Billie (Salvation Through Song)
When I struggled out of the locker room the two women were standing in the hallway as if they were waiting for someone. I’d seen them earlier in the pool. “I like your shirt,” grinned the younger, slender, dark-haired. Her mother, with the jaunty hat, looked brightly up from her wheelchair, exclaiming just half a breath behind, “Billie Holiday!” I paused to let them admire it. “Years ago,” I said, “I was outside Paris, in the courtyard at Versailles. There were two pretty French girls looking my way, grinning, pointing, waving. I was charmed and flattered, and then a little deflated when I realized it was Billie they were impressed with, not me.” The younger one said, soothingly, “Oh, I’m sure that wasn’t all of it.” “You chose to wear the shirt,” her mother sagely pointed out. “Maybe so.” I smiled, bid them take care, tottered toward the elevators.
It’s my favorite picture of Holiday. Not one of the classic gardenia portraits. This is the one by Gottlieb, 1947. You’ve seen it – she has her head tilted back, eyes shut, mouth open. You can just about feel the vibration from her voice. I have two of those shirts, bought around the same time, so maybe the one I was wearing the other day at the rehab gym isn’t exactly the same one I had on at Versailles twenty-seven years ago. But it might be.
Many of my favorite songwriters are women but I’m finicky about women singers. The soprano voice does not transport me, as it does so many. I vastly prefer Joni Mitchell’s singing on Travelogue where the voice is deeper, smokier, wearier than when those songs were first recorded. I’m not a fan of Blue, which many people revere; her young soprano sounds thin and screechy and distracts me from the language. Operatic sopranos leave me cold, but there are mezzos I can listen to. I admire Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, but it's an intellectual admiration, respect for their body of work. They’ve rarely grabbed me viscerally. Few jazz singers do, Cassandra Wilson and Melody Gardot being exceptions. The welling in my chest responds to blues, Americana, rock – singers with some growl in their voice. Nothing too pretty.
Holiday is a thing unto herself, of course. It’s a weakness in the way we use language to call her a jazz singer. So limiting. You might as well call Lucinda Williams a jazz singer. The way her voices and phrasings have become increasingly stylized over the years makes her instrument a great fit with Charles Lloyd’s saxophone on that Marvels album. And what could be more Americana in the heart than Billie singing “Strange Fruit”? We establish these category boxes because that’s what humans do in order to impose enough artificial order on the world to make it possible to live with the chaos of true reality. And then come the great artists to blow those categories up. What in the world is it that Billie does when she opens her mouth, closes her eyes, tilts her head back that way? Where does she go, what does she do that she is able to gather what she brings back?
Lynn and I live a happily isolate life these days, but I enjoyed my little encounter with the two women. Almost like small talk, which I’ve never been any good at. I like my isolation, but it’s good for me to be reminded that I can enjoy interacting with people. Occasionally. In small doses. As long as I know I can escape when I need to.
There were times in my life when the thought of becoming a monk was tremendously appealing. The hermits were always my favorite characters in the Bible – scratching a tenuous existence amidst the beauties of the desert, devoted to meditation and opening oneself up to the glories of God. I didn’t consider my lack of religious faith to be a disqualification. In any case my desires were more monkish than hermit-ish. I’d want the books, the parchment, the quill, the lion at my feet. I read Merton and fantasized about doing a retreat somewhere. I never got close to seriously investigating the possibilities, although I knew modern America holds plenty of options for those with the strong desire to get away from the incessant banging on the skull that is the modern world, if only for a week or two. But I was far too busy to do more than fantasize. So it is with some bemusement that I see how much my present life, as I enter the sixth year of my retirement, resonates with that old monkish dreamlife.
The goal of the seeker is to eliminate as far as possible the distractions of daily life in order to touch the reality behind mundane appearance. The quest plays out in different ways, but in all cultures. For the anchorites of the Old Testament, reality was a mighty and demanding and jealous God, source of all creation. For Chuang-tzu it was the Tao, the ever flowing movement of being. For the people of the Great Plains, Crazy Horse on his vision quest, it was the melding of his consciousness with all that exists in the natural world.
The great singers are on the same quest, though their means are so very different. It’s madness to use language to try touching the realities that exist outside of language. I love the quintessentially human foolishness of it. We turn to song, just as the ancients did, to get further than words alone can take us as we try to talk about the things that are essential to being, but impervious to being talked about. (The Nobel Committee recognized that in their finest expression songs are the fundament of literature). On the surface, the song that Billie sings is just a sweet simple ballad, but as Prez’s saxophone floats beneath the eerie tremor of her voice, she layers lifetimes of passion, love, loss, loneliness, hope and the joy of deep human connection into a three minute recording, just the way those elementals are layered in the way love lives in our lives. The song is a conduit. Nothing simple about it.
