"If It Ain't Got That Swing..." -- A "Theme Thursday" Post

I'm posting this one a day early, since my schedule's pretty tight, and I wanted to see how it looked!

Today's Theme Thursday post -- "Swing" -- finds the ol' Silver Fox a bit burnt out from things going on in the real world, so I'm going to write about someone who burned out in her own way... The incomparably talented "Lady Day," Billie Holiday. I should add that the following is not intended to be any kind of a biography. Merely some vignettes from her all-too-brief life.

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) had a life filled with one indignity after another. She was raped at least twice -- the first time when she was only ten -- and became a prostitute by age fifteen. She struggled for years with heroin addiction. And she was an African-American -- in her time, she would have been called either "Negro" or "colored" by those inclined to be polite -- during a period when the injustices of racism were only beginning to be questioned.

In keeping with today's theme, I'm tying Lady Day's life to "swing" in not one, but three ways. The first one's pretty obvious, the second one's rather morbid, and the third is a connection which will hopefully come out of left field.

1. Depending on whose article you read and, I suppose, the songs mentioned, Billie Holiday is described as a blues singer, a jazz singer, and/or a singer in swing bands. She performed with such notables as Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw, to name a few.

2. "Strange Fruit" was a song which Billie Holiday introduced, It was a scathing, mournful tune about the lynchings of Negroes in the American South. The "strange fruit" hanging from the trees were the hanged Negroes themselves. The song was a staple of hers for twenty years. However, in a 1958 interview, Ms. Holiday complained that many people missed the song's message entirely: "They'll ask me to 'sing that sexy song about the people swinging.' "

3. According to Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday's autiobiograhy (co-written with William Dufty), the third example of "swinging" occurred during a time when Billie Holiday was sentenced to a "Catholic institiution."

(I say "according to," since Lady Sings the Blues contains several inaccuracies. When someone pointed some of them out to Billie, she replied "I ain't never read that book.")

Billie was sent to an institution after having been raped at age ten -- yes, that was her "crime" -- and the designated "bad girl" at any given moment there was made to wear a red dress. The other girls were ordered not to look at or speak to the wearer of that dress. One such girl was literally screaming for attention, by standing on the playground swing and swinging higher and higher. A nun predicted that God would punish her, right before the swing broke, sending the poor girl flying through the air. She broke her neck upon landing.

They had great forms of punishment there, according to the book. Shortly thereafter, Billie herself was punished for some offense by being locked overnight in the room where the dead girl's body rested, before the day of her funeral.

* * * * *

Jack Kerouac mentioned Billie Holiday's "Lover Man" in On the Road, which set me in search of the song... and began my love affair with Lady Day.



And now for something a bit more cheerful! A brief rendition of the swing tune, "Sing, Sing, Sing!" The song features Gene Krupa on drums, Benny Goodman on clarinet, and Harry James on trumpet. That's an awful lot of talent for only two minutes!



And, in that vein, a "duel" between Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich! (Notice the strains of "Sing, Sing, Sing" at the clip's beginning.)



Thanks for your time... swingers! (And I'll be visiting other TT posters as my busy Thursday schedule permits!)