If you don’t love Billie Holiday already, this should do it. For everyone else who knows what it is to be in her thrall, this will break your heart all over again. Lady Day in Paris, November 18, 1958, eight months before her death at age 44. She’s seen here on a French TV show called Music Hall Parade singing a tune by trombonist Trummy Young and arranger Jimmy Mundy, with lyric by Johnny Mercer. She introduced it in 1942 with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and due to contractual obligations, appeared on the Capitol 78 as “Lady Day.”
Billie’s final European tour included appearances in Milan and Paris. Both were poorly received, and when the Paris engagement at the Olympia was cancelled, she was reduced to singing for the door at the Blue Note and Mars nightclubs on the city’s right bank. The novelist James Jones was in Paris at the time, and he’s quoted in Stuart Nicholson’s biography, Billie Holiday. “She had been giving some concerts in Paris theaters,” said Jones, “but we had been warned off going to them because she wasn’t up to her best, so we only saw her at the Blue Note. She wasn’t holding her liquor well by this time…The club owner had given his bartenders strict orders not to serve her any booze, and while all of us knew this, nobody had the guts to tell her.”
Today is Billie’s 101st birthday anniversary. In many respects, she was her own worst enemy, but fate often seemed like a co-conspirator. Lady Day didn’t write “Trav’lin’ Light,” but Johnny Mercer didn’t have to look any further than her then 27-year-life to shape the song’s poignant narrative. I think of “Trav’lin’ Light” as the equal of “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit,” “Don’t Explain,” or other tunes that vied as her signature song. Here she sings it with her last accompanist, the jazz piano legend Mal Waldron.