As you can see, the voice does not stand out more than any of the other instruments. Holiday can’t even really be described as a band vocalist here—when Helen Forrest sang with Benny Goodman or Harry James, she certainly received more of a spotlight. The best word to describe Holiday’s role on the 1933–38 recordings is “sideman”: Even though her instrument is her own voice, this doesn’t bring her any special treatment or afford her any more or less attention than is received by the other musicians present. Beginning around the end of 1938, the freewheeling jam session feeling of the earlier work is increasingly embellished with what sounds like prewritten arrangements. There are still generous solos from all the instrumentalists—not only Lester Young, but also Harry James and Benny Carter, who are all over the late 1938 sessions.

Not that there was any shame in being a sideman. That first date, as mentioned, had Benny Goodman returning the favor to Holiday and guest-starring on one of her sessions—and not for the last time, either. The idea that the King of Swing should defer to one of his own men and happily serve as a mere bandsman illustrates the democracy of the classic thirties Holiday sessions: the most sublimely musical of singers working with the other leading improvisers of her day in a state of pure equality.

Famously, the musician with whom she made the most beautiful music was the brilliant saxophonist Lester Young. Holiday was a greater musician with her voice than most musicians were with their instruments; Young was a far better singer with his horn than nearly every singer out there. A year after the release of the big ten-CD box, Sony came out with a sixteen-track collection featuring Holiday and Young. The idea for the compilation was to be applauded. Unfortunately, Sony titled this set A Musical Romance, then used “The Man I Love” as the first song, and in the promo copy on the back of the package they compared Holiday and Young to “Romeo and Juliet… Eloise and Abelard … Tracy and Hepburn.”

The singer and the saxist were, in fact, very close personally; when the Basie band arrived in New York, Lester moved in with Billie and her mom before he found a place of his own. Famously, they gave each other the nicknames that are still associated with them: “Lady Day” and “Pres.” (Though, of course, if he was “the Pres,” he should have been married to Ella Fitzgerald, who was billed as “the First Lady” very early on.) But no, Lester Young was not the man that Holiday loved. (She made little secret of how she had little use for nice guys.) Packaging their professional partnership as a musical romance is deliberately misleading. Everyone who knew them, including John Hammond and Buck Clayton, states plainly that the singer and the saxophonist were never erotically involved. Not that I’m the most politically sensitive soul around, but it seems to me patently sexist to package their music this way, simply because she happened to be a she.

When Holiday sang about her relationships—which she did with an openness that seems astonishingly candid, even in our tell-all era—she wants us to know that she was perennially subservient to “her man.” In her music it’s just the opposite—what made the partnership with Young work so beautifully is that the two are equals on every level; if anything, she’s the more dominant partner, since Young, in addition to being featured on his own solos, often plays behind her vocals in a supporting role. Young may have, in fact, been the one man in her life who didn’t boss her around.

Their premier session together (January 1937) starts with two first-rate Irving Berlin songs (from the contemporaneous On the Avenue), “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” and “This Year’s Kisses.” The first (which is not, alas, on the Musical Romance CD) begins once again with Benny Goodman—it was as if Benny knew that the first meeting of Lady Day and Pres was going to be a historic event and he wanted to tell his grandchildren that he was there. “Kisses” gets under way with a gorgeous, laconic melody solo from Young. He seems to inspire Holiday, in her vocal chorus that follows, to sound more laid back and mellow than she usually does in this period. By contrast, on “The Man I Love,” Young’s tenor sound is darker and more full-bodied, more conventionally “masculine,” but the arrangement on the whole is somewhat more formal and concertlike. “Me, Myself and I” opens with Young playing a brief intro before Holiday’s entrance, but the real charm is Holiday’s second vocal chorus, in which the two are on together—it’s more than an obbligato, it’s practically a duet; here they’re like a considerably hipper Nelson and Jeanette or Fred and Ginger, singing and/or dancing around each other. It’s not just that he’s filling in behind her; she’s also responding to what he’s playing.

One happy consequence of the “Holiday” series, as opposed to the “Wilson” series, is that the singer was increasingly allowed to do two vocal choruses, and, as on “Me, Myself and I,” these second choruses were where the hot obbligato activity was—on “Who Wants Love” and others. In the Roosevelt era, Holiday was queen of the jukeboxes; when the jukes and the roadhouse joints that sheltered them began to proliferate in the mid-thirties, the record industry responded with stacks of discs of mostly contemporary songs played by small bands for dancing, with both hot solos and vocals. Fats Waller’s stardom in this period was based equally on his juke activity and his radio appearances. ARC survived largely by selling Holiday and others to the juke joints for thirty-five cents a pop; for a nickel, customers got a three-minute dance. You and your date could have a swell evening out for a couple of bucks, tops.

But Holiday was too special to stay in any one place. By the end of the decade, as she grew increasingly popular as a vocalist, her records came more and more into line with those of other singers, with more formal arrangements like those of Bing Crosby. (Even so, there’s a considerable amount of give and take on the 1940–44 dates.) The main event that kicked her up the stairs, from being just another guy in the band to a Ladylike diva, was her relationship with Barney Josephson and the release of Commodore C-526.

Where Hammond was a WASP record producer, Josephson was a Jewish nightclub impresario, and they both were equally committed both to African American music and the cause of integration (well before it was called that). Holiday had previously sung successfully on Fifty-second Street (at Kelly’s Stables and elsewhere), but Josephson, who opened Cafe Society in 1938, was the first talent presenter to take a long-term interest in her career, and her sustained appearances at Cafe Society did as much as anything to make her a star.

It was there that Holiday began singing “Strange Fruit,” with words and music by Lewis Allen, a poet and schoolteacher who was so far to the left that he made Hammond and Josephson look like Fox News pundits. (Yet even he hesitated to put his real name, Abel Meeropol, on the song.) There had been other so-called protest songs (to use a later terminology) with regards to the so-called race issue in the mainstream before, some of them ambiguous. With “Strange Fruit,” though, the meaning was explicit, and there were no other options or interpretations—there was only one way to sing it and only one way to listen to it. This was a lament about a lynching; there was no way it could possibly be construed as being about anything else. Holiday was hardly the type to confront controversy—no Nina Simone, she. She sang “Strange Fruit” only reluctantly but became committed to it when she witnessed the amazing effect it had on Cafe Society audiences. It was only natural that the song had to be recorded, but the American Recording Corp., which by now had morphed into Columbia Records, said thanks but no thanks.

Thus Hammond arranged for Holiday to do a session in April 1939 for Milt Gabler, who ran America’s first independent jazz label, Commodore Records. “Strange Fruit” took Holiday out of the juke joints—there was no way you could dance to it, unless you happened to be Martha Graham. But the flip side of Commodore C-526 brought her back, at least temporarily. This was “Fine and Mellow,” and it was more typical Holiday fare, a sexy blues credited to the singer herself.

At the time, as Gabler told me (and other interviewers), “Fine and Mellow” was the big hit, mainly since he was able to get it onto jukeboxes and tap into the burgeoning market for the blues. In later generations, “Strange Fruit” achieved a significance it didn’t have or couldn’t have had in its day. Apart from Holiday, virtually no one else sang it for at least a decade. “Love for Sale,” “Body and Soul,” and “Gloomy Sunday” all caused scandals in the 1930s for their allusions, respectively, to prostitution, physical love, and suicide, but “Strange Fruit” didn’t even get far enough out of the gate to be banned in Boston, not to mention Birmingham. (Call it a coincidence, but Holiday is the only artist I can think of who recorded all four songs.)

Holiday’s final sessions for Columbia are so amazingly good that when the Danish label Jazz Unlimited put out two whole volumes of alternate takes, you actually want to listen to them all the way through, even when sometimes hearing as many as three or four takes of the same song. The bulk of the 1940–42 dates feature her with bands directed by composer-arrangers Benny Carter and Eddie Heywood, who both struck an agreeable balance between Holiday and the band. There is still no shortage of terrific solos, but now it does seem more as if everything else is secondary to her. Though these sides are less democratic, they’re no less delightful.

As Holiday ascended the ladder, and was given the star treatment more and more, something was gained as well as lost. If the 1940–42 sessions don’t have the loose spontaneity of the earlier music, the compensating factor is that Holiday is given a better class of song. In this period, standards tested by time (even by then) are the rule and ephemeral new tunes are the exception. The songs she does here are almost all classics: “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Love Me or Leave Me” (both with the verses), and even “Gloomy Sunday,” the aforementioned Hungarian suicide song that had infiltrated the English-speaking world (via Paul Robeson and Hal Kemp) five years earlier. The 1936 “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” is an unexpected choice; it’s a rather old-fashioned song that sounds more like 1916. Fats Waller made a terrific record of it swinging and gagging it up (exactly what the song needed), while Ruth Etting did a lovely version that’s completely straight. Sung in medium dance time, Holiday’s treatment is somewhere in between; she doesn’t jazz it just for the sake of it, but she isn’t afraid to interpret the song and personalize it either.

She’s especially winning on two old-timers by W. C. Handy (supposedly the start of an aborted album of Handy à la Holiday), “St. Louis Blues” and “Loveless Love.” The latter is no less a traditional blues than the one named after St. Louis. The 1941 “Solitude” marks the first Ellington song she’d sung since “Saddest Tale” seven years earlier, and she renders it as much like a prayer as a torch song; Eddie Heywood backs her here with a sonorous “choir” of three saxes and a trumpet. She sings the phrase “mem-or-ies that never die,” slowly, stretching out each syllable, as if she were truly savoring a memory. Heywood tinkles on the piano to make it sound like a celesta, giving it a more spiritual quality, and when she leaves the bridge and reaches the line “In my solitude I’m praying,” it’s hard to resist the compulsion to fall down on your knees.

Furthermore, the new songs that she did introduce in the immediate prewar period have an amazingly high batting average. “I Hear Music” is bright and upbeat, almost more of an Ella Fitzgerald number. It’s hardly the fastest thing that Holiday ever sang, but she really swings. “Mandy Is Two” represents a case of literal reporting for lyricist Johnny Mercer, since his adopted daughter Amanda had just reached that age. The song represents the major expression of parental devotion for both Mercer and Holiday; she invests it with a kind of affectionate,cheeky impudence that, to me, portrays childhood much more endearingly than a pile of sappy sentiment.

Clearly, when Holiday wasn’t singing classics in this period, she was making them: The “Solitude” date also includes one of her most identifiable numbers, “God Bless the Child,” which uses the horns-as-choir sound to great effect. Both words and music, as Donald Clarke’s Wishing on the Moon (the second of three recommended full-length biographies of Holiday) reveals, were written by Arthur Herzog based on a title and an idea from Holiday, who received half the credit and royalties. Holiday gifted Herzog with an old southern expression, the original meaning of which has long been eclipsed by the popularity of the song, but essentially describes self-sufficient offspring who are innocent of the sins of the father. At one point in Lady Sings the Blues, Billie has an argument with her mother and snaps back at her, “God bless the child that’s got his own!”

As material specifically written for Holiday, it’s a marvelous piece of performance art. Like “Mandy Is Two,” it’s about childhood; like “Solitude,” it has a religious aspect. The song is written in a combination of biblical phrases and Southern slang: the opening line, “Them that’s got shall get,” is apparently what Herzog imagined people spoke like in a black church. Ray Charles, who knew a thing or two about the subject, later spun that line into a whole song by itself called “Them That Got.” It seems at once reverent and sacrilegious—you’re not quite sure what’s going on. I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it exerted an influence on the young Bob Dylan, whose songs have a similarly mysterious quality.

After Holiday’s first chorus, Roy Eldridge plays what is, for him, a very brief and subdued muted passage. Holiday then wraps it up with a beautiful and carefully considered coda: Instead of doing an out chorus (everything from the bridge on), she sings just the key lines again, “Mama may have, Papa may have/But God bless the child that’s got his own.” She finally finishes with a tag that may have been written by Herzog: “He just don’t worry ’bout nothin’, ’cause he’s got his own.” Holiday didn’t always use this line when she sang the song again (you can hear her rehearsing it a few dozen times on a 1956 private tape), but it actually anticipates the signature tags of Billy Eckstine. More than almost anything else from the 1933–44 period—even “Strange Fruit”—“God Bless the Child” became an all-time Holiday classic, one that she sang at nearly every concert and rerecorded for both Decca and Verve. There’s also a wonderful film of her singing it, accompanied by a Basie small band in 1950, around the same time that she rerecorded it for Decca.

In 1942, she made the first recording of another song by a sagacious lyricist who completely captured her essence, “Trav’lin’ Light.” Johnny Mercer not only wrote the text, he produced the session for his newly incorporated Capitol Records. “Trav’lin’ Light” does a brilliant job of depicting someone trying to put a brave face on a breakup, a façade that you’re supposed to be instantly able to see through—what Hammerstein would call “an air of resignation.”

Holiday recorded “Trav’lin’ ” with old-timer Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra on a sojourn to the West Coast. Although this transpired a few months after her final session for Columbia, she was apparently still under contract to CBS, as Capitol was obliged to credit her under the alias of “Lady Day.” Earlier, Mercer had sung with Holiday (sort of) on a Benny Goodman program; later, he would introduce her at the Newport Jazz Festival. One wonders if it ever occurred to him to sign her to Capitol, seeing as she was about to be at liberty. Since the AFM ban was about to start in July 1942 and continue for two years, it was a moot point. In 1944, Holiday would begin a seven-year relationship with producer Milt Gabler, first at Commodore Records, then at Decca.

From a distance, it looks as if Gabler was planning a specific album of Billie Holiday on Commodore. She did three dates in a relatively short time span (two weeks) that produced twelve tracks, all of which are roughly uniform in the same tempos (only a few, like “I’ll Get By,” are slightly faster) and all are vintage standards (like “Lover Come Back to Me” and “He’s Funny That Way”). On the whole, Holiday is much more subdued than on her earlier work, and there’s even less interaction or active participation from the sidemen (including Doc Cheatham and Vic Dickenson, trumpet and trombone) than the 1940–42 sessions. Gabler wisely brought back Eddie Heywood as musical director, yet his arrangements here also seem much less exciting. It’s almost as if they’re all taking Holiday’s status as Diva with a capital D so seriously that they’re less inclined to take risks and have fun. One can’t argue, however, with the best singer in jazz doing such great tunes (including a couple of older songs that were revived during the war, “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “As Tme Goes By”) with such a terrific band.

Holiday began the postwar era in a curious position: Was she a jazz diva, who primarily sang old songs with small bands in small clubs for a niche audience (as they say in the twenty-first century)? Or could she be what she had been in the late thirties, trying to reach the mass market with a mix of material, old and new, blues and novelties, happy songs and sad songs and whatever? The greatest strength of Holiday’s work in the mid- and late forties was that Gabler was committed to creatively exploring these issues and seeing what they could come up with. Not all the Decca sides are on the same level, but that’s what’s bound to happen when you’re willing to experiment. On the whole, this is a very listenable catalogue of thirty-six songs, with a fair share of Holiday standards: “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Don’t Explain,” “Good Morning Heartache,” and the song that launched her relationship with Decca, “Lover Man.”

