April, North Carolina: Voltage Records / Lady Sings the Blues

Asheville, North Carolina reminds me of Portland, Oregon in the late 1990s. 

Research independent bookstores in Asheville and the question comes back: Are you looking for a feminist bookstore? An anarchist bookstore? One that serves wine? Are you looking for a bookstore that sells coffee? A coffee shop that sells books? (Cue Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.)

When I moved to Portland in the late 90s, people would say to me: Huh…why Portland? Just a few years later, the nation was a bit more aware of the city. (I will claim little to no credit for that.) Walking around Asheville gives me that vibe… a smaller city that’s got a good thing going and would be happy enough to keep it a secret.

Smack in the center of town there’s a warehouse-sized resale shop, where you can browse a few dozen old typewriters, vintage movie posters from the 70s and 80s (remember Krull?), and more crates of records than one could reasonably flip through in a day. 

It says something about a city when a junk shop can afford prime real estate…and when enough people shop there that it can remain afloat.

So much to love in Asheville. I was particularly taken with the Pinball Museum, where you pay a flat fee and are allowed to go nuts on some vintage pinball machines as well as some 80s classics.

And, yes, there are record stores. Lots to choose from. More or less arbitrarily, I went with Voltage Records. I suppose the cool t-shirts in the window won me over.

Hard not to like this place. Terrific selection…and every poster and record sleeve tacked on the wall suggested a cultivated sense of cool. It made me think of Ferris Beuller’s bedroom, where you want to pause the movie and stare at every last thing.

I bought a Billie Holiday record.

And now: here’s how dumb I am.

I already liked Billie Holiday. In my mind, she occupies a similar space as Ella Fitzgerald. Jazzy, bluesy vocals that at once are gutsy and elegant. If I had to offer a quick distinction between those two singers, I would’ve said Billie Holiday is a bit darker. If pressed to say why, I would’ve tried to say something about the song “Strange Fruit.”

I knew that David Sedaris does a shockingly spot-on impression of her. I knew that listening to her while drinking coffee on a Sunday morning is a pleasant thing to do. My knowledge more or less ended there. 

I can now report I am just a smidge smarter in the Billie Holiday department.

The record I picked up, Lady Sings the Blues, recorded in 1956, came out at a later and darker phase of her career. The first line on the back of the sleeve is: The mid-fifties were troubled times for Billie.

This record, it turns out, was essentially released as an accompaniment to an autobiography by the same name. One of those autobiographies that are openly ghost-written.

Here's the ghost:

I borrowed a copy of the book from my library. It's based on a series of conversations between Billie Holiday and William Dufty, and it reads like that in a good way: breezy and conversational. You feel as if she is talking to you, and she speaks casually, without a shred of self-pity, about being arrested for prostitution at age 15...about other stints in jail...about various drug "cures" that never quite took. As I learned from a BBC documentary: Even before the book came out, Billie was arrested for the third time for drug possession. This time for heroin and cocaine.

Drug use is firmly a part of Billie Holiday's story. The 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross (as well as Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor), opens with Billie shoved into a padded jail cell, hooked on heroin and sweating out her demons. Of Diana Ross’s performance, Roger Ebert wrote:

“…within the first three or four minutes of "Lady Sings the Blues", I was left with a feeling of complete confidence in a dramatic performance. This was one of the great performances of 1972.”

Ebert was not alone in thinking so. Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar, though she lost out to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. 

I was tempted to write: Twitter would've loved that...but then this was the Oscars ceremony when Sacheen Littlefeather refused Marlon Brando's award on his behalf.

I also got the movie from my library. 

(Here's the book, the movie, and my cat, who really wanted in on this.)

As for the record, the consensus is that her voice is strained. Still striking, but not quite what it once was. Her range had narrowed. Her voice seemed troubled.

All true, I’m sure. But exactly how untroubled do we want a blues song to sound? And more than a half-century later, "Strange Fruit" is still bone-chilling. It often can feel like a letdown to learn that an iconic song was not written by the singer who made it famous. For me, though, the depth of "Straight Fruit" only increases as you learn more about the song's author, Abel Meeropol.

I will admit that when I first dug into this record and learned where it fell within her career, I thought: Crud, should I have picked up an earlier recording?

The more time I’ve spent with it, the happier I am that I ended up with this one. Billie Holiday's story is no less tragic for seeming a bit predictable. It's hard to imagine an artist like her getting to live in peace. What's surprising, and actually inspiring, about her story is how she refused to be joyless. She was determined to have fun. And she did. With men. With women. With whatever pleasure that was on offer, and when it wasn't on offer, she made it herself. In her autobiography, she recalls being locked up and under a constant, watchful eye. She knew a bit about making whiskey out of rice, but she knew that any missing rice would be noticed. So she concocted some whiskey out of discarded potato peels.

If Lady Sings the Blues is a dark record, you could almost not notice it. Joy keeps bubbling up to the surface. I'm glad that I learned a few things about it, and I'm also glad to have landed in the same spot: listening to this on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee is a pleasant thing to do.