black-and-white shots are stunningly lit, with black-on-black backgrounds and shimmering whites. Miliâs photos of Holiday caught in performance are among the best. An earlier session was devoted to one of the â
Life
Goes to a Partyâ features that the magazine sponsored from time to time, this one including some of Duke Ellingtonâs and Eddie Condonâs musicians, and Holiday as the only singer. If Americans did not yet know who she was, this striking photo of her singing among the musicians instead of in front of them would have made her a memorablefigure.
The Musician
CHAPTER FOUR
The Prehistory of a Singer
W hen Billie and her mother moved from Baltimore to New York City in 1929, Wall Street was crashing, Prohibition was radically changing the entertainment business, and the glories of the Harlem Renaissance were fading. As Langston Hughes would write, âWe were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward.â But Hughes was only partly correct. Harlemâs writers, painters, and playwrights may have lost their uptown allure, and its elaborate revues may have been shrinking or moving to midtown theaters, but its music, which had never been the strongest element in the Renaissanceâs ideology, was finding new homes in small cabarets and cellars in Harlem, where the ban on alcohol was not consistently enforced. An alternate jazz age to that of the whites downtown was taking shape there, and suddenly it seemed that a great variety of women singers was everywhere. Some were established artists, like the blues singers, coon shouters, and red-hot mamas, all of whom owed much to African American musical traditions. Newer styles were appearing as well, such as the flappers and torch singers, and they, too, had roots in the black community.
The concept of a jazz vocalist did not exist when Billie stumbled her way into a career as a singer. A singerâs having a career of her or his ownâindependent of a band, a musical theater, or a vaudeville companyâwas only just beginning to be possible. Still, there was then no clear idea of what a jazz singer might be. The women artists that most can now agreeon as the leading figures in jazz singingâBessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carterâwere all quite different stylistically from one another, and all created such individual approaches that they were not easily adapted by other singers without making them seem unimaginative imitators. And yet there was a set of common resources from the past from which all these women drew to craft their own approaches.
 â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â
By the mid-nineteenth century the full impact of black singing on America was yet to be felt. For most white Americans outside of the American South, the only black vocalizing they might have heard was from a distant church service. Yet the few individuals who did witness more of this music believed they were hearing the future: the dominant feature of a distinctive American singing style that was yet to take shape. As early as 1845 a journalist named J. K. Kinnard declared that the world had not yet heard the best of Americaâs poets, the Negro poets and songsters, nor had they been properly acknowledged even at home. Abolitionists thought the spirituals were the most distinctive and powerful music they had ever heard.In the 1850s Walt Whitman singled out the language of Negroes as having âhints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes . . .â
After railroads and the radio connected most of the country and recorded music came into existence, only the most isolated person would not have known that
Life
Goes to a Partyâ features that the magazine sponsored from time to time, this one including some of Duke Ellingtonâs and Eddie Condonâs musicians, and Holiday as the only singer. If Americans did not yet know who she was, this striking photo of her singing among the musicians instead of in front of them would have made her a memorablefigure.
The Musician
CHAPTER FOUR
The Prehistory of a Singer
W hen Billie and her mother moved from Baltimore to New York City in 1929, Wall Street was crashing, Prohibition was radically changing the entertainment business, and the glories of the Harlem Renaissance were fading. As Langston Hughes would write, âWe were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward.â But Hughes was only partly correct. Harlemâs writers, painters, and playwrights may have lost their uptown allure, and its elaborate revues may have been shrinking or moving to midtown theaters, but its music, which had never been the strongest element in the Renaissanceâs ideology, was finding new homes in small cabarets and cellars in Harlem, where the ban on alcohol was not consistently enforced. An alternate jazz age to that of the whites downtown was taking shape there, and suddenly it seemed that a great variety of women singers was everywhere. Some were established artists, like the blues singers, coon shouters, and red-hot mamas, all of whom owed much to African American musical traditions. Newer styles were appearing as well, such as the flappers and torch singers, and they, too, had roots in the black community.
The concept of a jazz vocalist did not exist when Billie stumbled her way into a career as a singer. A singerâs having a career of her or his ownâindependent of a band, a musical theater, or a vaudeville companyâwas only just beginning to be possible. Still, there was then no clear idea of what a jazz singer might be. The women artists that most can now agreeon as the leading figures in jazz singingâBessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carterâwere all quite different stylistically from one another, and all created such individual approaches that they were not easily adapted by other singers without making them seem unimaginative imitators. And yet there was a set of common resources from the past from which all these women drew to craft their own approaches.
 â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â
By the mid-nineteenth century the full impact of black singing on America was yet to be felt. For most white Americans outside of the American South, the only black vocalizing they might have heard was from a distant church service. Yet the few individuals who did witness more of this music believed they were hearing the future: the dominant feature of a distinctive American singing style that was yet to take shape. As early as 1845 a journalist named J. K. Kinnard declared that the world had not yet heard the best of Americaâs poets, the Negro poets and songsters, nor had they been properly acknowledged even at home. Abolitionists thought the spirituals were the most distinctive and powerful music they had ever heard.In the 1850s Walt Whitman singled out the language of Negroes as having âhints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes . . .â
After railroads and the radio connected most of the country and recorded music came into existence, only the most isolated person would not have known that
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