Gabler had started Commodore Records in 1938 (an offshoot of his jazz specialty record shop on East Forty-second Street), and in 1941 he went to work for Jack Kapp at Decca Records. The delineation between what he was doing for the two labels was clear cut: Commodore was hardcore jazz for specialists, whereas at Decca he produced a wide variety of pop, blues, and even country material. Hence, with the spring 1944 Commodore sessions, Gabler felt obliged to stick with jazz standards. But then along came “Lover Man,” written expressly for Holiday by a soldier named Jimmy Davis and Harlem pianist Ram Ramirez. Holiday later said that she wanted to record it, but Gabler also said that when he heard her doing “Lover Man” on Fifty-second Street, he knew at once that it had the potential to be a “smash hit.” When he and Holiday talked about recording it, she told him, “I want fiddles!,” which solidified the decision that it had to be for Decca, not Commodore. (As she remembered, “I took the song to Milt Gabler at Decca and I went on my knees to him, I loved it so. I begged Milt and told him I had to have strings behind me.…”)

If the strings themselves were Holiday’s idea, it was prescient of Gabler to go along with it; few, if any, black or jazz (or blues) singers had yet recorded with strings—not Armstrong, not Fitzgerald, and certainly not Bessie Smith. This was the first major example of an undeniable jazz voice (in a way that, for instance, Lena Horne was not) set against a lush string section. Even Holiday herself was overwhelmed. Tutti Camarata, who arranged and conducted the October 1944 session, told Steven Lasker (who produced the recommended 1991 reissue Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Sessions), “She came into the studio, turned around and walked right out! I went after her and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Oh man, these strings hit me pretty hard!’ ”

Downbeat described the record as a “surprise,” which was putting it mildly. It was something that no one had heard before. Purists charged that the strings were a commercial affectation that compromised the jazz integrity of Holiday’s singing, but I feel just the opposite. It’s worth remembering that even in straight-ahead mainstream pop, there was precious little like this—Bing Crosby and Kate Smith never sang with this kind of big orchestral backdrop. (The closest thing was Artie Shaw’s string sessions.) In 1944–45, the use of a classical string section was also one of the ways that Sinatra (who was going regularly to hear Holiday on Swing Street) was beginning to try to distinguish himself from his predecessors.

Which is not to imply that the strings on “Lover Man” suggest Mozart; they’re much more like Miklós Rózsa or any of the leading film score composers. “Lover Man” and “No More” (the other tune from the first Decca date) both have a distinctive noir sound, dark and pensive and maybe slightly melodramatic. The strings frame Holiday’s performance in such a way as to make it more intimate and personal, even more sensual. Compared to her erotically charged delivery here, the vocals on “I’ll Be Seeing You” and the other spring Commodore titles sound almost detached.

Holiday recorded five titles in October and November 1944 (including her own “Don’t Explain”) with Camarata’s orchestra for Gabler, and Decca released “Lover Man” backed with the equally excellent, only slightly less iconic “That Ole Devil Called Love.” But Gabler apparently viewed this as a one-shot deal, not a long-term relationship, and didn’t bring her back into the studio for another nine months, following which she didn’t return until 1946. The bulk of the Decca sides would be done between then and 1949.

As a producer, Gabler had big ears and big eyes, and was open to a wide range of possibilities. Among other things, he produced some of her best up-tempo swinging numbers with big band accompaniment: Her 1949 “Them There Eyes” is much more exciting than the Vocalion original of ten years earlier. The band is loud and lively, and the tenor sax solo by Budd Johnson even more so, very much in the honking fashion of Illinois Jacquet. Holiday is incredibly playful: In the first 4 bars, she pauses for what seems like forever between “I fell in love with you the first time I looked into …” and “Them there eyes,” waiting for a whole beat to fall. It’s as if she’s toying with our expectations before she’s conditioned us to expect them.

The form is ABAB, and on some of the A sections (particularly the line about her heart going “jumping”) she’s choppy and staccato, right on the beat, until she gets to the bridges, whereupon she stretches out and lets the words flow smoothly into one another; both approaches are miraculously swinging, the juxtaposition of them even more so. Sy Oliver’s arrangement elaborates on the looser 1939 chart and has an ingenious second vocal chorus in which Holiday literally sings rings around the band: She sings the first two lines of each A, they come back blasting the title phrase at her instrumentally—as a kind of tutti—but the brassier they get, the hipper and subtler Holiday seems by contrast. In subsequent live performances, she would keep playing with the tune—sometimes deliberately squeaking on the high note on “bubble.” The studio version ends with another personalized coda, “I’m looking for the boy with the wistful eyes,” that she would vary over the years, sometimes using a spoken aside instead.

“Good Morning Heartache” represents the dark side of Holiday’s force, packing the kind of emotional wallop we expect from Garland or Piaf. The title seems distantly inspired by the Count Basie–Jimmy Rushing “Good Morning Blues,” in which the blues or heartache is characterized anthropomorphically, like a physical entity with whom one could have a conversation: “Good morning, blues,blues how do you do?” “Good morning, heartache, sit down.”

When Holiday cut “Heartache” in January 1946, the lyricist, Ervin Drake, was sitting in the main room between Holiday and the string section, so close that he could have reached out and touched her—which he was tempted to do. “She did it in one take,” he told me, “and it was marvelous.” According to the discography, there are only four strings on the session, but they’re still a significant presence. As for Holiday herself, this is as sublime an interpretation as anyone has ever delivered on a song; she’s capable of communicating profound levels of feeling that are entirely unprecedented anywhere in pop music, an ever churning mixture of protest, frustration, and resignation. The closest thing that I can think of is the happy/sad nature of one of Lester Young’s classic tenor solos, like “Sometimes I’m Happy.” She addresses the presence of heartache almost affectionately, “you old gloomy sight,” kind of the same gentle put-down one would extend to an old friend. When she sings “I turned and tossed until it seemed you had gone,” she inflects those words in such a way that you actually feel her turning and tossing. She’s capable of extracting every single nuance out of Drake’s lyric, yet you feel she doesn’t need the words at all. No wonder Sinatra called her “the single greatest influence on me”—and that was in 1958, while she was still alive.

In trying to sell Holiday’s records, Gabler, commendably, did not forget about the black audience. Holiday seems to have recorded more blues and blues-related material in the forties than during any other period; Gabler was concurrently producing Louis Jordan’s records, and he was keenly aware of what was going on in the “race” market. Where “Billie’s Blues” and “Fine and Mellow” were in traditional 12-bar blues form, many songs in the Decca period, like her own “Now or Never,” freely drew upon both blues and pop elements, and were the same sort of thing that the early R&B stars like Dinah Washington and Jordan were doing. Both Holiday and Washington recorded Leonard Feather’s “Baby Get Lost,” a rather impudent blues in C that gets downright vituperative in the stop-time bridge. “The Blues Are Brewin’,” which Holiday sang in the forgettable New Orleans (in which she played, as she told Feather, “a really cute maid”), is a phony-baloney Hollywood version of a blues, written by veterans Louis Alter and Eddie DeLange, who should have known better.

More creatively, “Big Stuff” was another Leonard’s idea of the blues: Leonard Bernstein, who wrote both words and music as part of his 1944 ballet Fancy Free, the predecessor to On the Town. Holiday made a special recording of the song (accompanied by Bernstein’s sister, Shirley) that was used as a prologue before the dance started. She also cut the song for Decca, a process that somehow took four sessions over sixteen months. On the 1991 Complete Decca package, there are two alternate takes with full orchestra and strings, although the issued take utilizes just a quintet featuring Holiday’s current paramour Joe Guy on trumpet. We can be glad they persevered: “Big Stuff” is an ingenious variation on the blues with elegant words and music by the Maestro. Holiday adroitly follows Bernstein’s emotional trajectory—haughty and defiant in the central section (sort of an A) and more compassionate and inviting in the equivalent of the bridge. I almost think she’s too lovey-dovey on the big band version; in the small group take, the song gets treated rough, and it likes it.

In fall 1949 Holiday explored yet another kind of blues in the form of four songs closely associated with Bessie Smith. Gabler consistently denied that he was considering an album of Billie Sings Bessie, but the evidence is pretty clear; in any case, the project never got beyond these four songs, which were not issued at the time as an album. Two of the four, “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)” and “Do Your Duty,” were from the final session of the Empress of the Blues, which was masterminded by Hammond three days before Holiday’s first recording in 1933. Sy Oliver’s arrangements are very hard and angular, with boppish overtones, and much more intense than Smith’s original accompaniments, although Holiday herself is remarkably subtle and highly nuanced, giving the songs a word-by-word interpretation of the sort I can’t imagine Smith doing in the twenties. Holiday isn’t entirely in her comfort zone: Some of the jazz age references seem anachronistic, particularly in “Pigfoot”—Holiday was a sophisticated lady and it’s hard to imagine her getting excited over pig’s feet and beer. (If only! What did turn her on, alas, was far more worrisome.)

But one of the things that make this quartet of songs great is that they show us another side of her. In “Do Your Duty,” she plays a woman pleading for her man to give her some attention (my word, not hers), while “Keep’s on A-Rainin’ ” is sung from the perspective of a man named “Big John” (obviously the same character whom Dinah Washington refers to as “Long John”), whose romantic inclinations are disrupted by the inclement weather. “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” is a whole other story. It’s telling that when dealing with matters of race, Holiday was eventually impelled to take up the torch of protest and rail against such matters as lynchings. Yet when it comes to the politics of gender, she’s disturbingly acquiescent. Instead of protesting the inequality of the sexes, Holiday seems to be celebrating the lengths a long-suffering woman will go to for her man—unless, as some feminist might argue (and this is a stretch), these songs are actually her way of speaking out against these conditions.

A friend of Holiday’s once said that she could walk into a room of respectable, good-looking, well-mannered young men, and walk out with the only wife-beating, parole-breaking, low-life, alcoholic reprobate in the bunch. Likewise, in her music she gravitates repeatedly toward what scholar Farrah Jasmine Griffith has identified as “masochistic love songs.” “When a Woman Loves a Man,” “She’s Funny That Way,” and “Jim” are the mildest; in these Tin Pan Alley songs, the male partner is merely insensitive. In “No Good Man” and her own “Don’t Explain,” Lady is thoroughly resigned to the idea that Lover Man will be serially unfaithful to her, and these are among the most moving performances she put on record—she’s almost frighteningly believable when she sings that she doesn’t care how her man treats her or what he does to her as long as he takes her in his arms.

The most extreme are the French “My Man” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” (from a traditional folk blues source), in which she accepts physical violence as a normal part of man-woman relations. Even “Jim,” who doesn’t bring her pretty flowers and try to cheer her lonely hours, is practically a saint compared to “My Man,” who isn’t true and beats her, too. When Bessie Smith sang “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” in 1923, she had a haughty, defiant air about her, leaving you with the distinct impression that no man could ever get away with anything that she didn’t want him to do. Holiday is going for some of the same attitude, but let’s just say that she’s insufficiently empowered—she sounds as if she’s making excuses for his abuse. The issue isn’t whether Lover Man beats her or not; she’s arguing that it’s her constitutional right to let him do whatever he wants. (Talk about a pyrrhic victory.)

You don’t need a degree in psychology to see this theme—womanly devotion far beyond the call of duty—running throughout her repertoire. “You’re My Thrill,” sung definitively by Holiday and echoed in her own way by disciple Peggy Lee, is clearly a song of erotic obsession, while in “Lover Man” she all but worships the second-person protagonist (“Oh where can you be?”) as if he were the Greek god Eros. “Billie’s Blues” includes the truly harrowing line “I’ve been your slave ever since I’ve been your babe,” which she follows with “But before I’ll be your dog I’ll see you in your grave.” It’s true there’s a note of defiance there, suggesting that even a doormat of a woman has some limits and draws a line somewhere, but ultimately it’s a token gesture—the distance between acting as a man’s slave and being his dog seems too minimal to fight over.

One of the most rewarding things about listening steadily to Holiday’s output is that it’s full of surprises (except, perhaps, when you go through the surviving tapes of live concerts from the fifties, which inevitably all contain the same half dozen songs). There are two amazing documents from 1949 and 1951 that are worth discussing, although it makes more sense not to talk about them in chronological order.

In April 1951 Holiday, again working under the name “Lady Day” (I’m not sure exactly why, since she doesn’t seem to have been under contract to anyone else at the time), made one session for Aladdin Records. The fascinating thing about these four orphan sides (issued on the Blue Note CD Billie’s Blues) is that they offer a hint as to what her subsequent career might have sounded like had she gone in a rhythm and blues direction. Backed by a sextet led by guitarist Tiny Grimes (who, throughout his long career, consistently demonstrated that there was little appreciable difference between jazz and R&B), all four songs impinge upon the blues in some fashion. Two are outright 12-bar I-IV-V melodies, “Be Fair with Me Baby” and “Rocky Mountain Blues,” and two are ballads, “Blue Turning Grey Over You” (written by Fats Waller), which alludes to the blues in its title at least, and “Detour Ahead,” which has a blues feel.

On the whole, the production sounds like what Dinah Washington or Ruth Brown were doing at the time. The sides made no impact on the market and, other than doing “Detour” (a song that was ideally suited to her) at a couple of live shows, Holiday never sang any of these again, even “Blue Turning Grey,” which she learned from her hero, Louis Armstrong.

Obviously, the song-songs are excellent, no surprise there. But the two “pure” blues are also delightful, and they’re the real thing—handy proof to have around in case anyone is foolish enough to claim that Holiday wasn’t a genuine blues singer. More than jazz, the blues is almost never about composition; it’s about the feeling you can come up with on the spot and about using the words and music as a conduit for that feeling. “Rocky Mountain” uses the metaphor of scaling a cliff for dealing with a bad relationship, and here she clearly communicates that even though she’s currently down in the dumps, “I will climb this mountain/If it’s the last thing I do.” Even on “Be Fair,” she feels she at least has a chance at getting Lover Man to treat her respectfully—or else why ask? There’s no air of resignation here. It’s easy to extrapolate a larger meaning from these four titles: On the more mainstream Tin Pan Alley pop songs, Holiday is more likely to be downtrodden and hopeless; on the blues, she’s just as likely to be defiant and empowered.

But not on, along with other exceptions, “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone.” Holiday sang that 1947 blues-inflected song by bandleader Buddy Johnson just once, in a live recording from California in June 1949. (Or at least, it was recorded or documented only on this occasion.) The details of the performance are unknown: Ten songs were used on the Armed Forces Radio Services show Just Jazz, produced by Gene Norman, a local radio personality who later became an important producer. We don’t know the location, or even whether it’s a nightclub or a concert hall (a lot of the Just Jazz shows were recorded at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium or at the Shrine in Los Angeles); eight of the ten Just Jazz songs have been bootlegged and rebootlegged all over the world many, many times on LP and CD, but there is no complete issue with all ten tracks in good-quality audio.

The Just Jazz tracks are worth our consideration because this is an exceptionally good live performance from a comparatively early period, with pianist Jimmy Rowles, one of Holiday’s best later accompanists. There are also three songs that she would never record commercially, including “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” the Basiecentric jazz standard. Holiday does it as a swinging riff in the “Them There Eyes” tradition—Rowles is especially helpful here—which she ends by reprising the title line in kind of a ballad coda, one of her famous descending slide notes. “Maybe You’ll Be There” is the torch song from 1947 by pianist Rube Bloom; although this is the only trace of her doing it, it’s clear it could have easily been one of her regular songs of love and loss.

