Baraka's Billie Holiday as a blues poet of black longing.

In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Baraka devotes a full chapter to "Music," and the subject threads throughout the entire book: "I've said that one constant for me from the time of any consciousness in helping to define the world has been music." If music has helped to define the world for him, his writing about music has helped to define the experience of U.S. blacks in the world. For Baraka movement from "one kind of music to another ... is another kind of path and direction in my life" (65). If this movement, this migration from one kind of music to another, defines the direction of his life, it also defines the variety of the Black American experience.

Baraka first articulates this relationship between black people and the music they have produced in his classic Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It (1963). He has since elaborated upon this relationship in a number of important essays, poems, and interviews. While it is tempting to follow this narrative line--to follow Baraka temporally from rhythm and blues through bebop, to the New Music--I want to use this opportunity to observe Baraka as he returns, in different literary forms, to the same subject--the legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. I want to suggest that, through careful reading of at least three pieces devoted to Holiday, we witness an important artistic and political shift in this ever-changing intellectual. Before turning directly to the Holiday writing, a bit more about the autobiography will help to situate the readings that follow.

In the introduction to the 1997 Lawrence Hill edition of the autobiography, Baraka updates readers on his political development during the dozen or so years following the book's first publication. The earlier edition ends in the mid-seventies. The introduction to the later edition posits Baraka's marriage to Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka) as central to his change and growth during this period. The book is dedicated to her, and opens and closes with a discussion of their marriage. Baraka identifies his change as a move through cultural nationalism to Communism. (The first change is from an apolitical bohemian to Black Nationalism: a move from the Village to Harlem, from Harlem to Newark, from his Jewish wife to his Black American wife.)

The introduction paints his marriage to Amina Baraka as a site of ongoing struggle: "Part of the burning union of my marriage to Sylvia has been a yearning to be completely whole" (xiv). He identifies the chauvinism of his nationalist period as being one of the primary sources of contention between the two of them. It is through Amina's insistence that he somewhat reluctantly confronts the legacy of his own chauvinism. (Indeed, in the last thirty years, Baraka, along with Eldridge Cleaver, Kwame Toure [Stokely Carmichael], and Ron Karenga, has often been cited as one of the major architects of the misogynist gender politics of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements.) I want to suggest that we can see the results of this personal and political struggle in Baraka's writing on Holiday. (It is not insignificant that Baraka claims he first came to Amina Baraka's attention when she read the liner notes he'd written for the album Billie Holiday in Germany.)

Throughout much of Western literature we have evidence of male poets containing female voices, particularly singing voices. The female voices are often otherworldly and dangerous, like those of the Sirens, and can only be represented in written form through the pen of the male poet. Baraka's writings on Billie Holiday may fall into this category. In the earliest writings he describes her voice and analyzes and interprets its meaning. In the last, he is an artist who is inspired by and inherits from her, builds upon her artistic legacy in order to acquire his own voice. In this way she becomes an artistic ancestor.

During his distinguished career, Amiri Baraka has published at least three pieces on Billie Holiday: a set of liner notes, an introduction for a documentary, and a poem. All three render a mythical Holiday who embodies Baraka's philosophy of black music.

The liner notes, first written in 1962 and later published in his Black Music of 1968, are aptly titled "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," a reference to Shakespeare's sonnets about the mysterious dark lady. Fred Moten writes that Baraka "constructs a bridge" from the dark Lady to Billie Holiday (274). Of the dark ladies of Renaissance sonnets, scholar and critic Kim Hall writes: "The whitening of the Dark Lady becomes crucial for the exercise of male poetic power" (115). If this is the case, then Baraka appropriates the Dark Lady: Instead of whitening the literary Dark Lady Baraka blackens her, not only in color but by situating her in a tradition and a social context of black American experience. And, in this gesture, he also exercises his own male poetic power. For, here we have access to her only through his description of the way she sounds and looks, and what she means. The Holiday of "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" is filled with contradictions:

   Dark Lady of the Sonnets

      Nothing was more perfect than
   what she was. Nor more willing to fail.
   (If we call failure something light can
   realize. Once you have seen it, or felt
   whatever thing she conjured growing
   in your flesh.)

      At the point where what she did
   left singing, you were on your own. At
   the point where what she was was in
   her voice, you listen and make your
   own promises.

      More than I have felt to say, she
   says always. More than she has ever
   felt is what we mean by fantasy.
   Emotion, is wherever you are. She
   stayed in the street.

