“Bitter Crop” (book talk on Billie Holiday)

Discover the life of jazz icon Billie Holiday with master biographer, Paul Alexander. In his latest book, Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, Alexander offers a unique perspective on Holiday’s final year, shedding light on her remarkable resilience amidst adversity. Reserve your spot now for an evening celebrating literature and jazz.

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.

“Before the Little Rock Nine entered the front doors of Central High School; before Rosa Parks was jailed in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama; before a young unknown Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott, Billy Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit.”” –Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, p. 29

“During her lifetime, especially during the 1950s, a decade defined by conservatism in the multiple forms of sexism, racism, and homophobia, Billie Holiday was devalued as a woman and minimized as a singer and musician. She was rarely honored by the music industry; her entire collection of awards was for citations for Best Leading Female Vocalist given to her between 1944 and 1947 by Esquire magazine. When the first Grammy awards were presented in 1959 for work released the year before, Lady in Satin was ignored. Moreover, for the last two decades of her life, because she represented a perceived threat to the status quo, she was methodically harassed by the government. The marginalization continued after her death. Federal and local governments refused to release documents related to how she was treated while she was alive. The City of New York, the New York Police Department, and Metropolitan Hospital never made a full disclosure concerning the events of the summer of 1959 that eventually resulted in her death. The FBI would attempt to downplay its involvement in the two-decade crusade carried out against her.

Over time, in various forms of media, Billie Holiday was portrayed as a drug-addicted victim, who happened to sing, even as her contribution to American culture was downplayed or ignored. But a more suitable assessment of her would result from viewing her as she was—an iconoclastic artist who made a timeless contribution to American art in the tradition of innovators like Walt Whitman or Georgia O’Keefe or Aaron Copeland or DW Griffith. She has earned her place as a figure afforded reverence and admiration in the continuing American story.” (Bitter Crop, pgs. 291-292)

“It is Billie Holiday … who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence, and I am proud to acknowledge it. [She] is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in someway by her genius.” -Frank Sinatra, Bitter Crop, p. 56

Billie Holiday YouTube Channel

Billie Holiday – all performances in Connecticut (1937 – 1958)