“I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone” is an absolute treasure. It’s nearly four full minutes long, essentially just Holiday and Rowles (the bass is barely audible), equal parts magic and tragic. It’s thrilling and devastating. It even helps that Johnson, who also wrote the lyrics, wasn’t a super-polished wordsmith of the theater variety (he rhymes “more” and “go”); it makes the text and the delivery that much more direct and human. Traffic seems to stop around it, time just stands still, Holiday transports you to a whole other place when she sings—when the crowd applauds at the end (and well they should) it abruptly jolts you back to reality. No one has ever sounded so open, so alone, so fragile, so exposed, and so vulnerable. In anyone else’s discography, this would be a high point; in Holiday’s canon, it’s merely a throwaway.

In terms of her relationship with her repertoire, Holiday was unique. She had a distinct body of songs associated with her that fans wanted to hear and that she sang at virtually every show. They weren’t chart hits (like Peggy Lee’s tune stack) and they weren’t songs identified with her from shows or films (like Judy Garland’s songbook). They were simply songs that she had sung over the years that seemed to fit her—they formed her own personal mythology. Michael Brooks, who produced the Complete Columbia box, is one of many advocates of the opinion that “much of [Holiday’s material] was bad.” While we’re on the subject, not every one of the thirty-six she recorded for Decca is exactly “Embraceable You” either—“Girls Were Meant to Take Care of Boys” is just plain sappy, the kind of old-fashioned thing that they should have saved for Dick Haymes. Likewise, no one could have redeemed “This Is Heaven to Me,” the last song in the Decca contract. (No one was more surprised than I when latter-day Holiday accolyte Madeline Peyroux revived it.) Yet both these eras yielded numerous wonderful, obscure tunes that never quite crossed over into standarddom, like the delightful “Here It Is Tomorrow Again,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “April in My Heart,” and two songs by George Cory and Douglass Cross (the team who later wrote “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”) in 1946–47, the beautiful “I’ll Look Around” and “Deep Song.” To me, the gems outnumber the dogs.

By contrast, when she recorded exclusively for producer Norman Granz from 1952 to 1957, she sang almost nothing but time-tested standards. No dogs here. Granz also backed her with nothing but excellent musicians who were worthy of the honor, in groups that generally consist of trumpet (usually Sweets Edison or Charlie Shavers), sax (Ben Webster or Vice President Paul Quinichette), and four rhythm (led by Oscar Peterson or, better yet, Jimmy Rowles). As with the 1944 Commodore titles, everything about the best of the Granz-Holiday sessions (originally released on Clef and then Verve) is practically perfect. Almost too perfect.

The only thing not to like about the 1952–57 sessions is the producer’s unwillingness to take chances. Every tune is either a proven standard or a long-established Billie Holiday classic. It’s a funny thing to complain about. Admittedly, these are some of the finest jazz vocal sessions ever made, and one feels like an ingrate complaining that the material is too uniformly excellent—or rather, that there are too few surprises. I can listen to the ARC material a thousand times and continually hear something marvelous I never noticed before, and this is less likely to happen on the Clef and Verve sessions. The major revelations, such as they are, derive mainly from the taped rehearsals, such as the aforementioned session with Tony Scott in which Holiday is obviously on a Sophie Tucker kick, singing “My Yiddishe Momme” and “Some of These Days,” and another private tape with Jimmy Rowles. (All this material is included on another ten-CD set, Polygram’s 1992 The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945–1959.)

If you want classy singing, even from well after the point where she begins to lose her chops, this is it. It’s amazing how consistent the results are, given the carefully controlled circumstances. I doubt that Berlin, Arlen, Porter, Kern, and Rodgers have ever been subjected to a more thorough workout. (There’s also a marvelous reading of Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens to Me”; would that catching colds and missing trains were the worst of Lady Day’s problems.) This is a less frantic, more relaxed and mature Holiday that we hear in her late thirties and early forties. Her improvisational style has also settled down—you’ll hear fewer instances of her radically rewriting a melody or, as in the case of the 1937 “I Can’t Get Started,” the lyric. These sides are less urgent than the thirties recordings, accomplishing in four or five minutes what she usually did in two or three in the early days, but that relaxed quality can be attractive, too.

In one sense, the 1950s recordings are the best of her entire career: Producer Granz was deliberately trying to re-create the freewheeling sound of Holiday’s 1935–38 dates, the jam sessions from before she began using prewritten charts, but with uniformly better songs. He used small groups—not orchestras with strings—and encouraged full-length solos of several choruses each from at least two or three side-men on almost every number. He couldn’t entirely erase her more divacentric work of the forties and go back to the freewheeling thirties, but he gave it his best shot.

In spite of the long-term success of the Decca and then Verve releases, by 1950 Holiday was nowhere near as recognizable a black superstar as Louis Jordan, Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine, or Ella Fitzgerald. She was widely loved in Harlem and among jazz fans, but even her two most popular discs, “I Cried for You” and “Fine and Mellow,” were mere minnows compared to a blockbuster like Ella Fitzgerald’s “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” In the forties, her reputation as a cult favorite strengthened with songs like “God Bless the Child,” “Lover Man,” and “Good Morning Heartache,” but she wasn’t a consistent enough seller to remain on Decca after the shakeup that occurred following the death of founder Jack Kapp. She had her following and her fans, but was rarely popular enough even to get on the cover of Down Beat, and her final tong-term producer-and-record-company affiliation with Norman Granz and Clef could be construed as a step back to the minors.

But in 1956, something happened that boosted Holiday’s star power considerably. This was the publication of her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues; she dictated her story to journalist William Dufty, who took considerable liberties with her words and the facts, but the result was a highly readable best seller that earned her considerable money and latein-life fame. Sadly, it wasn’t until the loathsome film of said book, which was released in 1972, thirteen years after her death, that Holiday became a pizza parlor perennial. (Diana Ross gives a surprisingly moving performance as some kind of bedraggled, drug-addicted torch singer, but neither she nor anything else in the picture seems to have anything to do with who or what Lady Day actually was.)

In writing Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday made the transition from a mere singer to a performance artist. In November 1956 she even did a full-length solo recital at Carnegie Hall, which could have been titled “Lady Sings the Blues—the Concert.” She sang her now-familiar songbook (along with one of her few new songs of the period, “Lady Sings the Blues,” with music by modernist Herbie Nichols) interspersed with readings from the book by Gilbert Millstein, the New York Times lit crit.

In a sense, she had found a way to profit from her misfortune—what Arlene Croce would later describe as “victim art.” By now music was no longer her only art; her life itself had become an artistic statement. When the 1956 concert was released some years later as The Essential Billie Holiday, Millstein wrote, “It was evident, even then, that Miss Holiday was ill” and “I was shocked at her physical weakness … but I will not forget the metamorphosis that night.… She was erect and beautiful; poised and smiling. And when the first section of narration was ended, she sang—with strength undiminished—with all of the art that was hers.” The recording bears him out: She is in incredibly good shape for this period in her life (she sounds better here than on most of the 1955 studio dates). This is one of her most powerful readings yet of “Fine and Mellow,” for instance. Obviously, she was reenergized by the occasion.

The book and the concert were Holiday’s ultimate confessional. Holiday was raised Catholic, and some observers (including the priest and jazz scholar Father Peter O’Brien) have noted the recurrence of Catholic themes in her art. She didn’t write most of the songs she sang, but there was, shall we say, a certain consistency in her material, not only what she recorded but what she kept in her act for years and years, and many of her perennials have a confessional quality. Holiday even brings that spirit to the most ungoyish performance of her career, “My Yiddishe Momme,” which was recorded under informal circumstances at the home of co-memoirist William Dufty, accompanied by Tony Scott (customarily a clarinetist, here playing piano). This 1925 song finds Holiday and Scott taking a break from working out routines and keys in order to sing a lullaby for the Duftys’ fifteen-month-old son, Bevan. For her, “Yiddishe Momme” is not a gag. She really sings her heart out, and lines like “Ask her to forgive me for/Things I did to make her cry” suggest a solidarity between Catholic confessional and Jewish atonement merging into Holiday’s tough love—in the toughest sense of the term.

Interestingly, Holiday didn’t get along with most of her fellow singers. They tended to make her insecure and therefore jealous. Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney (who both recorded albums in tribute to her decades after her death) were exceptions. It may be a coincidence that they’re both Catholic, however Holiday and Clooney can be said to have bonded over religion in that Holiday offered to serve as godmother for one of Rosemary’s children. This was Holiday’s own idea—it was too outrageous for Clooney to have suggested—but Holiday reasoned, “Well, I think that it would be a good thing if I was her Godmother because it takes a bad woman to be a good Godmother.”

Clooney recalled an incident that more typically describes Holiday’s relationships with other singers:

I remember once when Billie was singing at a little place down on Hollywood Boulevard. Joe [Ferrer, Clooney’s first husband] and I went to see her with Dinah Shore, who was a friend of mine, and her husband George [Montgomery]. We had been at the tennis matches and Dinah said, “Let’s go hear Billie Holiday.” And, you know, I thought it was a fine idea because Billie and I had been friends for a while by that time. Well, I already knew that Billie could be brutally honest under certain circumstances. And her set was coming up and she stopped at our table before the show and said to me, “What are you sitting with her for?” meaning Dinah. And now I’m smiling and laughing and, like, “Isn’t this a funny joke?,” like I was trying to pretend Billie wasn’t saying that. So I said, “Oh Billie you know Dinah here, you know George and you know my husband Joe and you know what fans we are of yours, and we just can’t wait for your show.… What are you going to sing?” I was babbling, talking nonsense just to shut her up because I knew what the next words were going to be. She said, “Don’t sit next to her. You could catch bad singing.” My God, I just wanted the floor to swallow me up! But Dinah was ever the lady, you know, she acted as if it just never happened. She didn’t hear it, and that was the end of it.

It was not yet Lady’s last stand. Now that the book and the Carnegie concert had elevated her profile once more, the phone was ringing again; in December 1957, she made her most celebrated television appearance, singing “Fine and Mellow” on The Sound of Jazz. Two major labels wanted to do albums with her, and the results were Lady in Satin for Columbia (1958) and Billie Holiday, more often referred to as “the MGM Album” (1959). There also was a technological motivation behind Lady in Satin, in that the combination of the long-playing record and the new high-fidelity and stereo recording processes were making it possible and desirable to record ever larger and more opulent orchestras and string sections for what was starting to be classified as “mood music.” Then thirty-four, Ray Ellis was one of Columbia’s up-and-coming purveyors of the emerging genre; Holiday supposedly had heard and liked Ellis’s first album, the very successful Ellis in Wonderland, and contacted producer Irving Townsend about doing an album with him.

Lady in Satin was an instant classic, capturing Holiday in remarkably good vocal form with excellent tunes and sympathetic string orchestrations. She obviously had heard Nat Cole’s recent albums with Gordon Jenkins and the classic Sinatra-Riddle records and wanted a big hi-fi string section. Columbia originally released Lady in Satin on two very different LP editions (the mono and the stereo versions utilize different takes and even different songs) and, later, three equally different CD editions. The most recent of these, supervised by Phil Schaap, at least collates all the various material, and straightens out such matters as the absence of a stereo master on the last tune, “The End of a Love Affair.” (The credits of the second CD edition state that the arrangements themselves were actually the work of the young German composer Claus Ogerman, who would later collaborate with Sinatra, Stan Getz, Wes Montgomery, and others.)

Holiday had only a year and a half to live when these songs were recorded, and the voice was obviously far less palatable than it had been in her prime. (Although she actually sounds stronger on these February 1958 sessions than she did in many of her 1955–57 Verve sessions.) Yet what Holiday had lost in chops, she more than made up for in ability to move an audience. The dramatic contrast between her hoarse and passionate sound and the orchestrations (whether by Ogerman or Ellis) also helps make this one of the most moving collections of pop standards of its time—or any other.

Lady in Satin is a classic in spite of how the background music is truly “background music”; it doesn’t sound like classical music, it doesn’t sound like film noir, it really sounds like Percy Faith or Ray Conniff or the other purveyors of what was becoming known as “easy listening.” Lady in Satin, indeed; you could call it Lady on an Elevator.

One of the set’s major strengths is the way Holiday sings the verses to “Glad to Be Unhappy,” “For All We Know,” and others. She was reluctant to sing them; like many who had grown up in the band era (including Sinatra), she didn’t care for verses as a rule. “I finally realized she had never learned the verses,” said Ellis, “so I gave the orchestra a break and had her sit down with her pianist, Mal Waldron, and learn them.” We’re glad that the director insisted and that the star acquiesced. “For Heaven’s Sake,” though bereft of the verse, is an obvious highlight. The background voices hold back somewhat on this one, and a flute figure recalls Nelson Riddle, but more important, Holiday’s storytelling abilities are at full throttle. She uses some of her trademark mannerisms, twisting the high notes on “Just hold me tight/We’re alone in the night,” but otherwise it’s amazing how spare and reserved her singing is—as if she refuses to depart from the melody unless she feels she absolutely must. As with the best of her students, including Sinatra, this is a clear illustration of how Holiday’s singing was not about her mannerisms, her personal life, or even the woman herself—the only thing that mattered to her was the song and the story.

A year later, in March 1959, Holiday sounds several decades older on the album released shortly after her death as Billie Holiday, which was also conducted by Ellis. These final two albums contain songs associated with Nat King Cole (“For All We Know”), Johnny Mathis (“It’s Not for Me to Say”), and especially Sinatra (“I’ll Never Smile Again,” “All the Way,” “Violets for Your Furs,” and others); would that she had also done “Over the Rainbow.” Holiday’s vocal power has decreased, but fortunately so has the size of the orchestra, and the three wordless sopranos from Lady in Satin, saints be praised, have been locked in the ladies’ room. Both Lady in Satin and Billie Holiday are of a piece with Louis Armstrong’s Satchmo Under the Stars and Crosby’s Bing with a Beat. Here we have three of the absolute primary colors of American culture keeping up to date with the times and making contemporary music in the style of their disciples, like Fitzgerald and Sinatra. Holiday was part of the younger generation chronologically, but in experience and wisdom she was by far the oldest of them all, and would be the first to go—only four months after these sessions.

It’s all too apparent that Holiday is very close to the end here, and it comes through especially in her few faster tempos; she seems overwhelmed and underpowered, making her attempts at happy songs the saddest thing of all. On “Sometimes I’m Happy” you think, No, she doesn’t sound as if she could ever be happy. On “You Took Advantage of Me” you think, Yeah, someone obviously did.

“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” is also very sad, but in a good way. The inclusion of the verse (the only time I’ve heard it) to Louis Armstrong’s signature song heightens the emotional impact. The refrain itself describes a pastoral scene of the gallant South, but the verse establishes what the rest of the song does not implicitly state: that the singer is speaking from somewhere up north, where she’s homesick for old Virginny. Holiday makes clear that the song is about going home, and in the context of where she was at this point in her life, that means a multitude of things. Home is the South, where she grew up (born in Philadelphia but raised in Baltimore). Home is the ideal of Louis Armstrong, the man whom she consistently acknowledged as her key inspiration (“I copied my style from Louis,” she says in a 1956 interview with Willis Conover) and who made her want to sing to begin with. And lastly, home is the hereafter. When we pass from this earth we return to the cosmos or the happy hunting ground or the big bandstand in the sky. Whatever. Wherever she’s going, it’s not going to be long before she goes.