      The myth of blues is dragged from
   people. Though some others make categories
   no one understands. A man
   told me Billie Holiday wasn't singing
   the blues, and he knew. O.K., but what
   I ask myself is what had she seen to
   shape her singing so? What in her life,
   proposed such tragedy, such final
   hopeless agony? Or flip the coin and
   she is singing, "Miss Brown to You."
   And none of your cats would dare
   cross her. One eye closed, and her
   arms held in such balance, as if all
   women were so aloof. Or could laugh
   so.

      And even in the laughter, something
   other than brightness, completed
   the sound. A voice that grew from
   singer's instrument to a woman's. And
   from that (those last records critics say
   are weak) to a black landscape of need,
   and perhaps, suffocated desire.

      Sometimes you are afraid to listen
   to this lady. (Black Music 25)

The two opening sentences link Holiday to both perfection and failure. The first sentence is constructed rather awkwardly: "Nothing was more perfect than what she was," instead of "Nothing was more perfect than she." What she was is perfect, not her. "Nor, more willing to fail." Failure here is willed, not something passive that "happens" as an act of fate. Even in her failure there is agency, because she chooses it. And in her willingness to fail, she approaches perfection, for willingness to fail here means being willing to take risks. There is no artistic growth, discovery, or possibility without risk of failure. For Baraka, Holiday's artistry lies in her being willing to risk failure; on the other hand, this will to failure might also result in the tragedy of her life.

In the parenthetical statement that follows, Baraka links Holiday to the perfection of light, the quality of brightness, which can realize failure. Again the word realize connotes something accomplished, achieved. It also means to understand, to appreciate, to recognize, to be conscious of. This Holiday consciously courts failure. The Holiday who closes this paragraph is a conjure woman; she conjures desire in her male listener (for the listener and the teller of her tale is male here).

In the second paragraph, Baraka begins to describe her art: "At the moment where what she did left singing, you were on your own. At the point where what she was in her voice, you listen and make your own promises." Again, there are numerous possibilities here. Does he mean she seems to stop singing and begin to do something else? Does she literally stop singing because it is the end of the song, the end of the set, or the end of her life? Is the listener left alone, abandoned, wanting, yearning, and longing? Or does she leave singing by moving into another realm and take the listener with her. He follows with "At the point where what she was in her voice," a sentence which links Holiday's life, her person, her ups and downs to her voice. The voice embodies the life. So here again we have her as that which is both of the body and outside of bodily experience, both in the world and otherworldly.

By paragraph three, Baraka shifts pronouns from "you" to "I." "More than I have felt to say, she says always." She articulates that which it is beyond his capacity to communicate. He is a wordsmith, a poet, and yet language fails him; through her singing she is able to transmit meaning and emotion. Here, however, we do not "hear" her. The male poet is admitting the failure of language to represent, to contain, to express what she says, and yet he is our only access to her "sound." He goes on: "More than she has ever felt, is what we mean by fantasy." She has experienced and felt the entire spectrum of human emotions. There is no corner of humanity that she cannot express. The woman's singing voice, like our experience of emotions, cannot be captured in the written word.

Baraka then gives us a contest over the meaning of Holiday's art by setting up a debate of sorts. "A man told me Billie Holiday wasn't singing the blues, and he knew." Here, a critic, possibly Martin Williams, is a figure interested primarily in form--Billie Holiday doesn't sing the formal 12-bar blues. Then the Baraka figure says, "What ... is what she had seen to shape her singing so? What in her life, proposed such tragedy, such final hopeless agony?" Here again he links life and voice; the blues becomes an ethos, not a form. It influences her praxis and her performance. Her singing is directly related to conditions of her life. However, lest we get mired in the tragedy of it all, he juxtaposes that sentence with "Or flip the coin and she is singing 'Miss Brown to You.' And none of you cats would dare cross her. One eye closed, and her arms held in such balance, as if all women were so aloof. Or could laugh so." If she is tragic on one side, she is all hipness, flipness, and flirtation on the other. Nor is hers the mild flirtation of adolescence but that which makes men insecure, the kind that seduces and entices by warning, "You can't handle this." All of these--the tragedy and the flirtation, the serious playfulness--are the blues. She epitomizes both and consequently epitomizes the blues. At once tragic, sensual, playful, and divine, she becomes the poet's dream woman. Sensual but inaccessible, aloof and laughing.

