Bitter Crop
The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory look at the tumultuous life of a jazz legend and American cultural icon
“A book written as only one artist could view another, with insight and sincere compassion.” —Sandra Cisneros, best-selling author of Woman Without Shame
In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.
During her lifetime and after her death, Billie Holiday was often depicted as a down-on-her-luck junkie severely lacking in self-esteem. Relying on interviews with people who knew her, and new material unearthed in private collections and institutional archives, Bitter Crop—a reference to the last two words of Strange Fruit, her moving song about lynching—limns Holiday as a powerful, ambitious woman who overcame her flaws to triumph as a vital figure of American popular music.
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Biographer Alexander (Rough Magic) traces in this stellar and sometimes-devastating account the remarkable life of a "jazz legend" whose voice "had nothing to do with reality but everything to do with the truth," as poet Owen Dodson once put it. Using as a narrative frame the artist's final year—during which she dealt with cirrhosis of the liver and professional setbacks—Alexander flashes back to defining events of Holiday's life, including engaging in prostitution as a teen, struggling with alcoholism, spending stints in prison for narcotics possession, and entering into a string of abusive marriages, the last of which—to Louis McKay—lasted in name until her 1959 death, when he inherited her assets even though she'd planned on divorcing him. Despite such challenges, Holiday—who'd changed her name from Eleanora to the more commercial-sounding "Billie" in her late teens—emerges as an artist who felt most alive while performing and conveyed in her songs the often-dark truths of her life better than any journalist could. Chronicling Holiday's career, Alexander covers in meticulous detail her early successes; collaborations and friendships (she developed an especially close relationship with saxophonist Lester Young); and the music itself, including 1958's Lady in Satin, her penultimate album and a "masterpiece of longing and sorrow" made singular by her beautifully "damaged, tortured voice." The result is an excellent biography befitting of its inimitable subject.