Armstrong is all over “Sleepy Time” and Sinatra is cited directly in a piece of special material for “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” Following the dropping of his name, she continues, “I must make some changes from the old to the new/I must do things just the same as others do.” Holiday, unlike Sinatra, was powerless to change anything about herself, whether it was good or bad. On the ten-CD Complete Verve box, the MGM album is sequenced in original recording order, which illustrates how some sessions are jazzier than others, particularly the final date, which employs three brass, two reeds, and four rhythm—no strings. Had Lady in Satin been Holiday’s final album, she would have gone out with a big dramatic exit. Billie Holiday makes for a much subtler coda, and it’s not a bad note on which to conclude a great career.

Mel Tormé was one of the few younger singers who was mentioned in Holiday’s book, and whether it was Dufty or Lady herself who put him in (“He wasn’t imitating anybody and he had that beat,” true, true), it was a singular honor that Mel was always proud of. Mel was fond of likening the sound of Billie Holiday’s voice to the taste of spinach: “It may not taste good, but it’s so good for you.” I have to admit that for the longest time, I thought Mel was selling Holiday short. He himself had a smooth, beautiful voice, but I couldn’t imagine that he could only appreciate smooth-voiced singers like, say, Vic Damone or Sarah Vaughan; he couldn’t possibly fail to appreciate the beauty of the sound of Holiday, Armstrong, or, for that matter, Thelonious Monk. Stupid me. It wasn’t until after Mel died that I finally figured out what he was talking about: It wasn’t her voice that didn’t taste good; it was her message that, like medication, was often difficult to swallow. Mel was referring to the often-horrific content of her music, her tales of lovers being pushed to the very precipice of human emotion, the most remote peaks of human feeling, the uppest ups and the downest downs that we are capable of feeling. Perhaps Holiday is telling us that it’s only when we’re subjected to these extremes that we can truly appreciate life. Even when she’s mired in the dregs of human weakness and failings, she is, in the end, celebrating the human condition.

Shirley Horn (1934–2005)

Understatement is overrated. Most of the time, less is not more, as the minimalists would have you believe, but less is actually less. Musically speaking, who wouldn’t prefer the art of maximalists like Oscar Peterson or Judy Garland, whose work is crammed to the breaking point with musical and emotional resonance? The pianist and singer Shirley Horn is a rare example of an artist who might convince you that less really is more.

Yet I still can’t think of the music of Miss Horn as “minimalist” in the way the term is generally used. It’s true that, like Count Basie, she employed as few notes as possible—never playing two notes when one would do, never sustaining them for two beats when one was sufficient. Yet she was never making a conceptual point, she was simply trying to keep her artistic canvas from getting overcrowded, knowing full well that too many notes on one’s plate could easily get in one another’s way, compete with one another, overpower one another.

When she sings Johnny Mandel’s “Close Enough for Love” on her 1988 album of the same title, each gorgeous note and each well-placed idea has plenty of room to resonate. She keeps the harmonic backdrop wide and open so there’s always plenty of room up front for the melody. Even when she employs a Latin rhythm, as on “How Am I to Know?” (on the 1992 Here’s to Life), she does it subtly and gently, and refuses to let it overwhelm the piece as a whole.

It’s not that she never built to a loud climax—she did occasionally, as on “Georgia on My Mind” on her 1981 Violets for Your Furs. But when she does it’s particularly effective, simply because she made it a point never to overuse this particular device—in fact, never to overdo anything. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that Horn did as little as she could get away with. Just the opposite: She sang and played as much as she could, belted as loud as she could, played as many breathtaking fast arpeggios as she felt the music would allow. But her innate artistic tolerance of such things had a very low threshold. She knew exactly the point of no return at which too many notes or syllables would start to cancel one another out. In a sense, she was a musical maximalist who squeezed as much music as possible out of every precious note.

Horn could be sultry and mysterious, yet for the most part she was direct and forthright. She eschewed the tricky arrangements, so common to music today, that are complicated for no reason other than to declare the so-called cleverness of the performer or arranger. As she once told me, “I think a ballad should be sung slow, I don’t think a ballad should be sung like a foxtrot. That bugs me. If you’re going to do a foxtrot, do a foxtrot. Slow down and interpret the lyric and try to paint a picture, tell a story. If it’s a love song, do it that way.”

In jazz, tempo is an essential part of an artist’s musical personality: As critic Francis Davis has said of Bud Powell, speed is a key part of stylization, and the lack of speed is likewise an artistic statement. If slowness was a driving force of her artistry, it was correspondingly slow to pay off for her: In June 1992, she opened for Mel Tormé at Carnegie Hall during the JVC Jazz Festival. The crowd was primed for Mel’s high-energy presentation and had no idea what to make of this extremely subtle, extremely slow pianist and singer (whom nobody there had ever heard of), who, in a manner diametrically opposed to the headliner’s, never seemed to reach out to them. They all but ignored her, acting as if she weren’t there—or worse, as if she were just there to supply cocktail piano as a background to their conversation. And I can’t only blame the callousness of the crowd, or even the technicians at Carnegie who left the house lights on during her set. For her part, Horn refused to do anything to attract attention, she just kept playing and singing her usual nightclub material—which included long solos for her bassist—and seemed not to care whether anyone was paying attention or not. Yes, the crowd was acting as if she weren’t there, but she was acting as if the audience weren’t there. This was undoubtedly one of her first appearances at Carnegie and it gave her a good chance to win over several thousand people who had probably never heard her before. The way in which she was unable to make the most of this opportunity provides a clear illustration of why it took the world so long to appreciate her.

As noted earlier, time is a key concept both in the music and the career of Horn—as is also true of Andy Bey and Jimmy Scott. Horn, especially in the latter part of her career, phrased so slowly that the thirteen-year-old son of a friend of mine referred to her as “Shir … Lee … Horn.” For all three artists, the concept of slowness works on several levels: Just as Horn, Bey, and Scott have never been in a rush to get through a song (Scott in particular can take “Try a Little Tenderness” and make it seem as long as Gone With the Wind), none of them was in a hurry to be appreciated by big, mainstream audiences. All three were around for many decades before they began to be noticed by more than a few hard-core cultists.

Shirley Horn lived virtually her whole life in Washington, D.C., where she was born on May 1, 1934. She was attracted to music and songs as a very young girl. “My family loved music and there was always music around from the greatest singers and bands,” she said. “Usually, I just learned the songs my mother used to sing around the home. I would ask her, ‘What’s the name of this one, what’s the name of that one?’ because I’d have the melody in my mind. I remember hearing Peggy Lee singing ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ In fact, probably 75 percent of the songs I do are ones I heard at home.” “What I remember first in my life is playing the piano. That’s when I was four years old. I’d go to my grandmother’s home. She had a parlor with a great big piano. The parlor was for company, and it was closed off with French doors. It was always cold, but I didn’t want to do anything but just go in there and sit on the piano stool. I wasn’t interested in playing with the kids outside. After several years of this, my grandmother told my mother to get me lessons.”

Horn’s two biggest influences as a pianist-singer were Nat Cole and Ray Charles, and like them, she described her whole singing career as “an accident.” At seventeen, she was working at a local Washington restaurant. “One night close to Christmas, this older gentleman who would regularly come in for dinner came with a teddy bear as tall as I. Somehow I knew that [bear was a gift] for me,” she recalled. Soon enough, the customer sent her a note saying, “If you sing ‘Melancholy Baby’ the teddy bear is yours.” “I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing, but I wanted that bear.” Early on, she was particularly attracted to “You’re My Thrill,” another standard associated with Peggy Lee. Horn would play it and sing it at the Step Down, which she remembered was then considered D.C.’s “best jazz joint.” The owner would repeatedly insist, “ ‘You’ve got to record that song,’ ” she remembered, “and I said, ‘I’m going to do it once I’ve made up my mind.’ ” In the early fifties, she went to Howard University and sup ported herself and her education by working in local jazz clubs.

Around 1959, by which time she was married and about to give birth, she had the opportunity, for the only time in her life, to hear another favorite performer of hers in person. “I heard that Billie [Holiday] was going to be in Baltimore at the Tijuana Club,” Horn told me. “So I said to my husband, ‘We’re going to see her.’ I was practically in labor at that time, but I had to see her! I said, ‘Do what you want to do, but I’m going,’ and I did, and we went and I saw her for the first time. I was the biggest thing in the world and I insisted on sitting right in the front seat, and everybody just moved and let me have it!

“Again, I was very, very, very pregnant and was about to have a ten-and-a-half-pound baby. So they told me I couldn’t go back to the dressing room, but I said, ‘I’m going,’ nobody stops me! I was terribly upset because she was in another world. But she was very kind to me, the way she looked at me! She said, ‘I’m gonna give you my seat!’ I sat down and I don’t think I said anything to her, but she just talked to me. I was in a trance just looking at her, it was easy to see she had been a very beautiful woman, and no longer able to function very well.”

Horn was at first more successful at starting a family than at launching a career: She was teaching music and playing in smaller clubs, but it seemed as if she would never progress beyond being a local favorite among the black population of Washington. In 1959, she recorded for the first time as a sideman to the pioneering jazz violinist Stuff Smith. Verve Records, recording in D.C., intended to do a Gershwin jazz album featuring Smith’s hot violin as well as vocals by both Horn and the leader, but unfortunately most of the session was released only many years after the fact as part of a Mosaic box. A year or so later, she had the chance to make an album for the tiny independent label Stereo-Craft, a concern mostly known for albums by traditional jazzmen like Ruby Braff and Pee Wee Russell.

Almost no one heard the resultant record, Embers and Ashes, but one of the few who did was Miles Davis, who liked it so much that he brought Horn up from Washington to New York to open for him at the Vanguard in 1961. It’s said that a number of the standards Davis recorded on his next album, Seven Steps to Heaven, were directly inspired by Horn; he obviously recognized that she shared his distinct aversion to throwing too many extra notes around.

Between an album, even on an itty-bitty label, and sharing a bill with Davis at the Vanguard, Shirley Horn now had a foot in the door. However, like Jimmy Scott, her history over most of the next three decades would be one of getting an occasional break (generally meaning a chance to do an album), but then not being able to capitalize on said break and falling back into obscurity. The exposure from the Vanguard brought her to the attention of Quincy Jones, then at Mercury Records. In 1962 and 1963, he produced two albums with her: Loads of Love, on which another Jones, pianist and arranger Jimmy Jones, conducted an all-star band (including Gerry Mulligan), and Shirley Horn with Horns, done under the baton of Q himself. It’s overstating the obvious to declare that neither of these early efforts made Horn into a star, and today they serve mainly as historical documents of her early style.

The best of Horn’s sixties studio albums is the last, the 1965 Travelin’ Light. Unlike the Mercury sets, Travelin’ wisely employs Horn’s regular working rhythm section plus a group of major jazz instrumentalists. Not surprisingly, she sounds much younger than the familiar, widely heard Shirley Horn of the nineties, and consistently sings in much faster tempos. However, she had already developed a deep, burnt umber sound, and a way of suggesting a melody, of outlining it, rather than filling in each little note. Even by the age of thirty-one, in 1965, she had perfected the art of giving the listener just enough information to follow either a story line or a melody line.

Travelin’ Light is a sensational album. Nearly thirty years later, Horn would record a tribute to Ray Charles, Light out of Darkness. Songs that she obviously learned from him are scattered throughout her discography—like “Georgia on My Mind” on Violets for Your Furs and “New York’s My Home” on A Lazy Afternoon. The influence of Miles Davis (which she acknowledged in a full-length tribute package, the 1998 I Remember Miles) is readily discernible in terms of her use of timbre and tempo; Horn’s debt to Ray Charles is buried a bit deeper—you’ll never hear her screaming and squealing like Brother Ray. Yet particularly on Marvin Jenkins’s “Big City” and “Don’t Be on the Outside,” Horn and her eight-piece ensemble capture the spirit of the great, compactly swinging octet Charles led in the 1950s, before he expanded to orchestral proportions.

Throughout, from the Broadway-saucy “Confession” (from The Band Wagon) to the blues-saucy “Some of My Best Friends Are the Blues,” Horn found the perfect balance of sultriness and coolness. Unlike most singers of her genre and generation, she even made an early and most admirable peace with the rival camp by doing a tender, personal, and highly jazzy treatment of the Lennon-McCartney “And I Love Her.”

Travelin’ Light is our first full-scale glimpse of the mature Horn style. Thirty years later, her message caught on, in that the most successful singers (in jazz or genres adjacent to it) of recent years have all been, to a certain degree, sultry and understated: Cassandra Wilson, Madeline Peyroux, Diana Krall, Patricia Barber, Norah Jones. The best of them have learned Horn’s lesson: Don’t just sound detached and dispassionate, as if you couldn’t give a darn, but make an emotion more powerful by bringing just enough energy to it. Less, as we have seen, is not more, but just enough is perfect.

Travelin’ Light, which, like her other early works, was in the catalogue for roughly a day and a half, would be her last full-length album for seven years (and her last project with an ensemble larger than her trio for almost thirty). Where Are You Going (1972, Perception) is a quartet album that points to her future work with her trio, including several Horn classics that would remain in her repertoire for years, the Arlen-Harburg “The Eagle and Me” and Marvin Fisher’s scintillating “Something Happens to Me,” a tune prized among pianist-singers following the Cole brothers, Nat and Freddy. The most familiar piece is the Gershwin brothers’ ”Do It Again” (with a marvelous spoken verse) and the most esoteric is a rather unexplainable piece of performance art entitled “Consequences of a Drug Addict Role,” a longish and bizarre polemic against substance abuse, in which Horn uses electronic effects to phase in and out—and in general sounds completely stoned.

The two most ambitious pieces on Where Are You Going are the least successful: The title track lives up to its name by being a rather directionless melody, and “Drug Addict Role” can only be considered a success in that no one who hears it would ever want to go near drugs or drug addicts. Yet her use of the quartet format presages her classic later albums with her trio, and the tempos are slower than her earlier recordings, also pointing forward to the nineties more than back to the sixties. Most innovative is a treatment of Bobby Scott’s “A Taste of Honey” that uses Miles Davis’s “All Blues” as a framing, contextual vamp.

The big news in Horn’s career in the early seventies was not this comparatively lesser album (by her standards), but the entrance into her life of the bassist Charles Ables. Ables, a steady, supportive player who wore oversize glasses that made him look like Louis Jordan playing Deacon Jones, would be her partner on the instrument for the next twenty years. Her classic trio finally coalesced a few years later when drummer Steve Williams, the only surviving member of the group, came on board. The Shirley Horn Trio was such a perfect mini-ensemble, it’s not surprising that just as the group was reaching a pinnacle, they were heard and signed by the recently reestablished Verve Records. Horn’s “mature” period, therefore, can be easily divided in two distinct portions: pure trio (that is, trio-only) albums, and those where the trio interacts with larger and more ambitious studio-based ensembles.

