A shoebox of interviews with Billie Holiday’s associates has uncovered a wealth of details about the jazz singer’s life, writes Gerald Isaaman

Singing the Blues for Billie by Julia Blackburn
Jonathan Cape, £17.99

FOR some she is sheer magic, a melancholy voice and sexual symbol that yanks at the soul.
Others shrug their shoulders, moan and ask what all the fuss is about.
That’s the ambivalent world of Billie Holiday. Her tragic life story has been romanticised into triumph.
She is upheld as Lady Day, the destitute kid from Philadelphia who made it, at 14, to Harlem’s junkie background of drugs, booze, prostitution, violence, crime and rampant racism to become idolised as America’s first queen of jazz.
She has already been the subject of numerous graphic biographies, notably Donald Clarke’s Wishing on the Moon, published a decade ago, as well as one movie which pulled out all the sentimental stops.
Here is a new one. And it’s different and tragic in its own right, since Julia Blackburn, as she announces from the start, is following in the remarkable footsteps of Linda Kuehl, a devoted Holiday admirer who wanted to create a book herself.
During the 1970s she went out on a mission to interview and tape record more than 150 people who ever knew anything about her treasured Billie, creating a remarkable archive of voices she stuffed into two shoe boxes.
Along with that she created a hoard of private letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings, police files and even hospital records relating to Billie that included her shopping lists and drunken notes left to her secretary.
Her tribute to Billie never materialised, despite the efforts of two publishers, her manuscript left unfinished when she set off to see a Count Basie concert in January 1979, amid a snowstorm, and ended up killing herself by jumping from a third floor hotel bedroom.
It is that mass of material that biographer and novelist Blackburn has used for the basis of her resurrection of Billie’s beautiful and brutal life, bringing to it her own love of jazz, inspired from the day, also aged 14, she first heard her sing at a party. “She sounded as brave as a lioness and yet she also sounded as fearful as a child,” Blackburn recalls.
And her warmth and empathy counts as the story unfolds of Billie’s grim and extraordinary life on the edge, lifting her out of the Hollywood stereotype into raw and remarkable reality.
It is a devastating social history too. One that ought not to make America proud of how it treated its native inheritance of black musicians, the narcotics squad and racists always on their back as they explored their great creative and technical skills to produce music that remains sublime.
Writing about jazz is not easy if people don’t understand its anarchic rhythms.
It’s the music that moves you. It’s the beat that stirs your veins, the sound of those moaning saxes, shining trumpets and the soft, searing and sensuous voice of Lady Day, amid the haze of smoke and alcohol, that shamelessly touches the soul.
Sometimes it’s as if it all belongs to a different world that words cannot always reach.
And there are parts of this admirable and potently sensitive addition to the Billie Holiday saga, unhappily without any photographs, that equally sag.
The simple fact is that Blackburn is unable to write about Billie and her music, unable to discuss her performances, her exemplary skills as a musician so brilliantly able to infuse standard songs with an intonation and style that remains unique and supreme.
Given that she has captured so much, perhaps we ask too much. So put on a Billie disc and listen to that yearning voice sing I Cried for You.