Even for the best-trained musician, one cannot achieve this until a decade or two after the fundamentals are mastered. It’s this stage of forgetting what you know that defines the difference between competence and genuine achievement.
Lady Day took the fast track to this second stage by being denied any access to the first. Oddly, that might have been the key to her success.
I’ve known other mighty musicians like this, people who were outstanding improvisers, impressive band members, tremendous singers, and even players who still could not read a lick of music. They always feel embarrassed by this because it is a genuine disability, not to mention socially and professionally embarrassing. Even so, I sometimes wonder whether not knowing something—in this case how to read music—is the key to their success.
The third stage of musical achievement involves a point that is deeply frustrating and nearly insoluble. You need somehow to gain an audience that is willing to pay to hear your music. Having been involved in university-level music at quite an early age, I can promise you that this is the part that musicians resent the most.
There has been an emergent pretension in the 20th century that musicians should not have to worry about this problem. They should just be who they are and gain an audience and a paycheck regardless of whether audiences or benefactors are willing to give up their income to hear the performance. Resentment of the audience and customers is a feature of modern musicians who do not perform in the popular space.
Lady Day never had this problem. From the beginning of her musical career, she understood that her job was to translate the music in her heart to the ears of the listeners, in a fashion that was communicative of art, in order to inspire the listeners. Of this she never had any doubts.
This is another reason to admire her art. Unlike high-end, overtrained professional musicians of today, she saw music as a method by which to convey emotions deep within an audience that wanted to hear what she had to sing. She was never shy about that, and you can hear it especially in the way she managed the text of her songs. She loved the words, primarily as a means by which to tell a story and send a message.
In a strange way, and despite all my knowledge and training on the particulars, I have to admire the beauty, mastery, and mighty achievement of this interesting woman from Harlem and what she did for the world. She took music itself to another level, beyond the notes and the page to a pure method of creating meaning through art.
Sinatra put it this way in 1958: “With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the United States during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.”
We could probably add another 50 years to that.
Lady Day knew the way.
