Posted 5:27 PM by Gene

Today taking a detour home to get some groceries I passed, as I often do, a once apartment building (now some sort of social-services agency) where Lady Day lived, and the his-TOR-ical marker in front mentioned "Strange Fruit." This well-meaning placard was undoubtedly written by someone who knew not a thing about jazz, but had to be carefully taught. The problem is the Lady sang so much inferior stuff foisted on her by producers and song-pluggers, and had such a persecution complex to go with it, that she was inevitably drawn to the pretentious wuhhhks like "God Bless the Child" that define her; but then as a producer of countless Columbia CD reissues has written in his liner notes, at some point she stopped singing songs and started "interpreting" them, and that lay slow waste to her just as sure as that toxic stew of drugs. But the Lady had heart and soul in spades, and even those third-rate songs have an eloquence, if only because she and Teddy Wilson and Prez and Roy Eldridge and her company made the first rate feel like a lowly second.

I wonder what Billie would think of [C]RAP. It is dangerous to place thoughts in the minds of dead folks we revere (the aggressively two-faced Thomas Jefferson shows that), but the Lady was BLUNT, and I would like to think she could have hurled a few choice epithets at [C]RAPPERS, starting with terms like "Stepin Fetchits" and "minstrels" and "thugs" and ascending from there.