Can the problems which plagued Billie Holiday's life be explained away simply as those of an ordinary woman beset by tribulations? Stuart Nicholson, the singer's biographer, examines the tensions that are so closely linked to her genius
It comes as a shock to open the new, attractively packaged six-CD set, Billie Holiday: The Complete Verve Studio Master Takes, and be confronted with an image of Holiday's face that simulates religious iconography of the 15th and 16th centuries, beatifying the head of Christ. Perhaps it's inevitable that the mythic Holiday, whose sainted, metaphorical afterlife has continued to grow since her death in 1959, would eventually become jazz and pop's all-purpose romantic martyr.
It all seems a far cry from 1950 when her career was going nowhere after she had been unceremoniously dropped by recording giant Decca. Back then, her hedonistic and much-publicised lifestyle stood in the way of a contract with another major label and only the tiny independent, Aladdin Records, was willing to take a chance on her, recording just four mediocre sides in 1951.
When she relocated to the west coast in 1952, impresario and record producer Norman Granz signed her to his own independent label. From the very first track of The Complete Verve Studio Master Takes it's apparent that Holiday's accumulated life experiences have given her a different perspective from the reckless vitality of youth displayed on her celebrated earlier work between 1933 and 1946.
In 1992 Granz told me he felt he had to take her beyond her nightclub song-list, which had hardly changed in years, and get her to sing more demanding material. This he did against her strong protestations about the "hassle" of learning new material. Thus, this set contains such gems as You Go to My Head and Autumn in New York alongside nightclub staples such as Yesterdays and I Cried For You. When Granz finished recording her, it was, he said, because he felt he had done all he could with her and she was getting difficult to work with - indeed, he once had to wind up a recording session because she was too drunk to continue
Yet although a sense of sadness and waste provided the backdrop for her troubled, colourful life, that life is ultimately redeemed by the joy, the passion and, in her final years, the pathos of her music. On the final 1959 session (not produced by Granz but by Ray Ellis) her voice was shot and the end was just four months away, prompting some fans to claim they can hear her dying on these moving sides. For many, the totality of these recordings reflect a maturity of interpretation beyond anything the young Holiday was able to achieve. Despite the flaws and tics in her voice, she created a series of classics that, from whatever perspective you view them, number among the finest recordings not just in jazz but in 20th-century popular music.
Yet few listeners notice how Billie Holiday took the tradition of the previous generation of female blues singers and applied it to the American popular song. By careful selection of material, she sung these songs in a way that invoked a blues mood on non-blues material. The blues singer, Bessie Smith, a special childhood favourite, sang the blues in the first person about sex, infidelity and broken relationships. Billie chose the popular song form with similar lyric content, about a woman unlucky in love whose experiences appeared to mirror those of the singer. In effect, she created a character part for herself that evolved directly out of the blues tradition, without becoming a blues singer herself .
OVER THE YEARS the autobiographical subtext of her songs has helped give momentum to the Billie Holiday legend. Yet the image of Billie Holiday as all-purpose victim - part romantic martyr, part heroine of excess - tends to overwhelm appreciation of her artistry. The great paradox was that the very singer who could freeze an audience into their seats with the emotional power of her voice struggled with deep emotional problems of her own that she could not begin to understand.
Today, looking back on a life with so many wrong turnings, so many wrong associations, seemingly inexplicable behaviour and a failure to take responsibility for a career that showed such great promise, a pattern emerges that probably had its roots in the singer's traumatic childhood. A feeling of abandonment at constantly being farmed out to friends and relatives, added to the emotional havoc caused by her rape as an 11-year-old, could well have contributed to the diminished sense of self spoken of by those close to her. Feelings of rejection would also go some way to explaining her abnormally dependent personality, her desire to attach herself to anyone who would love and care for her, and then, once in a relationship, do anything and accept anything to maintain it.
Equally, the absence of parental supervision in her formative years might have had a bearing on her lack of discipline, expressed at an early age through truancy and indifference to academic activities. Frequently, she acted the way she did as the result of some whim. Her outward appearance of loyalty, pride and sincerity seems to have concealed a deficiency that made her incapable of remorse or of the avoidance of destructive behaviour. Yet such calm, after-the-fact rationalisations can never fully explain the dark and destructive forces that are part of human nature.
Dr Geoffrey Wills, a clinical psychologist with a special interest in personality disorders, whose work includes a paper on the link between psychopathology and artistic creativity, claims that, looking at Holiday's life in the round, her personality traits are consistent with someone who may have suffered from a psychopathic personality disorder.
"If it had been possible to assess her using Hare's Psychopathy Checklist - the most widely used tool in the assessment of psychopathy - she would undoubtedly have received a high score," he says. Many of the characteristics of such a disorder are present: irresponsibility when important issues are at stake; absence of remorse or shame; and an inability to learn from experience or to follow any consistent plan.
THIS DISORDER, WHAT psychiatrist Robert Lindner has called the "most destructive of all forms of aberrant behaviour", was only beginning to be understood in the late 1940s and was barely recognised during Billie's lifetime. Therein may lie possibly the greatest tragedy of the singer, that she may have been struggling with a destructive mental disorder that neither she nor anyone around her could comprehend.
Perhaps the extreme contradictions to be found in her character created the tensions that gave rise to her genius. That she was able to achieve so much with the burdens she had to carry must surely be her ultimate triumph.
Billie Holiday, by Stuart Nicholson, is published by Orion/Indigo
Billie Holiday: The Complete Verve Studio Master Takes is released later this month by Universal