|
|
||
Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting new life of Billie Holiday is told in the voices of those who knew her.
'She couldn't do enough for the men she loved, or even her friends. She
spent a large portion of the money she earn on heroin, but she also spent
a lot on down-and-out friends…Billie was, with all her weaknesses,
an honest person'
Trummy Young, trombonist
Read this critically acclaimed book to rediscover the legend that was Billie Holiday:
'Julia Blackburn…has contributed much to the legacy of a remarkable human being' New Statesman
'Often books about jazz musicians make the mistake of over-focusing on the music. Blackburn is more interested in Billie as a person' Guardian
'This is a really marvellous book, the most uninhibitedly intimate portrayal ever of the short, hard life and overall musical triumph of Lady Day' Spectator
'Julia Blackburn has an extraordinary talent for thinking herself into other worlds…So vivid are her conjurings of lives lived elsewhere or long ago, you begin to suspect she sees ghosts' Evening Standard
'This is a raw, true book that evokes not just the life of the great singer Billie Holiday but an entire jazz era' Mail on Sunday
'Nowhere else is the context of her life and work so vividly captured'
Toni Morrison
'Billie Holiday was - and is - a singer who stays in the mind of everyone
who heard her. Like all jazz musicians, she sang about who she was at
the moment and during all that preceded that moment. Julia Blackburn's
With Billie tells Billie's own storie of that life, and this book becomes
part of the music'
Nat Henhoff
'At last, a portrait of the artist and person called Billie Holiday.
This extraordinary book completes her story.'
Mike Figgis
Billie Holiday on the web