The Shirley Horn “trio” albums include the following (only the first doesn’t feature Ables or Williams) and Where Are You Going, which is technically a quartet date, albeit one that establishes the later sound of her working band:

A Lazy Afternoon (1978, Steeplechase)

All Night Long (1981, Steeplechase)

Violets for Your Furs (1981, Steeplechase)

The Garden of the Blues (1984, Steeplechase)

All of Me (1986, CBS-Sony), the trio plus Frank Wess on tenor and flute

I Thought About You (1987, Verve)

Softly (1987, Audiophile)

Close Enough for Love (1988, Verve)

I Love You, Paris (1992, Verve), taped live in Paris

The following projects utilize accompaniments beyond the trio (all of these are on Verve):

You Won’t Forget Me (1990), with Miles Davis, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans

Here’s to Life (1992), with Johnny Mandel and His Orchestra

Light out of Darkness (1993), with Gary Bartz and various Ray Charlesian additives, among them a vocal group dubbed “The Hornettes”

The Main Ingredient (1995), with Joe Henderson, Buck Hill, Roy Hargrove, and Elvin Jones

Loving You (1997), a more contempo-poppish project, utilizing various combinations, including Steve Novosel on bass and synthesized strings

I Remember Miles (1998), with Roy Hargrove, Toots Thielemans, Ron Carter; her only Grammy winner thus far

You’re My Thrill (2001), with Johnny Mandel and His Orchestra

Admittedly the distinction is in many cases elastic. Close Enough for Love uses the trio plus guest star Buck Hill, the finest of Washington-based tenors (what Von Freeman is to Chicago and Teddy Edwards was to Los Angeles), who was so much a part of Horn’s musical family he could well be considered the fourth member of the trio; he guested with her again at the Au Bar in 2005 on what is believed to be her final recording. Loving You substantially reworks both the personnel of the trio, with Steve Williams in his familiar place at the drums but Steve Novosel in for Ables. You Won’t Forget Me, Light out of Darkness, and The Main Ingredient all do use the familiar trio as a core group; still, the emphasis here is on the guest stars.

The trio albums have a purity that makes them unique; in a sense, it should be no surprise that Horn doesn’t alter her performing style whether she’s in a comparatively intimate room like Maxim’s, a now defunct East Side spot where she played several times in the mid-nineties, or whether she’s in Carnegie Hall. Naturally, like most singers Horn was better experienced live than on disc, but it’s mainly because of the context, not because she does anything different. The intimate trio albums are the recordings where she comes closest to sounding the way she did in person.

Nearly all the trio discs have the same general assortment of tunes that she performs in a typical club set; the only one that qualifies as a concept album is Garden of the Blues. This is her only songbook package—a collection of works by a single composer. It’s completely consistent that she elected to devote her only songbook album to a writer considerably off the beaten path, one Curtis Lewis. Like Marvin Fisher, Curtis Lewis is a favorite among jazz musicians. He also has some blues and soul credentials (Helen Humes and Aretha Franklin both recorded his “Today I Sing the Blues”), and as with Willard Robison, most of the inspiration for his lyrics derives from contrast between rural and urban, the traditional and the newfangled, and at least every other song seems to be about the loss of innocence. Though short (thirty-eight minutes), the live Garden of the Blues is a singularly ambitious and very satisfying project. In fact, all four of the albums she recorded for the Danish Steeplechase label are live, this one taped at a concert in Miami in 1984.

In 1986, Horn made another live album (from a club called Vine Street in Los Angeles), I Thought About You, but with a difference: This would be the first of eleven albums for Verve.

The concepts for her albums were often vague, but it didn’t matter. I Remember Miles is essentially just a collection of standards with guests Thielemans and Hargrove, and if you heard the album without knowing the title, you might not guess it was a Davis tribute. Although, inspired by Horn, Davis recorded Spencer Williams’s “Basin Street Blues” along with Clarence Williams’s “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” I don’t think anybody associates those songs with him. It’s all exquisitely done, and the very fact that Horn doesn’t have to go out of the way to evoke Davis illustrates how essentially similar their slow ballad styles are. Her burnished tone and reliance on crawl tempos are just two qualities that make her voice closer than anyone else’s to capturing Davis’s very vocal Harmon-muted trumpet timbre.

The Miles tribute record arrived seven years after Horn had recorded with the trumpeter himself, on the title cut of You Won’t Forget Me. Thirty years earlier, he had been one of Horn’s early boosters, and roughly a year before his death, he consented to appear with her on what was probably his final studio session. At the time, it seemed as if the superstar Prince of Darkness was helping his onetime protégée by lending her his marquee value and presence, but in retrospect it was clearly the other way around. In giving Davis a chance to show that he could still play beautifully on standard changes, and that his chops hadn’t completely eroded from decades of chemical and musical abuse, Horn was doing Miles a favor.

She never got to record with Ray Charles, but she did record a tribute album to him. When Light out of Darkness (1993) first came out, the only projects I could imagine that were less likely were The George Shearing Quintet Plays Leadbelly or Lennie Tristano Plays Louis Jordan. Both Charles and Horn sang and played the piano, but at first glance that was all they seemed to have in common. The album juxtaposed the most raucous and rocking R&B shouter with the quietest and most intimately reflective singer-pianist ever to tiptoe across a keyboard. Bill Evans once observed, “You don’t go to a Keith Jarrett concert to yell, ‘yeah!’ ” We normally listen to Shirley Horn for different reasons than we listen to Ray Charles—for meditative rumination rather than romping and stomping; for thoughtful introspection rather than butt kicking. In Light out of Darkness, Horn moves several tunes from Charles’s domain into her own territory, such as her spare, minimalist treatment of “Drown in My Own Tears,” and “Georgia on My Mind.” She likewise underplays “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” a jazz standard usually treated with much wailing and gnashing. On other pieces, like the extroverted “Hit the Road, Jack!” she finds a halfway point between her own idiosyncratic sound and Charles’s. When she unexpectedly essays a genuine rockhouse flag-waver like “I Got a (Wo)Man,” she doesn’t exactly rock but she proves that the uptempo Horn is no less engaging than she is on one of her more characteristic snail-tempo hypnotic spells.

The 1992 Here’s to Life, a collaboration with arranger-conductor-composer Johnny Mandel, may well be my favorite of all Horn albums. That year, Verve sent out an advance promo disc on Here’s to Life that came in a little cardboard case, with the silhouette of a piano in front; when you unfolded the piano cutout, you found a picture of Horn underneath, glamorized more like the other Horne (Lena) and sporting opera gloves she could have borrowed from Hildegarde. The idea of hiding Horn’s portrait behind the outline of a piano is an ironic one. The risk of giving her a larger ensemble to work with is that her style is so subtle and quiet that a traditional jazz big band would bury her completely; even a string section would have to play extremely pianissimo. Few besides Mandel could have so adroitly used a symphony-sized ensemble to more fully expose Shirley Horn’s brilliance, to praise her rather than to bury her.

Mandel worked on Here’s to Life not long after participating in Natalie Cole’s 1991 megahit Unforgettable with Love. It would be enough if Here’s to Life were just Horn’s best trio-plus project (Ables and Williams and her own piano are at the core, abetted by Mandel’s strings and guest soloist, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis). Yet it’s more: This is one of the triumphant works of an era that was just rediscovering the art of jazz-influenced standards. Like Nelson Riddle before him, Mandel has mastered the art of taking a big orchestra and making it light and subtle, turning a studio full of musicians into an extension of Horn’s own playing. One never feels there are any incongruous or foreign elements behind her—the strings apparently emerge from Horn’s own sensibility and artistic consciousness.(The orchestrations were, in fact, recorded after the trio tracks and then added to what Horn had already laid down.)

Over the years, Mandel was supported more by the movies than by the pop music industry, and between his own songs and two by Russian composer Dimitri Tiomkin, there’s a lot of cinematic material here. Horn’s reading of “Wild Is the Wind” is less flamboyant than Johnny Mathis’s and less tortured than Nina Simone’s, while “Return to Paradise” restores a worthy slice of Island exotica to the public consciousness. (Like Nat Cole before her, she can take a line like “Evil turns to love” and almost make you take it seriously.) Mandel’s own songs—“Quietly There” and “Where Do You Start”—have never sounded better, while his classic “A Time for Love” sounds better here than in any treatment since Tony Bennett’s.

The maestro’s “Where Do You Start” doesn’t quite belong here, since it’s a downer of a dirge concerning a divorce and therefore out of place with the reserved yet upbeat overall mood of the project. For that matter, had you read me the lyrics of “Here’s to Life” before Horn or Joe Williams sang them, I would surely have vetoed it for inclusion, since the song is the latest in the adult pop music world’s long string of attempts to re-create Sinatra’s “My Way”—a series of heavy-handed self-celebratory anthems that have seemingly been omnipresent since the sixties. It’s the kind of thing that Barbra Streisand should sing, yet Horn, like Joe Williams, has managed to make quite a convincing soliloquy of introspection out of otherwise unpromising material.

In 2000, Horn and Mandel reunited for You’re My Thrill, an album that’s a worthy sequel if not quite a full-fledged return to paradise. One would have thought that on Here’s to Life, Horn would have exhausted Mandel’s supply of good original songs (she had already used his collaboration with Paul Williams, “Close Enough for Love,” as the title of her second Verve album in 1988), but no, he surprises us by unleashing another one, “Solitary Moon,” a classically Horn-like melancholy mood with a lyric by the Bergmans. She starts with the title track, with a burnt tone and breathlessness that implies that she first learned the song from Peggy Lee. (She also honors Lee on “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” on which she updates the year mentioned in the lyric from “1922,” as Lee sang it with Benny Goodman, to “1942,” the year Lee and Goodman recorded it.) “Solitary Moon,” the slightly faster “Sharing the Night with the Blues,” and “All Night Long” are all “Wee Small Hours”-type arias of love, loss, and trying to make it through the long nights. Even though “Sharing the Night” is in a kicking tempo, Horn leaves us in a quandary as to whether she’s trying to confront the blues by singing about them, or if she’s just resigned to the fact “That night will fall/And deepen my despair.” The title of “All Night Long” may suggest an erotic romp, as in, “I want to love you all night long,” but no! This Curtis Lewis song is more in the spirit of never-had-no-kissin’-ooh-what-I’ve-been-missin’ all night long.

The best thing about You’re My Thrill is that it displays every side of Horn’s music. There are the expected slow numbers and a quota of faster tunes (“Rules of the Road,” “You Better Love Me”), as well as numbers by the trio, or close enough to it. “Solitary Moon” further marks her first important performance with someone else playing piano, in this case the remarkable Alan Broadbent. Yet what’s perhaps most rewarding about the album is that it contains a generous amount of the Horn piano. Sadly, for two tragic reasons You’re My Thrill was the last time we would ever hear the classic Horn trio on record: Within a few months in late 2001 and early 2002 she lost one of her feet to diabetes, and her longtime bassist, Charles Ables, to cancer at the age of fifty-eight. The loss of the second upset her even more than the first.

Horn was out of commission for almost two years, but in November 2002 she appeared at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, with bassist Eddie Howard, and George Mesterhazy (described in a local paper as a Horn “disciple”) on piano. For a year or so, she worked strictly as a singer, and recorded one album in this fashion, the 2003 May the Music Never End. Her three major appearances in New York in that year were especially triumphant, a sold-out week at the Iridium and two shows at Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. Her devastatingly perfect “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” was the high point of a tribute to Peggy Lee, and a bill she shared with the Dave Brubeck Quartet was no less mesmerizing. The Carnegie shows were especially rewarding to those few of us who had been present at her disastrous Carnegie appearance eleven years earlier: Whereas the crowds all but ignored her in 1992, in 2003 they were hanging on to every word and every note, breathing along with her and feeling along with her. If anyone in the hall had so much as coughed, the crowd would have stoned him.

Halfway through 2004, she also began playing piano again, this time using a prosthetic foot to work the sustaining pedal. In 2004 and 2005, she found a new home in New York, and played three engagements at the Au Bar on East Fifty-eighth Street. As great a self-accompanist as Horn had been, she was actually better when Mr. Mesterhazy played, as this freed her from the difficulty of the artificial appendage, which occupied too much of her diminishing resources. With him playing, she could concentrate on putting everything she had into her singing.

Obviously mindful that she would not be able to make a new recording, Verve Records, her label for the most rewarding part of her career, put together a compilation, But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn on Verve, and released it, it turned out, only a week before her death on October 20, 2005. The Best of concludes with three tracks recorded at the Au Bar in January 2005. (Let’s hope more will be issued in the near future. As of 2010, nothing more has been released.) There are two Richard Rodgers songs familiar to Horn fans: “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” co-starring trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and “Loads of Love,” one of the many medium-up numbers with comic overtones that she would employ to give audiences a respite from her devastatingly moving slow ballads. Strangely, none of the three Au Bar numbers is one of those classic Horn torch songs, but this subset opens with Billy Eckstine’s “Jelly, Jelly,” one of the strongest traditional 12-bar blues numbers she ever sang, and with a spot for an old friend, the tenor saxist Buck Hill.

Her greatest moments were the slow love songs, with which, at the end of her life especially, she could get a crowd—whether several thousand in a concert hall or several dozen in a club—following her en masse. The title of the more famous of those Rodgers and Hart songs to the contrary, it wasn’t that we didn’t know what time it was, but that Shirley Horn made it seem as if time, somehow, had ceased to exist.

Lena Horne (1917–2010)

Lena Horne, like her contemporary and sometimes friend Frank Sinatra (born eighteen months before her), has demonstrated a recurring tendency toward premature autobiography. In 1965, Sinatra turned fifty and used the occasion to proclaim that he had reached the September of his years. In that same year, Horne, who was then only forty-eight, published her memoir Lena. A decade and a half later, she made an even more emphatic autobiographical statement in her one-woman Broadway show, The Lady and Her Music (the title borrowed from Sinatra), which ran thirteen months and closed on her sixty-fifth birthday. In both cases, Horne insisted on telling her life story at a point when she still had a lot of living left to do; however, she’d already lived enough experiences, both good and bad, to fill a dozen books or shows.

Still, we should be glad that Horne wrote Lena. For me, there’s one detail that is particularly revealing about the lady’s commitment to her music, even though when she wrote it, she was obviously thinking about something else entirely. She was discussing the song “Penthouse Serenade.” The lyric depicts a romantic, idyllic fantasy of existence at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. The text is the height of fanciful Depression-era escapism: “Just picture a penthouse way up in the sky/With hinges on chimneys for stars to go by.” Anyone else might approach it as pure fantasy, yet Horne questioned her ability to sing this song properly. It’s unlikely, she reasoned, that she’d ever be permitted to dwell in this oh-so-serenade-able penthouse, because like most first-class buildings in New York at that time, even a fictitious penthouse was subject to the heinous yet legal racially based restrictions designed expressly to keep black people out of these midtown Manhattan towers. How could she invest “Penthouse Serenade” with the level of credibility and total belief that she brought to all the songs in her repertoire when, as an African American, it was beyond her ability even to imagine herself living in one?

Horne was making a point regarding the racial situation she had been subjected to for her entire life, but to me this observation says much more about her approach to her music, about how very deeply she thinks about the words and the music of every song she sings. She has to thoroughly believe a song herself before she can sing it; she can’t just knock out a number that doesn’t mean anything to her. Once she believes it, it’s a logical progression to convincing her audiences to believe it as well. But if she can’t feel it, she won’t sing it. That’s all there is to that.

