Billie Holiday Was a Songwriter, Too - WSJ

Holiday’s unusually high success rate as a songwriter “reveals a lot about the immensity of her talent,” says Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Lorraine Feather, whose father, Leonard, was Holiday’s friend. “No one sounded like her, and her songs were unique too. All that she went through in life”—a dysfunctional childhood, substance abuse, run-ins with authorities—“was transformed into great art.”

Holiday required assistance when she wrote a song because she could neither read nor write music. She wrote her first songs under her sole byline between 1936 and 1939, when she was regularly in a studio recording singles and had plenty of musicians to help her. “Fine and Mellow” became a hit in part because it was the B side to “Strange Fruit,” released in 1939 by Milt Gabler’s Commodore Records.

“The night before the recording session,” Gabler wrote, “I went down to Café Society…I told [Billie] I wanted a blues, so we sat down at a little ‘deuce’ table outside of her dressing room door and we started to write down blues verses…Billie had written and collected various blues lines, which she already had on paper. We didn’t need a tune,” Gabler recalled, because the musicians scheduled for the session “all knew the blues.” Gabler later claimed he wrote one verse himself, but when he filed the copyright for “Fine and Mellow” he listed only Holiday as the songwriter. The song “is a mastery of storytelling and composition,” says jazz artist Madeleine Peyroux. “The melody is postmodern. The lyric is a tour de force—intimate, vulnerable, universal, and strange.”

In time, as Holiday recorded less frequently, she turned to co-authors to help her with her songs. Her standard method was to have an idea for a song and then, after contemplating it for days or even weeks, seek out a composer to collaborate with. Between 1939 and 1941, the composer to whom she turned most often was Arthur Herzog, Jr., whom she worked with on “Don’t Explain,” one of her more personal compositions. On multiple occasions, Holiday discussed how she wrote the song’s lyrics after catching her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, cheating. He came home one night with lipstick on his collar; as he fumbled for an explanation, she cut him off, saying, “Take a bath, man. Don’t explain.”

Holiday also collaborated with Herzog on “God Bless the Child.” She later recalled that she got the idea for her most famous song after her mother refused to lend her money, prompting Holiday to quip, “God bless the child that’s got his own.” Holiday wrote: “I thought about [the line] and thought about it. One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head. Then I rushed down to [Greenwich] Village that night and met with Arthur Herzog. He sat down at a piano and picked it out, phrase by phrase, as I sang to him.” The song includes the lines “Mama may have, Papa may have/But God bless the child that’s got his own,” a reference to Holiday’s struggles with her mother, who was often flighty and childlike. “I think Billie was being sarcastic,” Lorraine Feather says, “but there is a tender, loving vibe to the title. The lyrics are genius. Once you hear ‘God Bless the Child,’ you never forget it.”

Following a fallow period in the mid-1940s, when she struggled with drug addiction, from 1949 to 1958 Holiday wrote one song on her own, “Stormy Blues,” and several others with collaborators—“Now and Never” with Curtis R. Lewis, “Preacher Boy” with Jeanne Burns, and “Lady Sings the Blues” with Herbie Nichols. (Holiday added lyrics to an existing Nichols instrumental composition called “Serenade” and renamed it.) But there is no better example of her writing process than her final song, “Left Alone,” which she wrote with Mal Waldron, the accomplished composer (“Soul Eyes”) and musician who was her piano accompanist for the last two years of her life.

In September 1958, the two of them were on a flight from New York to San Francisco, where Holiday was scheduled to perform. “We had seven hours to kill,” Waldron recalled. “So [Billie] decided she wanted to do a tune…. She felt she wanted it to be the story of her life.” Holiday wrote the lyrics on a piece of paper, likely with suggestions from Waldron. The title, “Left Alone,” reflected the perennial sadness of her life—the fact that almost all her romantic involvements ended with her being abandoned.

“Then,” says Waldron’s daughter, Mala, herself a singer-songwriter, “as Billie sang the melody my father wrote the music. He always carried manuscript paper in his briefcase. He often wrote songs and arrangements on the train. By the end of the flight, they had a song. Theirs was a true collaboration.” As for Holiday as a songwriter, Mala Waldron believes “she had a natural understanding of structure, and she was a great lyricist. That one-third of her songs are classics is amazing.”

“These compositions succeed in all the criteria of great American art,” Peyroux says, “while never using a masculine voice, perspective, or tone. For a singer to write a song is to step outside one’s body, turn around and look back at oneself, then stay there as long as it takes to perfect the story. And there’s no room for privacy, shame, or ambivalence. ‘Lady Sings the Blues,’ ‘God Bless the Child,’ ‘Don’t Explain’—I believe Billie Holiday must have known how important these iconic works would be to feminism and to America. And I believe she was right.”

Paul Alexander is the author of “Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year,” which will be published on Feb. 13 by Alfred A. Knopf.