Religion Around Billie Holiday by Tracy Fessenden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religion Around Billie Holiday by Tracy Fessenden Brett Grainger Religion Around Billie Holiday. By Tracy Fessenden. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018. 280 pp. $34.95. Few jazz artists have attracted more mythology than Billie Holiday, the legendary singer whose technical ability, iconoclastic sound, and notorious personal life made her arguably the most popular vocalist of her day. In Religion Around Billie Holiday, Tracy Fessenden works to free Holiday from the romantic myth that argues that the height of her artistry was somehow dependent upon the depth of her misery (a string of abusive boyfriends, drug addiction, incarceration) or, better, to demonstrate how Holiday could be both a victim of a racist, misogynist culture, and also a resilient agent who cannily participated in her own mythmaking. [End Page 86] The book is the latest entry in Penn State Press's "Religion Around" series, which examines "the religious forces surrounding cultural icons," rather than offering straight-up biographical narratives. As Fessenden writes, her entry focuses "not on Holiday's religious practice or expression but on the environing religious conditions to which her genius responded, and in which her life and sound took form" (4). Fessenden's chapters trace in heightened detail the multiple religious currents in which Holiday was formed and reformed. The first chapter, "Religion Around," outlines the American civil religion of the early twentieth century, one that was "broadly Protestant in tenor and emancipatory tilt." Through a comparison of two biographies—Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues and Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow—Fessenden shows how Holiday spurned the self-congratulatory anthem of Cold War America, which sent jazz musicians abroad as ambassadors of freedom, while forcing the same black musicians to live under Jim Crow at home. Chapter two, "True Confessions," filters Lady Sings the Blues through two genres of spiritual autobiography known to Holiday: Catholic hagiography and the popular tabloid. The third chapter, "The Story of Jazz," highlights what Fessenden calls the "Spanish tinge," the Afro-Cuban melodies and tonal structures that migrated into the ports of New Orleans and Baltimore where they mingled with blues and other musical traditions. "Crossing Jordan" tracks Holiday's emergence from the intersection of African American and Jewish cultural experience: the "marriage between Delta blues and Tin Pan alley," which produced the American songbook tradition of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Abel Meeropol's "Strange Fruit," which became Holiday's talisman. Resisting the longstanding habit of opposing Holiday's blues with the boyish grin of Louis Armstrong, Fessenden reveals the latter's persona to be a form of "Jewish stagecraft," a "production of joy" influenced by his own intimate experience of American Jewish life. The final chapter, "Our Lady," focuses on what Fessenden considers Holiday's most formative religious environment, "the urban, pre–Vatican II Catholicism that undertook to reform her." Holiday's early Catholic formation consisted of several stints at a Baltimore girls' school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, one of two African American orders of Catholic nuns in the United States, and eleven months in the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a convent reformatory to which she was committed by a court at the age of nine and again two years later. As Fessenden argues, the House of the Good Shepherd was the place where Holiday "learned to arrange the jagged pieces of her life as matters of eternal consequence, where her wounded spirit was made the subject of confessional performance, and where, in [End Page 87] the course of this self-culture, she received dedicated practice and instruction in singing" (75). By imprinting the model of female Catholic sanctity at mid-century—especially the newly sainted Thérèse of Lisieux, who Holiday revered—Holiday built the persona of a suffering, sainted singer. Fessenden reveals a woman who worked to leverage the trap that she was in, without ever being able to escape it. A hungry, centrifugal curiosity animates Fessenden's writing. At times, her sense of "religion around" seems capacious enough to include nothing less than America itself. The danger of shooting with a panoramic lens is that, while seeking out broader sightlines, you...