Billie

Besides this doc I also just watched the newly released DVD "Sid & Judy" (Garland) both foretelling the enormous pressures of achievement. Money & drugs/alcohol, as usual, play a part. This doc compiles the many years of research from the intelligent, yet sensitive, 125 audio taped interviews of Linda Lipnack Kuehl along with her research into the paper trail documentation of Billie's life. Unfortunately Linda died before she could edit it all into a source story (although many other's have utilized her research) on Billie's life. The saddest part is two years before Billie died (1959 with just $750) she married McKay, and even though she intended to divorce & create a will, it was never completed & her estate went to him & his family.

Note: 1937, Count Basie introduces Billie (age 22) into the band and to the audience with perhaps the first recorded singing rhyming rap lyric. Amazing to hear how current it sounded.

I really enjoyed this film - lots of clips of Billie singing that I'd not seen before and many sympathetic interviews with other great musicians. Well worth watching whether you're a fan or new to the music of the woman who pretty much defined popular singing.

It's a documentary on the singer Billie Holiday based on research and oral interviews by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who died in 1978 under mysterious circumstances, which meant she could not finish the book she was writing about Holiday.

I watched this movie because I was very disappointed when I watched "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972) starring Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday. The story told in that movie seemed to have a passing connection to reality, and much of it was pretty bad despite the praise Ross received for playing the role. Ross did not have the depth to play such a complex person.

This 90-minute documentary makes excellent use of Kuehl's audio interviews of musicians that worked with Holiday, friends from her early life, and people like one of the pimps from her early life as a prostitute. It was chilling to hear him laugh about prostitutes liking to be beaten up. Accompanying the interviews is a lot of Holiday music and film footage that matches well the interviews. The most striking musical piece for me was "Strange Fruit," which explicitly references victims of lynching as the "strange fruit."

In my mind, if you want to learn about the real Billie Holiday, this is the film to see.

Billie Holiday was supremely talented, lived a hard life, and had an unstable personality. She died from abuse of drink and drugs, aged just 44. This documentary is interesting as it contains candid interviews from those who knew her, conducted by a female journalist who was researching her life in the 1970s; her work never reached fruition as she died young herself, in what some of those close to her believe to have been suspicious circumstances. We don't really get any insight into the latter death; we do get a more interesting (though unpolished) insight into the singer's life, unfiltered by the hagiography that can spoil some films made too many years after the fact. The speed of Holiday's decline is tragic; it's clear she had problems of her own, but also that those around her (and the racist world she lived in) certainly made them worse. But the film does do justice to her brilliance; to this day, she pretty much defines what a jazz singer is, and she dared to call out racism too. It's definitely worth watching, even if jazz isn't your usual beat.

Before seeing this documentary I knew little about Billie Holiday. She had a rough start in Philadelphia and Baltimore, including being sex trafficked by her prostitute mother. But she had a mesmerizing voice, while she could probably sing anything well she preformed more as a vocal stylist. And many of her songs were reflections of herself and her life. The documentary contains many vocal excerpts from interviews, including some by Holiday herself.

In many respects her life was mostly a tragedy, heavy into sex, drugs, and alcohol into her adulthood which ended when she was only 44. But she did have an indelible influence on her type of music.

On DVD from my public library, I watched it at home, my wife skipped.