Such a scary place to be, filling yourself with that intensity, delivering it to one listener or to thousands. The singer starts at the surface of the song and with timbre and tone and timing, teases it apart. The song doesn’t really exist until the singer opens herself into it. Then the listener’s heart beats faster, suddenly there are unbidden tears of emotion, an overpowering flood of memory and hope. To create that, the singer has to give themselves completely to the song, a fresh quest every time. The singer does that hard and terrifying work for the listener. When the listener’s had enough, they can lean back with a sigh and continue on the path of their days.
When the singer’s had too much, where does she get to go? How does she find her way out of what burns with the intensity of the individual moments of existence? Her reality is a mirror image of that of the listener. She can only briefly spend time in the mundane world before she has to go back and open her mouth and feel, as her breath reaches in and out, the flow of all the hurt and marvelous wonder her songs contain. The further she goes in, the harder it is to come back. We know what happened to Billie Holliday.
My own life has been a struggle to keep a connection to the ineffable without losing myself in it. (My mother used to worry about that for me). Art wasn’t a means of self-expression as much as a path toward self-exploration. By writing, by making music, I was taking steps on the path of my own vision quest. But in the later years of my first marriage I’d stepped off. I’d become unbalanced, too occupied with the responsibilities I’d taken on in the real world. There was a veil, I felt, keeping me apart from the ineffable reality. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t find my way to it anymore. When the marriage crumbled and I started singing again, the veil came apart, I stepped back on my path.
It’s only recently that it’s started to seem funny to me (in the odd, not the amusing, sense) that I’ve generally referred to my avocation as being a guitar player rather than a singer. During the decade plus that I had the guitars and amps and microphones set up in the basement, I’d holler to Lynn as I started down the stairs, “I’m going down to play guitar!” But it was the singing that mattered more to me. The guitar was the tool, the tether, the anchor, the boat.
I was never one of those obsessive amateurs trying to copy the exact picking patterns of the recordings I was learning songs from. I didn’t have a particularly good ear, and not much technique. I didn’t hang out with guitar players, trading secrets. When I was fifteen, maybe, a friend showed me how to do a three finger picking pattern and I worked off of that for the next forty years. I managed something close to the recording on “Needle and the Damage Done”; I had a nifty little arrangement of “Landslide” that was based on the concert versions Buckingham recorded long after the original. I had a faithful rendition of Taylor’s picking of “Fire & Rain”. But mostly I just looked for chord progressions and rhythm patterns that gave me the platform for what I really wanted to do, which was to find my way into singing the songs.
In 2004, Elvis Costello released The Delivery Man, an album recorded in Clarksdale, where I’d recently been making pilgrimages. I hadn’t written a song in a decade and didn’t expect to have any inclination to ever write one again. But I was playing out a lot, solo stuff around town and a few times a year around the country with the Bearded Pigs. I latched on to the title of Costello’s album. I’m a delivery man, I thought. Figuring out how to deliver a song finer that it’s ever been delivered to you before; digging into its corners and shadows and rhythms and beats to deliver an experience truer to the essence of the song than even the songwriter knew was there.
No one is better at this than Bettye LaVette. Watch her sing the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors. Pete looks on somber, alternately nodding and shaking his head; this is the emotion he put deep into the song. Roger looks shell-shocked; my god, he thinks, so that’s how it was meant to sound. I’ve been doing it wrong all these years! In 2012 I saw her at the Café Carlyle, a tiny room in Manhattan, where she broke every song open, turned it inside out, found new layers, new notes, new tempos, new colors, wrestling it away from every other version that’d ever been done, making it brand new. LaVette’s singing is an act of courage, an act of grace, an act of humility and bravado, an act of redemption.
I wanted to do that so much more than I wanted to perfect some slick and impressive finger-picking pattern.
Which is just as well, since six months after the Café Carlyle the short-circuit in my spinal cord put an end to any finger-picking at all. I can still kinda form chords. I can strum, downstroke only (it baffles me that I can’t do the upstroke). I’ve figured out ways to rearrange songs to suit my infirmities. I’m a better singer now than I ever was, weakened diaphragm notwithstanding. I think about Jessica Lange, getting ready to play Mary Tyrone on Broadway, sixteen years after playing it the first time – “I have so much more loss to work with.” The artist finds her way into the desolation and the art helps her find her way back. For the singer, it’s the song that’s your raft, carries you out if you trust it, trust yourself to trust it enough. Your tongue caresses the syllables, but you’re singing with your whole body, all your memories and hopes. All the joys. All the loss. What it takes to reach into the ineffable and deliver it.
You’ve seen pictures of St. Jerome in his study. His books are piled around him, he leans over the parchment, pen in hand. The lion is dozing near his feet. In the version that places me in the picture, there’s a couple of harmonicas laying haphazardly on the writing table, and a Telecaster standing an arm’s length away. Every so often, he looks up from his writing, he needs a break. He stretches his back, rolls his shoulders, reaches for the Telecaster. The amp screeches when he turns it on. He fastens the thumbpick, clumsily strums the chords. He sings.