Billie Holiday Wishing On The Moon

by Clarke, Donald

• ISBN13: 9780306811364
• ISBN10: 0306811367
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-20
• Publisher: Da Capo Press

Summary

Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography,Lady Sings the Blues. "Now, finally, we have a definitive biography," saidBooklistof Donald Clarke'sBillie Holiday, "by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength." Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970sinterviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction and, in the words of theSeattle Times, "finally sets us straight. . .evoking her world in all its anguish, triumph, force and irony."Newsdaycalled this "a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu." TheNew York Timesraved that it "may be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday," and Helen Oakley Dance inJazzTimessaid, "We should probably have to wait a long time for another life of Billie Holiday to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement."

Author Biography

Donald Clarke lives in Austin, Texas.

Table of Contents

Preface to the First Edition (1994)	ix
Introduction to the Da Capo Edition	xii
An African-American Nation	1	(2)
Baltimore	3	(19)
The Point	22	(18)
Harlem	40	(25)
The First Records, and Triumph at the Apollo	65	(22)
The Teddy Wilson Era	87	(11)
The Street That Never Slept	98	(22)
On the Road with the Big Bands	120	(30)
1937-9: Strong Fruit	150	(31)
The War Years	181	(56)
Triumph and Trouble	237	(27)
The Jailbird	264	(20)
The Gangster and the Bassist	284	(22)
The Last Decade Begins	306	(26)
The Last Merry-Go-Round: Fun, Fights and Fame	332	(39)
Intimations of Mortality	371	(24)
The Triumphant Decline of Lady Day	395	(28)
The Loneliest Girl in the World	423	(22)
Coda: The Lady Is an Icon	445	(16)
Index	461