"And even in the laughter, something other than brightness, completed the sound. A voice that grew from a singer's instrument to a woman's. And from that (those last records critics say are weak) to a black landscape of need, and perhaps suffocated desire." Here is the Baraka of Blues People. The laughter is more than Holiday's individual laughter, but the laughter of black American humor, that of the "you got to laugh to keep from crying" variety. "Something other than brightness completed the sound" distinguishes her from Ella Fitzgerald. There are echoes of Langston Hughes's "Harlem" in this paragraph: "What ever happens to a dream deferred?" Her voice embodies the condition of black people in this land: dispossession, suffocated desire. He especially hears this in the later records, which other critics dismiss. For Baraka, her voice moves to another plane: She moves from an artist primarily concerned with her form to a woman concerned with communicating beyond the moment of entertainment. Interestingly, to sing like a woman here means to sing the tragic, to sing out of a place of need and suffocated desire. If the first paragraph opens out into the desire she provokes in the male listener, here we close on the suffocation of her own desire, and consequently that of the people she represents.

He closes his notes with "Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this Lady." She strips life of all of its pretenses; listen at your own risk, he warns. This is not a voice for the naive and unprepared. Billie Holiday of the liner notes is a Siren--one whose voice is seductive and dangerous at the same time; it is a voice that lures men to their deaths. The Dark Lady of these notes starts off as a woman who embodies a blues ethos of both tragedy and comedy, frustration and flirtation, light and dark. She moves on to become representative of the collective history of black people in the United States. Listen here to the voice of this woman who was Lady of Light and Darkness--Lady Day, Dark Lady of the Sonnets--and you will hear what it really means to be black in America. It seems Baraka wants to have it both ways here: He wants a Lady who "wills" her own failure, and yet he wants to hold on to the inevitability of that failure in a context that denies black humanity and possibility. Yes, the Lady of this piece is contradictory, but so is the desire of the writer. Significantly, this prose poem appears as liner notes introducing her recorded voice. If Kim Hall is right and the dark ladies of Renaissance sonnets empower the male poet to represent and silence them, then Baraka's Dark Lady insists on speaking for herself in the music. He doesn't close the liner notes with an invitation to listen but instead with a warning: "Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this Lady."

Baraka returns to Lady Day in another prose poem, originally composed for the British Documentary The Long Night of Lady Day. In his introduction to the piece Baraka writes that he was unable to participate in the project because his murdered sister Kimako was buried on the day of an important meeting about the film. By situating the piece in this context, Baraka inadvertently suggests that the makers of the documentary could not even sympathize with someone whose life circumstances were quite like those of Holiday. The piece was eventually published in The Music, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka.

   Billie

      Of all the singers I know there is
   only one can burn a hole in your heart
   and fill up your soul with deep blue-black
   history, a tragic poet of longing.

      Billie's voice was once light bouncy,
   a swing-band banner popping in
   the wind of syncopation. Life here
   changed that. As she lived it, grew
   heavy inside her a steel mystery murdering
   of feeling with feeling. By the
   end of her life Billie's songs were genuinely
   frightening. You not only hear
   the song but the pain. And it is lyric
   editorial that is so pointed as to the origins
   of its suffering ...

      Billie always changed the melody
   to suit her feeling for the language. She
   is fundamentally a blues poet, trapped
   in the bogus "sophistication" of the
   dead society pretending life.

      The double dose of terror; being
   black and woman. She was a workingwoman,
   when she could get a card
   that's a triple cruel and unusual punishment.
   (The Music 285)

If Holiday of the liner notes moved from singer to woman, here she moves from singer to poet. Here her individual, personal tragedy is a collective, historical tragedy of black people. Holiday is the figure through which the weight of this collective history is expressed. Again, this is the role of black music in Blues People. Note the phrase blue-black history. There are several connotations: black people, their blues, and their history. Blue-black is often used to define a color of black people--the darkest of the dark, those who, in Baraka's writings, sit at the bottom of the color caste system in Negro America but who produce the most vibrant aspects of black culture. These are the blue-black people of the poor and working class. Blue-black might also be the color of a bruise, connoting pain and violence. Finally it could be an allusion to the Andy Razaf song, sung by Louis Armstrong and cited at the beginning of Ellison's Invisible Man--"What did I do to be so black and blue?" Here black is the skin color of those who bear the curse of Ham; blue is the feeling of melancholy. Black-and-blue is also the color of a figure in this song who is white "inside." All of this blue-black history pours forth, like hot tar, from Holiday's song. The sentence closes on the phrase "a tragic poet of longing," which links Baraka with Lady Day--a tragic poet expressing the longing of a people; a longing that is stronger than waiting; longing as void, something that has been missing or perhaps that never was. What is the "it"? For Baraka "it" is often freedom from racial and class oppression. So Holiday goes from singer to embodiment of black history to tragic poet of longing. Once again she embodies Baraka's theory of black music.

