With Billie - Softcover

Blackburn, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099483653 ISBN 13: 9780099483656

Publisher: Vintage, 2006

Synopsis

Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting book is a life of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz.

Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim of her own vices. These intimate stories give us a much deeper picture of her personality - we witness scenes from her chaotic childhood; we see her when she first arrives in Harlem at the age of fourteen; and we follow her through her rise to fame and into the notoriety that came so close on its heels.

Billie's friends and lovers and fellow musicians talk about her troubles and her addictions, but they also have a lot to say about her warmth and her courage, and the ones who were really close to her understood that although she had a lot of men and drugs and booze in her life, all that really mattered was the singing.

About this title

Product Description:

A biography of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz.

Review:

"Julia Blackburn's book gives a far more complete idea of Holiday as an artist than anything else I have read" (Guardian)

"This is a raw, true book that evokes not just the life of the great singer Billie Holiday but an entire jazz era.... Blackburn's compelling tale is of whores, drug-pushers, bent policemen and crooked lawyers as well as brilliant musicians, and she brings alive everything she touches" (Mail on Sunday)

"This addition to the tide of Billie Holiday books is extremely welcome. Nowhere else is the context of her life and work so vividly captured" (Toni Morrison)

"Full of vigour and colour...Ms Blackburn's portrait of a unique artist is moving, revealing and quite unforgettable" (Economist)

"Julia Blackburn...has contributed much to the legacy of a remarkable human being" (New Statesman)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0099483653
• ISBN 13: 9780099483656
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368