LADY SINGS THE BLUES
With author Paul Alexander in-person with his new biography of Billie Holiday, Bitter
Crop
Sunday, March 24th at 2:30 PM
Inlcudes post-film discussion and Q&A
Lady Sings the Blues (1972)
Pop superstar Diana Ross portrays legendary jazz singer Billie
Holiday in this powerful biographical drama. Beginning with Holiday's
traumatic youth, the film depicts her early attempts at a singing career and
her eventual rise to stardom, as well as her difficult relationship with Louis
McKay (Billy Dee Williams), her boyfriend and manager. Casting a shadow
over even Holiday's brightest moments is the vocalist's severe drug addiction,
which threatens to end both her career and her life. (USA, 1972, 142 mins,
R, English | Dir. Sidney J. Furie)
Bitter
Crop: The Heartache And Triumph Of Billie Holiday's Last Year from author Paul Alexander is a
revelatory look at the tumultuous life of a jazz legend and American cultural
icon.
In
the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul
Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives
us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer.
He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to
provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s
artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse,
relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law. During her lifetime
and after her death, Billie Holiday was often depicted as a down-on-her-luck junkie
severely lacking in self-esteem. Relying on interviews with people who knew
her, and new material unearthed in private collections and institutional
archives, Bitter Crop—a reference to the last two words of Strange
Fruit, her moving song about lynching—limns Holiday as a powerful,
ambitious woman who overcame her flaws to triumph as a vital figure of American
popular music.
“A book written as only one artist could view another, with insight and
sincere compassion.” —Sandra Cisneros, best-selling author of Woman
Without Shame
