One of the dramatic ways in which Billie expressed how she felt about being black was regularly singing ‘Strange Fruit’, about a lynching in ‘the gallant South’. Blackburn rightly devotes a whole chapter to the song and cites the entire lyric, as it had such a profound effect on her public and on that egregious transvestite J. Edgar Hoover. It was in 1940, when Billie first sang ‘Strange Fruit’ in public, that the FBI opened a file on her. They hounded her ever after. Always under surveillance, she was penalised as severely as possible for her drugs offences, once imprisoned for a year and a day, while other similar offenders got off with a fine or less. (My own experience of that most emotive song and Billie’s understanding of its potency are related in my memoir Better Than Working. Her response to my anguish in an all-black nightclub was a big kiss and a bottle of gin.)

Thanks initially in part to the enthusiasm of John Hammond, a wealthy amateur of jazz (Benny Goodman’s brother-in-law), and thanks later to Norman Granz of Jazz at the Philharmonic fame, Billie Holiday was usually accompanied by the very best of jazz musicians, most notably Teddy Wilson, the pianist, and Lester Young, the tenor sax man, who, for many years, complemented her singing, loved her fraternally, and bestowed upon her the title ‘Lady Day’. When she was with men like them she sang at her wonderful best, and when with her they were splendidly inspired.

In spite of all the turbulence of her career and affairs, she somehow managed to write a few songs for herself, such as ‘God Bless the Child’ and ‘Don’t Explain’, and, most memorably, the autobiographical ‘Fine and Mellow’. Some of the words reveal her ambivalent feelings: ‘My man don’t love me/ Treats me awful mean/ My man he don’t love me/ Treats me awful mean/ He’s the lowest man/ That I have ever seen/ . . . But when he starts in to love me/ He’s so fine and mellow.’

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