Billie and the Blessed Child

Billie Holiday recorded what was almost her last hit song, “God Bless the Child,” on this date in 1941, with the Eddie Heywood Orchestra featuring Roy Eldridge on trumpet. Shortly before this session, she had co-written this tune with Arthur Herzog, Jr., a songwriter with whom she sometimes collaborated. In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday claims that the song stemmed from an incident in her childhood when she asked for money from her mother and was refused.

Unfortunately, Holiday was not the most reliable of narrators. A different account appears in Donald Clark’s biography, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon. Herzog was trying to come up with a hit record at the time, which was during the ill-fated ASCAP strike, in which the American Society of Composers tried to boost their radio royalty rate and broadcasters balked. A rival organization was formed, called Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and their songs were the only thing on the air at the time. Herzog was not a member of ASCAP and saw an opportunity.

He approached Holiday and asked her for an “old-fashioned Southern expression” to turn into a song. Billie could come up with nothing in response to this rather odd request. Their conversation turned to Billie’s mother, who was apparently attempting to open a club of some sort at the time and was pestering her daughter for funds. In exasperation, Billie told Herzog, “God bless the child!” He asked her to explain the remark. “That’s what we used to say,” Holiday explained, “your mother’s got money, your father’s got money, your sister’s got money, your cousin’s got money, but if you haven’t got it yourself, God bless the child that’s got his own.” Herzog claimed that it took him only twenty minutes to write the song.

Billie Holiday’s version of “God Bless the Child” was honored with the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1976 - certainly an indication that all great popular songs are not necessarily about love.

Jazz Poetry - “Canary”

Canary by Rita Dove

For Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice

had as many shadows as lights,

a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,

the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,

magic spoon, magic needle.

Take all day if you have to

with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege

has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

--From Grace Notes (W.W. Norton, 1989)

Note: Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. She graduated with a B.A. degree from Miami University and received her MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1977. She has taught creative writing at Arizona State University and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1993. She has published nine books of poetry, winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Thomas and Beulah. Dove has also published a book of short stories, a novel, a collection of essays, and a play. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Jazz Poetry - "The Day Lady Died"

The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with

                                                                      her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

--From Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964)

Note: Frank O’Hara (1926 - 1966) was an American poet of the New York School, a loose collection of artists active in the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Baltimore, he studied piano before shipping off to the Pacific theater toward the end of World War Two. Back in the States, he attended Harvard, where he met fellow poet John Ashbery. O’Hara was a devotee of the visual arts and modern music, which shows in his poetry. He worked for years at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, while writing prolifically. His poetry generally incorporates experiences from his daily life in the city, which gives it a strong immediacy (as is clear from this tribute to Billie Holiday, who died on this date in 1959). As he stated, “It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail, or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial.” This same thing could be said about jazz.