With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

Book Overview

Few jazz singers have become icons like Billie Holiday. In With Billie , we hear the voices of those people who knew Billie best: piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375406107
• ISBN13: 9780375406102
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Powerful!

An amalgam of interviews of people who knew Billie Holliday, each giving his or her version of Billie's life. Not easy reading sometimes -- maybe the information in the footnotes could have been incorporated in the text more smoothly -- but the thoughts and feelings of all these people, taken together, form a portrait of Billie that is immediate and vibrant, full of joy and grief, but at the same time that keeps you aware that you can never know the source of the magic of great artistry.

A Good Book...

That deserves a good review. A couple reviews posted on here focus on Billie Holliday and her lifestyle, it puzzles me why they would even read the book, if you hated the woman so much -- nevertheless, they insisted on sharing their opinion of the person, not the book --so a lot of negative comments that aren't deserved get heaped onto the book -- First off, I don't know if you can fully appreciate this book unless you've listened to Billie Holliday extensively and have a cursory knowledge of what happened to her... Just picking up this book and plodding through it -- I think will leave you frustrated -- if you don't know which years, were her best recording years and when life started to go horribly wrong for her then you lose many details that are given away in the book -- if you haven't listened to several different recordings of the same song, you won't understand what makes this woman so talented, because by all accounts most people would find her voice unique -- but not classified under the definition of a spectacular voice -- so the fact that she never sung the same song the same way, twice and that her phrasing and timing is one of a jazz instrumentalist, not a singer... you'll end up wondering why Blackburn wasted her time on an alcoholic drug addicted and abused woman. In the end, the book will paint a faded picture of a woman -- her fears -- unrealized dreams -- and her music will fill in the rest. If you've ever listened to out takes of Holliday talking between takes -- you would suspect she was a pretty rough woman -- I found this book shed some light on her compassionate side... the fact that if you were her friend, she would give you the shirt off her back. Through interviews, layers of assurance are slowly built up -- and what is left is not a laundry list of facts -- because many of the people interviewed were old -- or junkies -- or drunks -- so sometimes things are hazy... but they still convey the spirit of the woman -- they know she was a good person, that was caught in an endless cycle of booze, drugs and abuse, she just couldn't rise above it -- I think the most fascinating thing about this book, why it ranks so highly in my opinion -- is the discovery that this giant of her industry feared the same thing that the people that live in everyday America do -- and her desires and dreams were not far from the person that goes to a cubicle everyday --in the end, and what makes her life seem somewhat tragic -- she realized too late that all that matters are the people we love and those that love us back.

AN ADDICTIVE READ

Julia Blackburn's biographical WITH BILLIE is a fascinating slant on the legendary singer. The author did a brilliant job editing the original interviews conducted by Linda Kuehl, leaving this work vibrant with the voices of Lady Day's contemporaries. It is more oral history than biography, and the author never imposes her own voice unnecessarily. I was literally sad when I completed reading the book,the ultimate litmus test of a work's enjoyability. Blackburn shows Holiday vividly, her genius, her deep flaws, her humanity. This book is a must-read for fans of Lady Day, jazz, or female singers everywhere.

Insightful look...

This book offers a new and insightful look into the tangled, intriguing life of Lady Day. However, it only has ONE photo of the legend in the entire book. I would like to have seen more photos, copies of documents mentioned, and other visual aids included. That's about the only negative thing about this book. A must have for the Billie collector.