1936 - It's exactly 75 years to the day since the great, great Billie Holiday recorded the song Billies Blues. Without any shadow of a doubt, Ms. Holiday changed the art of American popular vocals forever, and although she co-wrote only a few songs, several of them have become jazz standards; God Bless the Child, Don't Explain, Fine and Mellow, and Lady Sings the Blues. But she also had many more hits that have stood the test of time, and we have some of theme here for you today.
Billy Holiday was just such and artist, such a singer, a true blues performer in the best traditional sense. Of all history's vocalists it is Billie Holiday I would've love to have have the most - it's my fantasy it is my fantasy is that I would have saved this gracious creature from the sharks who surrounded her, crucified her, used her and took her for every penny she had. Nicknamed Lady Day by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, this American jazz singer had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo, and every singer since has been influenced by her style, even if it is subconscious and subliminal.
During her final period of separation from her mother, Holiday began to perform the songs she learned while working in a brothel. By early 1929, she joined her mother in Harlem where their landlady was a sharply dressed woman named Florence Williams, who ran a whorehouse at 151 West 140th Street. In order to live, Holiday's mother became a prostitute and, within a matter of days of arriving in New York, Holiday, who had not yet turned 14, also became a prostitute for $5 a time. On May 2, 1929, the house was raided, and Holiday and her mother were sent to prison. After spending some time in a workhouse, her mother was released in July, followed by Holiday in October, having then turned 14. She led a life that nobody deserves to lead, and she was used and abused incessantly. On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room so they could arrest for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. She subsequently remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and in her pocket, $750 cash, which she received from giving her story to a tabloid magazine. She died in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; A few hours before her death, her room, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. Billy Holiday was stunningly strikingly beautiful in her life, but in the end was physically wasted to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The acids of excess - not just drugs - had dissolved her alive. As she lay in that death bed, the final thoughts of this may well have been exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical yet sentimental, profane yet generous and immensely talented woman of just 44 years of age was the belief that she was to be released the following morning. She would have been, eventually, but instead she removed herself, finally, from her pain and from those who helped destroy her life. Her funeral mass was held at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in New York City.
This is the *MUSICBACKTRACK* tribute to Billie Holiday: First up, this video is 65 years old, with Louis Armstrong, singing the song, The Blues Are Brewin', from the 1946 New Orleans movie. Then the very first anti-racial song, the sad and eery Strange Fruit, My Man, and God Bless The Child. In some she looks strained the by the ravages of her life.
1965 - This is the day, 46 years ago, when Wilson Pickett released his classic song, In The Midnight Hour. Of all the major '60s soul stars, Wilson Pickett was one of the roughest and sweatiest, working up some of the decade's hottest dance floor grooves with hits such as the Midnight Hour, Land of 1000 Dances, Mustang Sally. His soul music took no prisoners and was raw, and he was a seminal act, contributing, as he did, to establish the sound of Southern soul with his early hits, which were often written and recorded with the cream of the session musicians in Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Before establishing himself as a solo artist, Pickett sang with the Falcons, who had a Top Ten R&B hit in 1962 with I Found a Love, If You Need Me, and It's Too Late, all R&B hits for the singer before he hooked up with Atlantic Records, who sent him to record at Stax in Memphis in 1965. One early result was of this new partnership was In the Midnight Hour, the chugging horn linen of which, along with the undulating funky beats and impassioned vocals, combined to bring R&B into the soul age. Thousands of bands around the world, black and white, covered In the Midnight Hour, both on-stage and on record in the 1960s. In deed, I can remember singing alongside Bon Scott in the sixties as we did duets of this song and Mustang Sally, loving every minute, knowing full well we would never possibly emulate the magic of Picket. He also recorded several early songs by Bobby Womack and hired Duane Allman as a session guitarist on a hit cover of the Beatles' Hey Jude. Pickett spent the early part of the 2000s performing, before retiring in late 2004 due to ill health. He passed away on January 19, 2006, following a heart attack. This is the great, Wilson Picket.
1967 - It was July 10 when a little-know white girl, Bobbie Gentry, recorded a clever song about murder, entitled Ode to Billie Joe. The song is a first-person Southern Gothic tale tale that reveals suicide and banality as a juxtaposition, told to the family at the dinner table. Throughout the song, the suicide and other tragedies are contrasted against the simpleness of everyday routine and polite conversation. The news that morning told at the table was that Billy Joe had jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, in Mississippi. At the dinner table, the narrator tells the news and says, "Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense; pass the biscuits, please" and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be taken aback ("I saw him at the sawmill yesterday.... And now you tell me Billie Joe has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"), he's not shocked enough to keep him from having a second piece of pie. Late in the song, Mama says, "Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite,"and then recalls a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor, the local preacher, who mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked very much like the narrator herself, and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge." Rocklore has it that the girl had an abortion and threw the dead baby off the bridge, into the flowing, dark waters below. The song was written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry, was a number-one hit all over the world, and ranked #412 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Ode to Billie Joe generated eight Grammy nominations, resulting in three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell, and has sold more than three million copies around the world.
1979 - This is the day Chuck Berry was sentenced to four months in prison for income tax evasion. Regardless, A month earlier, with the federal government on his tail for tax evasion, the rock and roll legend was asked by the President of the USA to perform at a benefit for the Black Music Association, on the lawns of The White. I think this is quite bizarre, but good on your Jimmy Carter. Even though they were on opposite sides of the law, Berry, the prime architect of rock'n'roll chord sounds and teen-angst lyric style behind mid-1950s hits like Roll Over Beethoven and Johnny B. Goode, showed up to perform at the Washington, D.C. concert on June 7 - just three days before he pleaded guilty to dodging over $100,000 in taxes. The conviction sent Berry back to jail, 32 years ago today, after previously being imprisoned for armed robbery and transporting a minor.
