Tracy Fessenden, Religion around Billie Holiday

Abstract

American Religion 27, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 152–154 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.10 Book Review Tracy Fessenden. Religion Around Billie Holiday (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018) Hannah C. Garvey Indiana University, Bloomington, USA “You do things in a beautiful way…” In Religion Around Billie Holiday, Tracy Fessenden asks readers to ­ consider what they can hear around Billie Holiday. How might one describe those impressions and remembrances? The jazz musician Charles Mingus referred to Holiday’s “elegance” (90). Holiday’s quasi-biographer William Dufty, describing her certainty that even after her death, “as long as language endures,” people would still listen to and be moved by her music, wrote: “Call it arrogance, serenity, hallucination, there it was” (90). Holiday’s friend and accompanist Bobby Henderson was captivated by her grace. When the two went out together, Henderson would look at Holiday and think: “You do things in a beautiful way” (90). These beautiful ways of Billie Holiday guide Fessenden through this third volume in the Religion Around series from Penn State University Press. While Fessenden’s work is steeped in Holiday’s “beautiful ways,” this book is less a biography of Billie Holiday’s religiosity than a revelatory model for the study of American religions. In Fessenden’s own words, “Religion Around Billie Holiday is not a brief for Holiday’s piety or impiety, her importance to religious history, or her prophetic voice for civil rights” (4). It is instead a study of the “spiritual weather through which Billie Holiday moved and still moves (as sound, Hannah C. Garvey 153 image, words, memory, desire)” (4). Fessenden taps into the elusive powers that surrounded Billie Holiday as she lived and performed in twentieth-century America. She weaves a picture of how Holiday interacted with these various powers and how they may have interacted with her. In this way, Fessenden’s method is less an investigation of a particular American figure and more a window into a particular American moment. While other reviewers of Religion Around Billie Holiday have lamented that Holiday is not more prominent, I am convinced that Fessenden’s work truly shines in tacking between Holiday and her American context(s), using the method of “around” to provide a much more whole vision of Holiday and of America. As Holiday’s friend and accompanist Teddy Wilson notes of the Hollywood version of Holiday’s pseudo-autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday was not a “wholly singular, unique” being. She was really “Billie Holiday only in the company of other musicians” (192). Holiday is Holiday in context, and Fessenden wants to tell that story, the story of Billie Holiday as inextricably wound with negotiations of what it is to be in and of America. Totellastory“around”–toattendtoitsmultiplicities–canbecomplicated,but Fessenden deftly threads readers through five chapters centering black American music and performance, American Catholicism, American jazz, American Judaism, and American heroin(e)-ism, using Holiday as both her needle and buoy. With John Hammond’s story-telling concert, “From Spirituals to Swing” (1938), as a guiding example, Fessenden begins by highlighting the unnuanced ways in which African American sonic productions have been coopted by white Americans to serve progressive and emancipatory roles in larger narratives of American identity. Fessenden counters that narrative with her telling of Holiday’s remarkably particular upbringing. While she and her mother struggled financially , Holiday moved through and around the streets of Baltimore working and sometimes singing in the city’s brothels and clubs to earn money, before being put into Catholic institutions like The Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls (70). Fessenden demonstrates how Holiday was not steeped in the gospel traditions of black Protestant churches but, instead, cultivated her voice through Catholic prayer books during masses and Victrola turntables in the apartments of Baltimore club owners. Chapters three and four work together to characterize the specific sonic atmosphere in which Holiday moved, highlighting performers like Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, particular genres like blues and jazz, and the strong interaction between Jewish Americans and black Americans that surfaced in the song lyrics performed by black musicians (“Strange Fruit...