Download Billie Holiday: Wishing On The Moon by Donald Clarke PDF

By Donald Clarke

Certainly no singer has been extra mythologized and extra misunderstood than Billie vacation, who helped to create a lot of the mystique herself together with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. "Now, eventually, now we have a definitive biography," acknowledged Booklist of Donald Clarke's Billie Holiday, "by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces each side of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate splendor and remarkable strength." Clarke was once given unequalled entry to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s—interviews with those that knew woman Day from her formative years within the streets and good-time homes of Baltimore in the course of the early days of luck in manhattan and into the years of status, correct as much as her tragic decline and loss of life on the age of forty-four. Clarke makes use of those interviews to split truth from fiction and, within the phrases of the Seattle Times, "finally units us directly. . .evoking her global in all its discomfort, triumph, strength and irony." Newsday known as this "a completely riveting account of vacation and her milieu." The New York Times raved that it "may be the main completely useful of the numerous books on Holiday," and Helen Oakley Dance in JazzTimes stated, "We should still most likely need to wait many years for an additional lifetime of Billie vacation to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement."

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Extra resources for Billie Holiday: Wishing On The Moon

Sample text

Pop was nothing but a porter all his life, but he fed us and put us through junior high school. ' After Eleanora became famous as Billie Holiday, on one of her visits to the Point, Johnny saw her in a bar on Pratt and Bethel. I buy her a drink. She asks me how's the family, and I go my way and she go hers. ' But Pops won't come. 30 in the morning when she gets off work. Anyways, he expects her to come and see him in his house. I t was her duty to visit him. ' Billie did not put on airs when she visited Baltimore, but she resented the family's rejection of her and her mother, and the breach was not to be healed.

I n 1971 Skinny was a school janitor, 'a toothless, caved-in, stringbean of a man', according to Linda Kuehl: His voice is mellow as vintage brandy and his line of jive as smooth as the blackberry wine he sipped with Billie at Ethel Moore's. He was one of Billie's earliest patrons - the pimp as patron of her art. That art gave her leverage and equality, for Skinny gave her money rather than the other way around. I know he spared Billie obligatory moralizing because retrospectively he happily spared me.

Takes me a whole day to scrub outside one room so's I can peeps in to see how it goes. They don't have too much oil cloth then, so I scrub the floor until it be yella. You can eat off the floor. I used to starch and iron them drapes. Alice have white drapes in one bedroom, everything was white, the furniture, everything. The other was all blue. Alice Dean have beautiful clothes in the closets. Fur coats, Chinese furs, Hudson seals . There wasn't no minks then, honey. She used to wear house dresses.

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