A Right to Sing the Blues

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (250 pp.) -Billie Holiday with William Duffy -Doubleday ($3.75).

"Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three." With this beginning, Billie Holiday, a singer who broke the hearts of a generation of jazz lovers, sets out to reveal what lies behind the blues -or at least her blues. Before she is through, she has lined out some bitter truths about being a Negro in the U.S. and some that are not too sweet about being a narcotics addict.

Billie Holiday was a "hip kitty," so she says, practically from the time she was born, 41 years ago, in a Baltimore slum. At six she was running errands for the girls in a local brothel so she could listen to their parlor phonograph. At 13 she had a police record already behind her. In New York she began her singing career. But that did not end her wayward life.

In the mid-30s, when she went on the road with Count Basie's band, Billie began to find out about life and "ofays."* Life: "Living on the road with a band, nobody had time to sleep alone, let alone with somebody . . . We'd pull into a town . . . take a long look at the bed, go play the gig [date], come back and look at the bed again, and then get on the bus." Ofays: "They told Basie I was too yellow to sing with all the black men in his band. Somebody might think I was white . . . So they got special dark grease paint and told me to put it on . . ."

Billie had already gone through an expensive "cure" to kick the narcotics habit when she was arrested and convicted in Philadelphia on a dope-possession charge, and sent to prison. Less than a year after her release, she was arrested again -and acquitted -in California. The way she tells it, the deck was stacked against her. "When I was on [dope], nobody gave me any trouble," she says. "I got into trouble when I tried to get off." She was arrested last winter again in Philadelphia, where the trial is still pending. And there her story ends.

Lady Sings the Blues has the tone of truth. Whether it is Singer Holiday's own style or Journalist-Friend William Dufty's professional hand, the book's deadpan manner is a little chilling. No matter how it is told, hers is a chilling story. Billie sings a sad, sad song.

* Pig Latin for "foes," a Negro word for white people.

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