There were other black performers of Horne’s immediate generation who were singing, for lack of a better word, “mainstream” love songs—particularly Billy Eckstine (older) and Nat King Cole (slightly younger); Cole even made an album called Penthouse Serenade, in which he doesn’t sing the lyric but plays the tune as a piano instrumental. Yet more than anyone else, Horne gives the impression of having lived in two worlds at the same time. She alone seems to have been scarred by the idea that here she was, a movie star—never a leading lady, unfortunately, but still a movie star—whom MGM was packaging as one of the most glamorous women in the world, as instantly recognizable as her friends Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, or Lana Turner. Yet if she wanted to live in a penthouse, there was a lot more standing between her and that piece of real estate besides the asking price. One thinks about Sammy Davis Jr.’s observation at the time that the biggest dream that there was for a black person circa 1950 was not to have money or fame or power, but simply to be able to walk into any public place that he wanted to.

The confusion and hurt that Horne felt were part of the price she paid to help change things for the better. It was in 1942 that Lena Horne and MGM changed the world; that was the year they filmed and released Panama Hattie. On the surface, this was hardly a significant event. Panama Hattie was Hollywood’s treatment of a 1940 Cole Porter musical that had starred Ethel Merman on Broadway (with Merman’s part, as usual, going to a Tinseltown stand-in). Ann Sothern played the title role and Horne only got one number. But once the world got a look at, and a listen to, Lena Horne in this film, both American culture and the civil rights situation in America could never be the same.

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that this film marked the mass-media debut of the concept of the African American as a real person. Before Lena Horne, blacks in films were depicted as,if not subhuman, then certainly as something inferior to white folks. Roles for African Americans ran the gamut from A to B, from servants on the plantation to “ooga-booga”-chanting natives in the Tarzan flicks: If they weren’t carrying a tray, chances are they were carrying a spear. In her memoir, Horne recounts a crucial conversation she had with friend Count Basie at the start of her Hollywood experience. The issue was whether, as Basie explained to her, “they [white America] could learn to see me as he [Basie] saw me, as a woman first, a Negro second. If they could do that, maybe they could see him as a man and all of us as individuals.” Lena Horne was the Jackie Robinson of show business.

Sixty years later, the battle with racism is hardly won, even if we do have a black president. However, we have come so far that it’s difficult to fathom the magnitude of Horne’s achievement. It should be stressed that, just as when Benny Goodman hired Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton for his band several years earlier, MGM had no interest in furthering the cause of race relations. Producer Arthur Freed and musical supervisor Roger Edens had no political purpose in mind; they simply wanted Horne for the studio because she was the classiest musical presence around. Metro’s talent roster already included more stars than there were in heaven, but it was incomplete until they annexed this celestial performer. It’s to their great credit that they weren’t about to let the color line (this at a time when the military, pro sports, and even the Los Angeles musicians’ union were still separate but unequal) stop them.

What might be regarded as Metro’s one concession to the era’s bigotry was their decision to present Horne exclusively as a musical and sexual object; in other words, she would never be shown mingling, plot-wise, with the white leading men and women who populated the rest of her pictures. The motive for this strategy wasn’t entirely political: As it happens, almost all the musical numbers in Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, Till the Clouds Roll By, and Words and Music have nothing to do with the stories (such as they are), while Ziegfeld Follies has no plot whatsoever.

This may be too charitable to Metro’s failure to let Horne have even a line of dialogue in any picture other than the all-black Cabin in the Sky. In this way, as she has often pointed out, exhibitors in the Southern states could scissor out her scenes and not risk getting lynched by their patrons. Perhaps this same backward thinking kept the studio from giving her any kind of screen credit in that first film, Panama Hattie.

Yet, in a sense, MGM’s policy of segregation contributes less to Horne’s exploitation than to her deification: In virtually all her dozen MGM films, Horne is completely unconnected to such down-to-earth concerns as plot and characterizations. She only flies in from the Planet Heaven to whet our collective appetites with a single sublime number and then vanish as mysteriously as she appeared. Beaming in and out like the otherworldly entity she was and is, Horne remains unidentified by anything other than her beauty and her magnificent music. If the color bar denied her the right to participate in the plot, and, in a sense, prohibited her from being seen as human, it also added credence to her divinity.

Consider that first film, Panama Hattie, in which Metro presents Ann Sothern as a floozy with a heart o’ gold. For all the studio’s fear of negative repercussions from more reactionary quarters, Horne comes off with considerably more dignity than the picture’s star. Although Arthur Freed saw fit to transform one of Broadway’s more sophisticated Cole Porter soirees into what quickly becomes an ersatz Three Stooges vehicle (with such colorful comics as Red Skelton, Ben Blue, and Rags Ragland falling all over one another in pursuit of enemy spies), Horne emerges untainted.

As Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet, documented in her book, The Hornes, their family had been among the leaders of the black bourgeoisie since the beginning. When Lena Horne entered life on June 30, 1917, she was the scion of the closest thing that Negro America had to royalty. After her parents separated, Horne’s father’s mother and family raised her in genteel Brooklyn society for the earliest years of her life. She then spent most of her teens living with her rather paranoid mother in a fast-paced succession of Southern towns. Horne went to work in the Cotton Club at sixteen, where she helped introduce Harold Arlen’s “As Long as I Live”; she wasn’t singing yet, but she danced around headliner Avon Long.

She was singing by 1936, however. In that year, she took to the road for several months with the orchestra led by Noble Sissle, a revered lyricist, singer, and bandleader who had been a pillar of black showbiz society since serving in World War I with Jim Europe’s band and co-writing the 1921 Shuffle Along, the first wildly successful all-black Broadway show of the modern era. It was a good foundation for her: Unlike, say, Basie’s band or Ellington’s, Sissle’s was regarded as the black equivalent of a society band, playing waltzes and sweet music in addition to straight-ahead jazz (boasting such notables as Sidney Bechet). Horne would likewise develop into an all-around pop singer, one of the few performers who seemed equally at home on the Broadway stage and in front of a swing band. At the age of eighteen, she made her first recordings, a pair of Deccas with Sissle: “That’s What Love Did to Me” and the jaunty “I Take to You.”

At nineteen, largely to escape her family, she married a friend of her father’s named Louis Jones and settled with him in Pittsburgh. It was quickly evident that the marriage was a mistake, but Horne stuck with it through the birth of two children. While still married, she returned to the boards when given the opportunity to star in her first film (the all-black B quickie The Duke Is Tops, 1938) and her first Broadway show (the flopperoo revue Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939). By 1940, she and Jones had separated and she returned to New York to resume her career full-time. Whether by accident or design, she would no longer confine herself to the “ghetto” of all-black show business: She went on the road with Charlie Barnet’s orchestra (with whom she landed her first hit record) and then gained fame as a solo star at Cafe Society, Barney Josephson’s cross-racial nightclub. (At which point she appeared in her second film, the short subject Boogie Woogie Dream, in 1941.)

By then, when she was performing full-time again, it was apparent that Horne was an artist who came off extremely well in an age of electronic reproduction: The camera loved her looks and the microphone loved her voice. Five years after her Sissle session, she returned to the recording studio, this time as a regular vocalist with Charlie Barnet and as a special guest with Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson. She also appeared, both on the air and for RCA Victor, with the rather oddball ensemble from the NBC Radio series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street; the W. C. Handy classics she cut with the CMSLBS ensemble are perhaps the finest tracks ever recorded by that studio band.

The earlier recordings, especially the big band selections like “Love Me a Little, Little” and “Don’t Take Your Love from Me” with Shaw, and “You’re My Thrill” with Barnet, spotlight Horne as a goddess-in-training, displaying a wide-eyed ebullience that came naturally enough while she was still in her mid-twenties. Yet she would never lose that ability to convey love in its most purely euphoric state—as witnessed on such later performances as “It’s Love,” “Let Me Love You,” and “At Long Last Love” (which she recorded with a rare verse). Horne never lost anything; she merely gained the ability to convey defiance (“Love Me or Leave Me”), obsession (“Mad About the Boy”), heartbreak (the 1941 solo side “What Is This Thing Called Love?”), and resignation (“I’m Through with Love”).

At the end of 1941, the NBC-RCA organization was impressed enough with Horne’s work to record six solo titles with her. By an apparent coincidence, she cut her first of many versions of the song that would become her theme, “Stormy Weather,” as the first title on the first date. She renders it in a moody, semiclassical treatment that’s somewhat reminiscent of the Chamber Music Society approach.

By that time, she was in the midst of a very successful nightclub engagement; in fact, within a few months she was the sensation of Hollywood. The film studios obviously were well aware of her, but the only one who was bold enough to show some interest was MGM, at that time the number-one producer of movie musicals. “I was ‘discovered’ singing in a nightclub called the Little Troc by Roger Edens,” Horne said in a 1992 interview. “I wasn’t impressed because I didn’t want to be in California, and I hadn’t ever thought about the movies. The next day [the studio] called and asked me to come in, I said I had to get my father first. So, he flew in from Pittsburgh and we sort of laughingly went to the studio. My father was, in fact, fighting against the idea of my going into the movies, because neither of us liked the roles that we Afro-Americans were obliged to play at that time.”

At this point, Horne, her father, and longtime friend Walter White of the NAACP helped the studio devise a strategy by which Lena would be afforded the same star-making treatment as any of Metro’s white stars—and avoid being presented in the traditionally demeaning light afforded black entertainers. In Cabin in the Sky, for instance, Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Butterfly “Prissy” McQueen, and Horne are all presented as social equals. Yet in the films immediately surrounding that 1943 blockbuster, all except Horne revert to playing servants—Waters as a maid in Cairo (a role Horne rejected), Anderson in Broadway Rhythm, and McQueen in I Dood It. Horne, who also appears in the last two titles, is seen as a singing siren, opening herself up to be judged only on the basis of her talent and not her racial identity.

At several points early in her career, Horne was confronted by managers who insisted that she “pass”—not necessarily for WASP but for Spanish. Metro may have had that in mind when they had her perform two ersatz-exotic numbers, “The Sping” (no, that’s not a misspelling) in Panama Hattie and “Brazilian Boogie” in Broadway Rhythm. Just as likely, they may have been cashing in on the vogue for Latinate novelties, as “Sping” suggests via its rhyme of “propaganda” with “Carmen Miranda” and by dressing Horne up in a seashell equivalent of the Brazilian Bombshell’s banana republic outfit. Though neither amounts to a great song—which becomes criminal when you consider that these two pictures have their roots in shows composed by Cole Porter and Jerome Kern—she works wonders with both.

Phil Moore was responsible for virtually all the accompaniments on her mid-forties sides. He was likely responsible for directing her to the Black & White label—oddly, in the years when she was getting the most exposure as an MGM star, she was under contract to an independent label rather than the better-known RCA. The Black & White recordings, which were all directed by Moore, are among the most consistently excellent sessions of her career—almost from the beginning she was an artist who stuck to first-rate material. Label executives at every stage of the game recognized that she was a class act and never stooped to sully her reputation, even in pursuit of the all-mighty hit single. The Black & White years climaxed in a deluxe production number built around the traditional “Frankie and Johnny,” with Horne and a full cast of actors;issued on both sides of a 78, this musical drama is equal parts Busby Berkeley and Gordon Jenkins, though Horne and Moore are considerably hipper than either. Next, she recorded sixteen tracks for Metro’s own fledgling record label, which were reissued as The MGM Singles in 2010.

She would spend occasional periods with other labels (Twentieth Century Fox) but for the most part her home base, record-wise, was the label formerly known as RCA. (Unfortunately that corporation has never seen fit to provide any kind of comprehensive overview of her work on the label.) In contrast, two other outfits she sang for in the mid-forties, Black & White and MGM, have issued complete, single-disc packages of her work for them: The Complete Black & White Recordings (Simitar) and Lena Horne at MGM (Turner-Rhino, which contains all of her sound track vocals for the studio) are recommended reissues, and one wishes Victor would follow suit. The bulk of her best-known recordings were done for RCA in the fifties, most notably Lena at the Waldorf Astoria, which for many years was the biggest-selling album by a female vocalist in the history of the corporation.

For an artist of her stature, Horne recorded surprisingly little. She spent the bulk of her glory years at RCA, and was under contract to that corporation in three (nonconsecutive) periods. From the birth of the LP (the first Horne long-play, the 10″ This Is Lena Horne, was released in 1952) to 1963, when she left for the second time, she released a total of only eleven albums, of which the first two were largely made up of existing singles.

It’s difficult to make the claim that Horne is a jazz singer in the sense that Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan was, or that she’s a pop singer like Doris Day, since she didn’t make what could be easily classified as pop records either. It’s a stretch to call her a movie star (although I do not hesitate to do so), and she only had one important Broadway leading role to her credit apart from her one-woman concert show. Her stock-in-trade was a room that pretty much no longer exists: What they used to refer to as a nightclub was somewhere between the jazz clubs or cabarets of today and a Las Vegas showroom. Most of these nightclubs, for lack of a better word, were situated in hotel ballrooms like the Waldorf-Astoria, although there were non-hotel-affiliated joints like the Basin Street clubs in New York, the famous Copacabana, and Ciro’s and the Mocambo in Hollywood. (As a general rule of thumb, nearly all the nonhotel venues tended to be under the control of organized crime, either of the Jewish or the Italian mafia variety.)

Aside from that warm, familiar vibrato and Henry Higgins–like articulation, there’s not one overwhelming standout characteristic we can instantly point to, like Fitzgerald’s swing, Billie Holiday’s vulnerability, or Vaughan’s virtuoso impudence. In fact, one of the traits we treasure in Horne’s performances is her simplicity and the absence of stylistic devices. She has her tricks to be sure (I keep swearing I hear tinges of a Southern accent so sweet it could charm the honeysuckle off the magnolias, even though I know darn well she spent most of her youth in New York), but they ultimately contribute to her naturalness.

Horne’s specialty is the bravura opener: There’s no one else who can so grab your attention with just a couple of notes, and then hold it like a dog clutching a bone. Some of her albums seem to consist entirely of openers. She’s especially convincing when she does this with one of the great songs, say Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On,” a song she has recorded at least four different times. Yet she works magic even with material by the decidedly less charmed team of Matt Dubey and Harold Karr (the team, somewhat further down on the Broadway food chain, who wrote Ethel Merman’s most notable flop, Happy Hunting): “A New Fangled Tango” and “I’d Do Anything.” On the second of these in particular she effortlessly tackles all the notes that the tune throws at her, and goes for the high ones excitingly and dramatically without resorting to screeching or belting. She also phrases just a hair behind the beat, again without making a point of it.

A master at building and sustaining a mood, she never fails to evoke precisely the right attitude for each song. She’s sultry without overdoing it on “Love Is the Thing” and “I Get the Blues When It Rains,” exuberant without being Pollyanna on “It’s Love,” resigned without being maudlin on “Fun to Be Fooled” and “Rules of the Road,” kittenish without being coy (well, not overly coy, anyhow) on “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and “Paradise.” On “It’s Love” (by Bernstein, Comden, and Green, from Wonderful Town, a song that deserves another airing today), she’s so upbeat that one can practically hear the smile on her face, and muted trumpeter Shorty Baker gleefully reinforces the feeling.