In the next paragraph he describes her singing and links it to her material condition as a black woman in America.

   Billie's voice was once light bouncy, a
   swing-band banner popping in the
   wind of syncopation. Life here
   changed that. As she lived it, grew
   heavy inside her a steel mystery murdering
   of feeling with feeling. By the
   end of her life Billie's songs were genuinely
   frightening. You not only hear
   the song but the pain. And it is lyric
   editorial that is so pointed as to the origins
   of its suffering ...

Note his extensive use of figurative language. It is almost onomatopoetic--it sounds like that which it is describing. His prose is inspired by her phrasing and sense of rhythm.

Once again at the end, he emphasizes her ability to provoke not desire, but fear. Unlike critics who stress the relationship between her changing voice and her poor musical material, bad men and self-destructive lifestyle, Baraka says, "Life here changed that." This short, direct sentence is emphatic in its accusation. What is the "here" of this sentence? Here on this planet or here in this country?

The grittiness brought on by life here grows inside of her like a baby in the womb, but as with Morrison's Beloved this "steel mystery" "murders." It murders the feeling of her light and bouncy singing with a feeling of what life "here" does to black people. Life "here" turns her songs from light and bouncy to "frightening." In describing Holiday's fate and its impact on her art, Baraka describes the fate of black artists and of black people. Again, her song is linked to collective pain and suffering.

He tells us what Holiday does to a song: "Billie always changed the melody to suit her feeling for language." Here, he focuses on the formal aspect of her art. She changes the melody, not to suit her mood but her "feeling for language." Again, this sensitivity to language makes her a poet. She, like him, like Hughes and Sterling Brown before her, and like Sherley Anne Williams and Gayl Jones after, is a blues poet. Not simply in terms of her use of the formal blues, but in her sensibility, her aesthetic, her way of telling a story. But as is the case with so many black artists who preceded her, she is stuck in a context that seeks to limit and confine her and is incapable of understanding or appreciating her.

Baraka ends by moving from Holiday as poet to Holiday as black workingwoman, denied her livelihood when her cabaret card is denied her. As such, she shares the material reality of many black women, denied the opportunity to make a living by using their gifts. Here she is not only a blues poet, but also a part of a blues people grounded in a specific set of conditions that give birth to the blues as music and as world view.

This Lady Day is both an artist in the tradition of black culture and a spokesperson in the tradition of black struggle. She carries tradition in her art and her person; she shapes and helps to create that tradition as well. Because black music is so deeply rooted in black experience for Baraka, Holiday as woman and artist comes to be representative of the experiences, needs, and thwarted desire of black people in this land called America. Baraka's Lady does not transcend history, she is mired in it, carries the weight of it in her voice and her being. Even in the light joy, there is an underlying blue darkness of that experience. In this sense she can grow from the light bouncy artist of her early recordings, to the communicative woman of her middle period, to the poet rendering a reading as well as a singer singing a song at the end of her life. Once again, this is represented to us through his interpretation of what she means. We do not have access to her voice, to her words.

The third work under consideration here, "The Lady," from 1987, marks a distinct change in both form and content:

The Lady

   The Lady said of her life here that she 1st
   heard part of her own voice, (Bessie &
   Louie),
   in a whore house; but she wasn't the
   only one

   The Lady said
   But also that the whore
   house
   was the only place where
   there was even a semblance
   of democracy

   People say
   no one says the word
   "Hunger"
   "Love"

   I want to remember (The Music 117)

With the poem "The Lady" Amiri Baraka immortalizes Billie Holiday by quoting statements attributed to her, and he also evokes her phrasing. The fourteen lines of the poem mimic the standard fourteen-line form of the sonnet. Yet, as William J. Harris argues, Baraka takes the traditional Western form and revises it, makes something new out of it. In this way, he is not unlike Billie Holiday, who revised the structure of American pop tunes by rewriting the melody and creating her own narratives through the timbre of her voice and the stresses of her phrasing.

