Ian Penman in Harper’s Magazine:
Early on in Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:
Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and clubs and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever. But you can call the roll of the wonderful joints that thrived before repeal in 1933—they’re mostly memories now: Basement Brownies, the Yea Man, the Alhambra, Mexico, the Next, the Clam House, the Shim Sham, the Covan, the Morocco, the Spider Web.
Get a load of those names! So evocative of a vanished world of bathtub gin, sweat-soaked tuxedos, small clubs fogged with high-tar cigarette smoke. You can taste the sin and glamour on the tip of your dehydrated tongue. For Holiday this was recent history, to us as distant as chain mail and apothecaries. The world that shaped her may have ebbed to a soft faraway glow, but Billie still feels contemporary, a presence in the room.
Why do we honor her changeable shade? Lady Sings the Blues remains in print today, and the flood never abates: more documentaries, more biopics, more biographies. Just by being herself she undoes all manner of oppositional hinges. Angel of history and a woman wronged. Queen of elegance and jailed addict. Regal and haughty but never a diva. She was reportedly something of a tomboy as a child and then later “one of the boys” when on the road with various swing-era bands and orchestras: fighting, swearing, drinking, gambling. She took male and female lovers, guiltlessly, without ever making a fuss.
More here.