Both “It’s Love” and “Love Is the Thing” (the latter introduced by Ethel Waters, who wasn’t particularly gracious to Horne when they worked together on Cabin in the Sky) employ a backing reminiscent of the great trio led by Horne’s friend Nat Cole. While guest pianist Billy Strayhorn completes the King Cole Trio allusion by comping behind Horne with Coleish block chords, an orchestra stays very piano in the background, excepting a standout trumpet solo by Joe Wilder.

By the fifties, Horne had close personal relationships with many of the great songwriters. As early as the thirties she was part of Duke Ellington’s inner circle, and through him she met Strayhorn (she described him as looking like “a beautiful brown owl”), who quickly grew closer to her than anyone. In addition to the songs he wrote for her, like “You’re the One,” she also recorded near-definitive readings of classic Strayhorniana like “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” The poignantly touching “You’re the One”(arranged by Joe Reisman), with its wonderfully descriptive (and “Lush Life”–like) verse, was not only written for her but, it seems, about her, and may best be interpreted as an expression of the bond between them. Perhaps in that same sense her romping treatment of Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” can be viewed as the result of her relationship with the Maestro. Although studio virtuoso Bernie Leighton played for Horne on “You’re the One,” Strayhorn himself plays on “Fun to Be Fooled,” “It’s Love,” and “Love Is the Thing.”

Horne’s career intersected with Harold Arlen at several points: When she first broke into the chorus line at the Cotton Club, Arlen was already the in-house songwriter at that legendary nitery. Ten years later, she recorded his “Stormy Weather” for the first time (for Victor) and when, several years after that, she starred in a Twentieth Century Fox musical using that same title, the song became the Lena Horne national anthem. Arlen also contributed songs to the MGM film of Cabin in the Sky, in which she made a notable impression as the heavy. (With Horne in the devil’s corner, the good guys haven’t got a prayer.)

Arlen does not seem to have been offended when, in 1946, Horne turned down the lead in his show St. Louis Woman; it was the book she rejected, not the score, and certainly not the composer. Though she declined to do the show, she later gave wonderful readings of its two best songs, “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” Horne and Arlen would get together on Broadway in 1957 for Jamaica, which featured the long-delayed debut of “Ain’t It the Truth,” which Arlen had written for both her and Louis Armstrong to sing in Cabin in the Sky, but which went unheard until Jamaica. That show was a hit, thanks mainly to Horne’s star power, but it wasn’t the Broadway blockbuster Arlen dreamed of (and ultimately never had). Much later, Horne’s positively sizzling treatment of “I’ve Got the World on a String,” another Cotton Club song, climaxed her 1976 Lena: A New Album.

Many of the composers whose works she exalted were, like Arlen, Ellington, and Strayhorn, personal friends. One of her very best albums, the 1959 Songs by Burke and Van Heusen, grew out of the relationship she and her second husband, Lennie Hayton, enjoyed with that songwriting team. Whereas Strayhorn was the great platonic love of her life, there’s little doubt that Hayton was closer to her than anyone else has ever been. By the time she became Mrs. Hayton, in 1950, Hayton had superseded Phil Moore as Horne’s key musical partner.

As her musical director, Hayton wrote outstanding charts for her and also commissioned other arrangers to do the same—like Ralph Burns, who came up with some brilliant writing on the Burke and Van Heusen album (especially “It’s Anybody’s Spring,” which buffets Horne’s chops with an especially springy flute solo by Phil Woods). Other Van Heusen songs abound in the Horne canon: “Darn That Dream,” on which, as free from shtick as ever, Horne sparkles especially brilliantly. “Dream” also testifies to the remarkable craft of the RCA engineers at this time—the amount of reverb with which they decorate her already shimmering voice is precisely perfect. Van Heusen’s “Come on Strong” isn’t one of his best melodies; the A sections are indulgently long and the payoff phrase at the ends of each section could be a little stronger—but Horne turns it into a tour de force of self-affirmation. (Something that she was amazingly good at, insecurities aside.)

Matty Malneck, another friend of Hayton’s from Paul Whiteman days, wrote “I’m Through with Love.” Horne and conductor Marty Gold take it much faster than usual, and observers will note that she’s in particularly excellent voice on this date. She doesn’t have to occasionally strain to reach any notes (she’s never been a vocal virtuoso); here they just seem to be waiting for her to hit them, like petunias in a flower box outside her window anticipating their inevitable plucking.

It’s hard to think of a major songwriter whose work Horne didn’t exalt. There are at least three near-definitive renditions of Gershwin biggies, beginning with a 1941 treatment of “The Man I Love,” which finds the young singer appropriately moon-faced and starry-eyed, while on her 1961 “Someone to Watch over Me” she seems acutely conscious of the consequences of allowing someone to watch over oneself—and of the consequences of not finding someone to perform said task. It’s an ever richer and more rewarding experience. Her “I Got Rhythm” of 1962 is particularly brilliant, as she avoids this very familiar tune itself and instead sings a countermelody in the foreground while the ensemble plays the original Gershwin line behind her.

These are just a few of the high points from the several hundred tracks she recorded for RCA over the decades. Beginning in 1963, she worked for a variety of other labels, including two film companies then getting into the LP racket, United Artists and Twentieth Century Fox. My favorite album of the sixties was the second of two that she made for the little known Charter label (both of which, fortunately, are available on a single CD from DRG Records), Lena Sings Your Requests and Lena Like Latin. The Latin (arranged by Shorty Rogers) album is a minor gem, showing that time is indeed one of her strengths. Here she catches the Latin groove, alternating between bossa nova and mambo (that is, between Brazilian and Cuban) like the accomplished master that she is. The set climaxes, for me anyhow, with “Island in the West Indies,” a neglected jewel introduced by Josephine Baker in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies whose Ira Gershwin lyric is as knee-slappingly funny as Vernon Duke’s melody is rhythmically contagious.

The other Charter album, Requests, alternates outstanding charts by another superb modern jazz arranger (Marty Paich) with some really tacky singles-like tracks aimed at the youth pop market, saturated with annoying 16th-note patterns (including a discothequey treatment of her immortal “Stormy Weather”). She fared better than many singers of her generation in the sixties, at least philosophically: The politics of the era made many other artists seem old-fashioned, but Horne, who had always stood in defiance of the racist status quo, at last seemed vindicated. In fact, she has written that one of the more personal consequences of the civil rights revolution in the sixties was that it gave her permission to go beyond her traditional role as a “symbol” of African American achievement. Now she considers herself “free merely to be human, free to speak frankly as an individual, not as an example, not as a ‘credit to my race.’ ” (The last phrase being a reference to Hattie McDaniel’s famous Oscar acceptance speech in 1939—for playing a maid in Gone With the Wind—and how several years later Horne became the first Hollywood black to appear, in Langston Hughes’s term, “without benefit of apron or bandana.”)

Still, at the close of the sixties, both her finest hour and her darkest moments lay ahead of her. In 1967, Billy Strayhorn died of cancer at the age of fifty-two, and his passing set the scene for the deaths of the three other most important men in her life: her father, her husband, and her son, who all died in 1970 or 1971. Not long after, however, she was on the road as half of a two-star show with longtime colleague Tony Bennett. He described her professionalism with a curious term: “frightening.” Bennett was amazed that even while she was recovering from such a tragic blow as the departure from her life of almost everyone she loved (only her daughter, Gail, remained to her), she still could go out and give a hundred percent every night. She may have been feeling incredible pain, but the crowds who paid good money to see her never knew it.

She adapted to changing times, back in those years when it was customary for show business veterans to refer to themselves as “survivors” and nearly every fifty-plus-year-old diva could have sung Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” (from Follies). One of her Twentieth Century Fox albums, Here’s Lena Now! circa 1965, had her essaying a butt-kicking, Basie-like version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But there was little that was notable for the next ten years. A one-shot project for the Gryphon label resulted in Watch What Happens! (1969), for which the jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo was billed as a collaborator (even though he doesn’t get a whole lot of solo space) and the outstanding jazz orchestrator Gary McFarland was at the podium. Alas, the album was a major disappointment: Horne could deal with inappropriate tunes or weak arrangements, but even she couldn’t contend with an entire album of both.

Yet she entered into a new winning streak starting with the 1976 Lena: A New Album, released around the time of her sixtieth birthday. It’s a career triumph for both Horne and her collaborator, the superb orchestrator Robert Farnon. The two of them stuffed the LP with the works of old friends like Strayhorn (a heart-stopping “Flower Is a Lovesome Thing”), Gershwin (an even better “Someone to Watch over Me”), and Arlen (that Cotton Club song, “I’ve Got the World on a String”). Unlike Szabo on the 1969 album, alto saxophonist Phil Woods is all over the place here. He starts “World on a String” with a ballad solo so strong that you fear for the sanity of any singer who tries to follow him, but Horne manages to wrest the crowd’s sympathies back just the same.

The major triumph of her later career was Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, the stage show that led to an equally successful double LP “original cast” album. Much of the album is good, but twenty-five years later a lot of it sounds much more dated than her forties and fifties recordings. Horne claimed to be playing herself here, but she also seems to be playing the role of angry black woman to the hilt, throwing in post–Aretha Franklin gospelisms of the kind that you don’t hear in any of her earlier work. It seems like a minor issue, but she even addresses her audience as “y’all,” and you wonder exactly when she lost her capacity for perfect English. At one point she tells the crowd, “I gotta right to be as trashy as I want whenever I want.”

Horne has released only five full-length albums since the show: The Men in My Life (1988), We’ll Be Together Again (1994), An Evening with Lena Horne (1995), Being Myself (1998), and the 2005 Seasons of a Life, which was drawn from previously unissued sessions done in the mid-nineties. They’re all excellent—the product of a woman whose recorded output was devoted, corny as it sounds, to the concept of quality over quantity. The first, done for the otherwise unknown Three Cherries label, has some dispensable songs and rockish arrangements but also some beautiful duets with Joe Williams and Sammy Davis Jr. (possibly his final recordings), while the other four packages, all done for Blue Note, are uniformly excellent. Horne sounds older than she did in the sixties, but one would never guess that she was pushing eighty. Not even Sinatra attempted so ambitious a project so late in life, featuring so many new songs and the backing of loose, mostly small group arrangements that leave the star vocalist with no place to hide.

In the middle of her Blue Note period, she appeared at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. She told the crowd that she was surprised to have been called for a Jazz Festival (apparently her first), and that she hoped producer George Wein didn’t expect her to become a jazz singer all at once. Whatever kind of singer she was, she sounded great. She had trimmed out the pseudo-soul excesses of the Lady and Her Music period and still had the energy and the drive of her fifties and sixties work. The album that will likely be her swan song, Seasons of a Life, concludes with what will probably be her final recording of “Stormy Weather,” and she has never sung it any better than she does here at age eighty-something.

Thus, at the point when Lena Horne believed that she had completed her social mission—to serve as a role model for black America—by the end of the sixties, her musical career was in a sense only beginning. The last fifteen years alone saw her four outstanding Blue Note albums, as well as a reexamination of her early work, both in film (as in 1994’s That’s Entertainment III) and recordings (2004 also saw the publication of the definitive Lena biography, James Gavin’s Stormy Weather). In 2000, EMI classics released Classic Ellington, a celebration of the Maestro’s music by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which featured two guest vocals by Horne. Assuming these were actually recorded in 2000, they qualify Horne as virtually the only leading jazz or pop vocalist to have recorded in eight decades, from the thirties to the millennium. It’s fitting that her final project involved her dear colleagues Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. She died in 2010—aged nightytwo—of a heart problem.

Most performers sing only with their voices, but Horne sang with her whole being: not only with her head and with her heart, but with her whole body. The flashing eyes, the graceful hands (whether clenched or unclenched, in motion or still), the commanding chin, the towering hair—even her teeth radiated with purpose. Like Sinatra, she inhabited a song and embodied it. The one time I was lucky enough to meet her in person, I was astonished to realize what a tiny woman she was close up, and how she made herself seem so much larger than life in performance through sheer willpower. She did the same thing with her voice: She never had the pure chops of Judy Garland or the miraculous musicality of Ella Fitzgerald, to name two of her peers, but she could take a tune and sell it like no one else. Sometimes even within the course of a single song she could be defiant and vulnerable, ecstatic and melancholy, serious and girlishly whimsical, seductive and spiritual.

We’ll let Ellington have the final word: Lena Horne, he once said, “is an American standard.”

Helen Humes (1909?–1981)

Surprisingly, there were several musical trends that Helen Humes was never involved with: She was never in a Broadway show, nor did she find fame in prewar Europe, like many of the black female singers from the generation immediately before her; and (paradoxically) unlike many ladies from the next generation, she was not specifically part of the church music or gospel movement.

But these are virtually the only aspects of African American music in which Helen Humes did not participate. In the twenties, she sang what later became known as classic blues, which was roughly the same idiom as Bessie Smith and the other Smith girls. In the late thirties, she established herself as one of the very finest of all female big band vocalists. In the forties alone, she worked in three different areas: the chichi New York nightclubs, the more visceral, hands-on jazz of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic company, and the even earthier strains of the brand of black pop that was about to erupt as rhythm and blues. That was all before the end of the 78 era and before Humes herself was even forty; she would spend the next thirty years exploring these genres—not in isolation from one another but rather by mixing them all together.

Through it all, Humes had a style that was at once sweet and swinging. Even more than Mildred Bailey, an obvious influence, Humes demonstrated how the act of creating jazz and blues could be a classically feminine, even dainty activity. She had a delicate squeak of a voice, yet far from tiptoeing through a song, she practically belts it out, making her understated and overstated, introverted and extroverted, subtle and in-your-face all at the same time. (Among many other things, she was the foremother of such cherubic cuties as Rose Murphy and Blossom Dearie.) Her feet were firmly planted in the blues even as her voice soared into the stratosphere; her style was perfectly described in a blues sung by her Basie band mate Jimmy Rushing: “Low and lean and built up from the ground.”

The best interview with Humes was conducted by Stanley Dance and included in The World of Count Basie. As she tells Dance, she did in fact start singing in church, and as a child, she played piano and sang in a Sunday school band. She said that she was born in Louisville on June 23, 1913, but scholars today, including Dan Morgenstern and Bob Porter, believe the actual year was more likely 1909, which makes her 1927 recordings more plausible.) Her family was part of the local gentry: Her father owned property and was one of the first black attorneys in Kentucky. In all her interviews and in every profile, she always stressed that she had a very happy childhood, and insisted on describing the rest of her life and her career the same way. (She would, however, have problems with alcohol and gambling.)

By the time she was twelve or thirteen, Humes was playing and singing on a semiprofessional level with several local bands of musical youngsters. She also performed at amateur shows, and at one of these was heard by a guitarist named Sylvester Weaver, who recorded for the Okeh Records’s “race” line, and who alerted his producer, future management giant Tommy Rockwell, about this remarkable young blues singer he had just heard in Louisville. Even at the height of what has become known as the “classic blues” era, good blues singers were at a premium. (As a result, many fairly dreadful singers were offered the chance to record, often with first-rate jazz musicians.)

In April 1927, when Humes was still only thirteen (or seventeen), Rockwell had her and her mother come to St. Louis, where Helen cut two sides, both credited to her as composer, “Black Cat Blues” and “A Worried Woman’s Blues.” In November, Rockwell brought the two Humeses up to New York, where Helen recorded an additional eight sides.