The title "The Lady" draws upon the phrase Our Lady, whether it is "Our Holy Mother" or the inaccessible lady to whom the poet pays homage. The first two stanzas of "The Lady" start with "The Lady said." In this way, the form of the poem seems to borrow elements from the blues stanza, a slightly altered repetition of the first line, in this instance with a change in the rhythm of the line because the second "The Lady said" makes a line in and of itself. By using the phrase The Lady said Baraka grounds the poem in the authority of Holiday's language of witnessing. Furthermore, he signals that we will get Billie Holiday's voice and words here. His writing will be constructed around her voice.

By the third stanza The Lady said is replaced with "People say"--a familiar colloquialism implying a kind of folk wisdom. This phrase is taken from Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues: "I've been told that nobody says the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'" (68). Hunger and love are words of longing. Hunger is a form of desire, but also need; love is a form of desire but also nourishment. "People say" is a mandate of the people; Holiday is identified by "them" as the person who is best able to articulate their basic needs, desires, and yearnings. In Holiday's autobiography this provocative statement of money and memory follows the love/hunger phrase:

   Maybe I remember what those words
   are all about. Maybe I'm proud enough
   to want to remember Baltimore and
   Welfare Island, the Catholic institution
   and the Jefferson Market Court, the
   sheriff in front of our place in Harlem
   and in the towns from coast to coast
   where I got my lumps and my scars,
   Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and
   San Francisco--every damn bit of it.

      All the Cadillacs and minks in the
   world--and I've had a few--can't
   make it up or make me forget it. All
   I've learned in all those places from all
   those people is wrapped up in those
   two words. You've got to have something
   to eat and a little love in your life
   before you can hold still for any damn
   body's sermon on how to behave. (168)

Holiday claims all of the painful experiences of her life. She names them and insists on "remembering them" because they have shaped her. They are experiences she shares with the poorest of the poor, those most in need of protection from a state that exploits and oppresses them. The Lady of this paragraph shares with the Lady of Baraka's poem a critique of American democracy as well as a vision of a more democratic future. This Lady insists basic needs must be met before systems of discipline and morality can have any meaning in the lives of the poor. The Lady of Baraka's poem insists the whorehouse--an illegal site where she first heard Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (phrases again inspired by the autobiography)--is a more egalitarian space than any that exist in "legit" America. Both imply desire and longing for a truer sense of democracy.

The last sentence of the poem does not start with "The Lady said" or "People say," but with "I want." To want is to desire, to long or yearn for. The "I" of this poem wants to remember; remember ends the sentence and the poem. Remember implies something in the past, something lost to the present, yet it also points forward to a future in which I will not have that which "I" remember, but "I" will have the memory of it. To remember is also to memorialize and, in so doing, to honor. This closing sentence, "I want to remember," does not end with a period. Thus it is left open, unfinished: It can be a space of possibility or an empty void. Through the use of slant rhyme, the poet draws a connection between the words hunger and remember. Both words imply loss, though the latter is a way of attending to the void whereas in the former it remains empty.

Though not a blues poem in the strictest sense, the poem borrows from the blues form. The "People say" of the final verse is more universal. The closing "I want to remember" echoes the last line of a blues in that it stands out and alone from the rest.

From line 10, beginning with "People say," the poem turns to the first person. Boundaries between Holiday and the poem's persona collapse, whereas before they had been made distinct by "The Lady said," as opposed to "I say." Who is the blues poet here? Baraka or Lady Day? Who wants to remember? This ambiguity situates the Holiday of this poem within a tradition of black art and longing.

In this poem, Baraka shares much with blues poets who preceded him. The Lady is not unlike Sterling Brown's Ma Rainey or the blues women in any number of Hughes's poems. Here he invokes Shakespeare, Hughes, Brown, and Holiday as literary forebears. And she helps inspire the form, the content, and the style of his work. Throughout these three works it is clear that, while Baraka's content and philosophy about the meaning of black music as it is embodied in Lady Day remains the same, his method of expressing this philosophy changes as he moves from the poet who represents the Black Woman (as culture bearer) to the poet who is influenced by her artistry and whose ability to speak his own truth grows from her song.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997.

--. Black Music. New York: Morrow, 1967.

--. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow, 1963.

--, and Amina Baraka. The Music. New York: Morrow, 1987.

Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Holiday, Billie. Lady Sings the Blues. With William Dufty. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956.

Moten, Fred. "Stanza, Record, Frame: Temporality, Technics and Artifact in Shakespeare/Baraka/Eisenstein." Semiotics 21-24 (1993): 274.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. This essay elaborates on ideas first presented in If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Free P, 2001) and "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Poetry.