Was Helen Humes the Charlotte Church of the blues? Not exactly. Part of Church’s multiplatinum appeal is that she sounds like a very polished little girl, whereas there’s nothing about the ten sides Humes made in 1927 that gives even the slightest hint that the singer is below the age of consent. Age is never an issue with Humes—in fact, the longer she worked, the more she mastered the technique of bringing a childlike innocence to her singing, so that, essentially, the older she got the younger she sounded, and she was never more girlish than when she was in her sixties.

The ten 1927 sides are sterling examples of the classic blues genre near its zenith—she sounds so good she might well have changed her last name to Smith. Even in “Everybody Does It Now,” when she sings about how “Grandpa” is “putting new tunes in this old trombone” or how that venerated gentleman is “taking monkey glands” (a hormonal therapy that was the twenties equivalent of Viagra), she doesn’t miss a single subtlety. At thirteen and fourteen (or whatever), Humes was already competing in the big leagues.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t allowed to continue on this path—her mother insisted she go back to Louisville and finish school. By the time she graduated, the first “race” records boom was over. Humes went to work as a waitress, but happened to be visiting an old friend in Buffalo, New York, when said friend’s husband encouraged her to sit in with Buffalo bandleader (and future Ellington tenor) Al Sears. Humes spent her early twenties bouncing back and forth between her hometown and upstate New York, and also worked—again with Sears—at the Cotton Club in Cincinnati. She later told the story of how Count Basie heard her for the first time with Sears in Cinci, circa 1937, and tried to induce her to join him on the road, replacing the departing Billie Holiday. Unfortunately, the pay Basie was offering was the same as she was making with Sears, and she saw no reason to take to the road for the same amount of coin.

Later in 1937, Sears brought his band, including Humes, to New York, but soon after disbanded it, at which point he and she both joined the house band at the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem. By now, Humes had been heard by the eminent talent scout John Hammond, who seconded Basie’s notion that she was just right for the Count’s band. Just around the time she joined Basie, she was recruited, along with most of Basie’s key soloists, for several sessions produced by Hammond and starring trumpeter Harry James, at that time still a sideman with Benny Goodman. These dates include some of the best music of the swing era, with James and the Basie men completely inspiring each other—anticipating the day some twenty years later when James would lead a Basie-based band on a permanent basis.

In 1927, Humes was very nearly in the same class as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; by 1938 she’s worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. (She also had the good fortune to land four absolutely first-rate songs: “Jubilee,” “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” “Song of the Wanderer,” and “It’s the Dreamer in Me.”) Yet these are, in a sense, just a warm-up for the twenty-six superb sides she cut with Basie between 1938 and 1941. It’s instructive that the four James sides precede the twenty-six Basie titles, because they show us that it wasn’t merely the Basie platform that empowered Humes to become one of the swingin’est singers around. She was already deeply in the groove.

Humes recorded with Basie himself for the first time on an unusual Kansas City Six-style session in January 1938, semiprivately produced by Hammond, featuring trumpeter Buck Clayton and tenor saxophonist Lester Young. In his autobiography, Hammond writes of a rather elaborate ruse, involving an Apollo Theater amateur contest, that he concocted to shoehorn Humes into the band and not offend its resident singer, Jimmy Rushing. (This in itself is strange: Every band of the era had a female singer, as had Basie with Billie Holiday.) As she told Stanley Dance, “Jimmy Rushing sang all the blues and originals with the band, so I got mostly ballads and pop songs, some good, some not so good.” In 1974, she recorded the Rushing-Basie classic “Goin’ to Chicago” under the title of “Tribute to Jimmy Rushing.”

All the numbers Humes mentions in the interview are, in fact, very good: “Dark Rapture” (her first actual commercial record with the full band), the Johnny Mercer standard “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” and a number of songs associated with other bands and singers: “All or Nothing at All,” “And the Angels Sing,” the Ink Spots’ ”If I Didn’t Care,” “Moonlight Serenade,” as well as the song that soon became her own signature, “If I Could Be with You” On Glenn Miller’s theme, “Moonlight Serenade,” she sings the rather pedestrian lyric by Mitchell Parish, which Miller himself never recorded, and she and Basie also make Parish’s “The Moon Fell into the River” into a moony melody of considerable worth. There also were two specialty blues custom-made for her, “Sub-Deb Blues” (a societal predecessor to Rushing’s more collegiate “Harvard Blues”) and “My Wandering Man.”

Even more than her predecessor Billie Holiday, Humes was the note perfect female singer for the Basie organization, light on her feet and supremely swinging—the female vocal counterpart of Lester Young (who especially shines on the bridge to “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” immediately before Humes’s out chorus reentrance) or Sweets Edison. Basie was eventually able, if not to replace his great blues shouter Jimmy Rushing, at least to find in Joe Williams a successor worthy to fill Rush’s big shoes, but he never had another female vocalist who could live up to Humes. Practically no one else did, either.

All in all, it was a very satisfying three years that Humes spent with Basie. She said she left because “I got tired of doing the same songs year after year.” This statement is not supported by the song lists we have from records and broadcasts; however, the last session she recorded with Basie is a curious example of the negative results of singing the same song too many times. The first of the two songs is a typical swing era jive novelty entitled “It’s Square but It Rocks.” After singing two perfectly acceptable takes, Humes starts a third run-through, gets as far as the bridge, and then proceeds to forget the lyrics and completely mangles those words she does remember. It’s curious in that one imagines that Humes, or any other singer at a recording date, would have had the words in front of her when she sang. She returns for a fourth take, on which she gets everything right. As a parting joke, after finishing the four extant takes of “It’s Square but It Rocks,” Humes’s final Basie side is a ballad titled “I’ll Forget.”

Now on her own, Humes again trailed Holiday, this time from the Basie band to a solo spot at New York’s Cafe Society. She owed this gig at “the Right Place for the Wrong People,” as it was billed, to Hammond, who served as mentor and advisor for the club’s owner, Barney Josephson. There, she was accompanied by both Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum—as she put it, “That wasn’t bad at all!” New York was her home base for most of the war years, although she occasionally toured the South as a solo act. In 1944, she relocated to California, where Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe became the center of her activities for the remainder of the decade.

After Hammond and Granz, the next producer-benefactor to take an interest in Humes was Leonard Feather, who’d already written for her in the Basie period. While, unfortunately, Granz never did record her, Feather did, and was responsible for her first two post-Basie recording dates. These were done in early (preban) 1942 and late (postban) 1944, and both utilized a combination of swing, bop, and blues musicians. Feather and Humes brilliantly launched the singer’s solo career; Feather later wrote that, “with her high-pitched timbre and high spirits, Helen was a natural for the lighter side of the blues.”

The bulk of these numbers were, like “My Wandering Man,” written for her by Feather, although the funniest is “Fortune Teller Blues,” credited to “Coots and Davis.” Here, Humes pleads with a Gypsy fortune-teller to inform her as to “where my papa was last night/He plays hot fiddle in a band uptown/Oh tell me can it be that he’s been fiddlin’ around?” She’s particularly effective on the bridge, delivered in quasi–stop time, and then in an interjection near the climactic line, “Don’t tell him where I was!” No one else before Dinah Washington, who would emerge a few seasons later, could have delivered that line with exactly the right amount of urgency, lyricism, and humor as Humes does. The other prize of the two Feather dates is “Mound Bayou,” a poem by Andy Razaf set to music by Feather. As with the best of Willard Robison, both Razaf’s words and Humes’s interpretation take the considerably overused song peg of “going home to the South” and invest it with more poignancy than perhaps the genre deserves.

As it happens, the 1942 Feather session, done for Decca, would be Humes’s last for a major label for roughly thirty years, and the 1944 date, with a band billed as Feather’s Hiptet, would be her first commercial session under her own name since 1927. It was also the first of several dozen titles done for the independent labels (Savoy, Philo, Aladdin, Mercury, Modern, Discovery) that sprang up to service the “race” market with blues and jazz product in the immediate postwar years. (All of this material is included on a recommended three-CD box import, Helen Humes Complete 1927–1950 Studio Recordings, on the French label Jazz Factory; the set contains all her early recordings with the unfortunate exception of her Basie vocals. The addition of those would have made for a perfect four-CD collection.)

Between leaving Basie and the end of the 78 era, she recorded roughly fifty tracks, half of them salacious blues numbers (not all that different from her 1927 sides in terms of content) and half of them heartfelt ballads. For Humes, singing the blues means lots of different things. It means fast and snappy quasi-nonsensical things like “Be-Baba-Leba,” “Be Ba Ba Le Ba Boogie,” “Flippety Flop Flop,” and “Be-Bop Bounce.” (These songs were apparently written by passersby.) It means her classic double entendre theme blues, like “Airplane Blues” (“First he turns me over and he starts to loop the loop/It takes a long, long time before his wings begin to droop”), or even “Jet-Propelled Papa” (“He don’t need no refueling/He can even burn air”) and “They Raided the Joint,” where for once she isn’t singing about sex but describing the addictive effects of gambling and virtually every brand of cheap liquor known to man (Sneaky Pete is probably the classiest of the beverages that she lists). Likewise, on “Knockin’ Myself Out,” a tune similar to the Duke Ellington–Ivie Anderson “Killin’ Myself,” she expresses her determination to commit suicide one glass at a time, “gradually by degree.”

Humes contrasted her blues numbers with ballads. There’s even one 1948 date in which she’s backed up by a vocal group called the Contrastors (not the snappiest of names). The best titles from this period are those where she combines the power of the blues with the sensitivity of a love song, and this she achieves quite often, especially on “Today I Sing the Blues,” which she apparently co-composed with Curtis Lewis. “Every Now and Then” is the work of a different Lewis (Al), and she sings this 1935 song both so poignantly and yet so rhythmically that it became her most repeated signature after “If I Could Be with You.” (At the time she cut her second version of “Every Now and Then,” in 1961, she named it as her favorite song.)

In 1950, Humes briefly reunited with Count Basie; the renewed association left no recordings, but it did result in the major visual document of Humes, two Snader Telescriptions of her doing the standards “I Cried for You” and “If I Could Be with You” with Basie’s sextet, featuring Wardell Gray. Later that fall, she cut eight especially successful sides for Discovery: “Sad Feeling,” which commences with a wild, Johnny Hodges–ian blues wail from Marshall Royal, is one of her hardest-hitting blues, a composition and arrangement that sounds more the province of Dinah Washington, while the next number, Benny Carter’s “Rock Me to Sleep,” is a riff romper of the kind that Ella Fitzgerald frequently essayed. The next, “This Love of Mine,” is a love song associated with (and co-written by) Frank Sinatra.

Then, too, there are some Humes specialties she perfected in her thirties that she would keep singing for the rest of her life, especially her elaborate semicomic paean to relationships of extreme contrast (young-old, rich-poor, you get the idea), recorded both as “Helen’s Advice” and “Million Dollar Secret.” What she does best is revel in the dysfunction of love, both its comic and tragic implications, even celebrating such unconventional situations as menage-à-trois in “Married Man Blues” and another original she recorded under two titles, “He May Be Yours” and “He May Be Your Man.” Humes can be subtle even when she’s shouting, and the November 1950 session with tenor colossus Dexter Gordon spotlights the singer at her loudest—and most exuberant.

Her work in the album era is considerably quieter. She returned to the jazz-and-standards audience when, in the mid-fifties, Red Norvo invited her to tour Australia with his band as a de facto replacement for the vibraphonist-bandleader’s longtime collaborator—and Humes’s original inspiration—Mildred Bailey. Even better, RCA Victor had the brilliant idea of rerecording a number of classic Norvo-Bailey big band charts with Humes taking the vocals. The set was titled Red Norvo in Hi-Fi, and it was a blessing for all concerned.

Humes’s career hit its next of many high points between 1959 and 1961 when, in her mid-forties, she cut three wonderful LPs for Contemporary Records in Los Angeles: ’Taint Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do, Songs I Like to Sing!, and Swingin’ with Humes. The first positions the singer with three horns and three rhythm, and though two super arranger-conductors are playing, Benny Carter (here on trumpet and officially leading the sextet) and André Previn, there’s nothing in the proceedings to contradict annotator Nat Hentoff’s claim that the sessions were completely ad-lib. Songs I Like to Sing! sports Humes in a prom dress on the cover, and decked out with more formal but no less swinging arrangements within, the work of the brilliant Marty Paich. Swingin’ returns HH to the small group context, this time with a few more modern players.

The ad-hoc small group format was a distinct throwback to the thirties sessions of Mildred Bailey and Billie Holiday, a setup often credited to John Hammond. It works so well for Humes that one wonders why other pop-jazz singers of the fifties, such as Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan, used it so sparingly if at all. Their output was polarized between extremely small bands (trios) and extremely large ones (string orchestras), instead of finding the sweet spot in the middle, as Humes does.

Humes recaptures the upbeat spirit of the best small group swing and, like Bailey, thrives in a context in which her swingingly cherubic voice is juxtaposed against such soloists as Carter, tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards (on both albums), trombonist Frank Rosolino, and trumpeter Joe Gordon on a level playing field. She even swings “Someday My Prince Will Come,” something few other singers have ever tried, with Wynton Kelly, the pianist who had played it with Miles Davis a few months earlier. She’s especially impactful when radically reconfiguring the traditional phrasing on two twenties apostrophe songs, “I’m Confessin’ ” and “S’posin’.”

After the 1961 sessions, Humes, like many other singers of her generation, became rather scarce and wouldn’t be rediscovered for another twelve years (until she came, once again, to the attention of Barney Josephson and John Hammond). There were a lot of lean times in the interim. Her personal troubles are suggested by a headline in Jet magazine from 1953: “Singer Helen Humes arrested in gambling raid.” That she already had experience with such matters is indicated by one of her 1947 blues titles, “They Raided the Joint,” in which the lyric goes “They took everybody down but me/I was over in the corner just as high as I could be.” (Nor was she an innocent bystander; according to the Jet story, the Los Angeles police found “Miss Humes and five other women playing blackjack at a white-covered table.”) The cop who raided her joint was none other than Tom Bradley, the future mayor of Los Angeles. She had also developed a fondness for rye whiskey.

Humes had already created enough essential music for three careers, and she still had another twenty years to go. After another protracted absence from the studio, she cut ten more albums (mostly for various European and American independents), beginning in 1973. By now she had carved out yet another identity for herself, this time as a grand sexagenarian of swing. The later work features a lot of familiar material, as well as a singer with diminished vocal ability but an increased determination to put a song over. Oddly, the 1975 The Talk of the Town, which was the one album for a major label and her reunion with John Hammond, is not the high point of the later career. The sets she taped in France, like the earlier Let the Good Times Roll and Sneakin’ Around, are stronger, as are such later efforts as Helen Humes and the Muse All Stars, and her final album, the 1980 Helen.

Humes died in 1981 at the age of sixty-eight. Her work of the years 1973–81 essentially constitutes a fifth career (counting her 1927 juvenilia as the first), and any one of her five distinct bodies of work would be enough to earn her a place in the hall of fame. At every step in the evolution of jazz and the blues, Humes was able to communicate her message to a whole new generation of listeners. Thirty years after her death, it seems likely that her music will continue to speak to one new audience and generation after another.