Billie Holiday Read Free Page A

as a series of “confrontations,” in which she creatively reshaped the musical material and the traditions that lay behind it. The power she discovered in doing so became her way of capturing an audience’s attention and belief. More recently, Farah Griffin, in
If You Can’t Be Free, Be aMystery
, asked how those who believe the book was written entirely by her coauthor can also accuse her of lying.
    Another way of putting it is to see
Lady Sings the Blues
as a form of autobiographical fiction. Much of what we read about her elsewhere tells us that this was really Billie Holiday speaking in the book. But a certain amount of withholding of certain aspects of her life or changing of facts was a form of editing on her part. Although the Doubleday editors struck out some passages in fear of potential lawsuits, Holiday’s own changes or omissions were perhaps a means of preventing readers from knowing too much, of distancing herself to keep from being too closely identified with how others saw her, and especially from what the press had written about her. She chose
not
to see herself as others did, and what might appear to be a private communication between the writer and the reader is ultimately as illusory as believing a singer is communicating directly to a listener in her audience.
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    From the beginning, Billie posed for photographers together with William Dufty, her collaborator on
Lady Sings the Blues
, as coauthors. Dufty gave interviews on his own before and after the book came out, addressing many issues concerning it in interviews and newspaper articles, including questions about particular facts and his own role in the writing. At the time, Harry S. Truman was publishing the first of his memoirs with Doubleday, and Dufty responded to the matter of errors or lies in Holiday’s autobiography by asking what cowriter was going to tell President Harry Truman that
he
should check his facts. Are the subject’s memories of experiences not sufficient to create an autobiography? Who was responsible for making the decision about truthfulness when a subject’s memories failed to square with those of others? If the uniqueness of an autobiography is that it is built on the personal memories and observations of the subject, should the cowriter or ghostwriter question the subject or urge her to change her thoughts on her own past?
    Dufty said he was not going to be a fact-checker for Billie; the wordswere hers. But that was part of the problem, for when errors were discovered in the book or material was found objectionable, many chose to believe they were not, in fact, her words. Some have insisted that she couldn’t write, and she sometimes did apologize for not being able to write better. Yet she did compose some lyrics, and sent letters to music business people, her editor, and friends, though many to the latter were unpunctuated. Others even questioned her ability to read, and quoted her one remark about never having read her own book—which has in fact been a standard dodge of many celebrities when they don’t wish to discuss or justify a topic in a coauthored book.She had certainly read
Lady Sings the Blues
, since she commented on many portions of it, both in galleys, at the insistence of Doubleday, and in published form, in her letters and in comments to the Duftys and to journalists. She also read reviews of the book and complained about some of them in detail.
    There was also the issue of Dufty’s being a
white
coauthor, an issue that has plagued African American autobiographical writing at least since Solomon Northup wrote
Twelve Years a Slave
in 1853, when otherwise sympathetic readers suspected that the truth of his narrative was clouded by the conventions of antislavery writing and the expectations of abolitionists. A hundred years later, some of the same doubts arose about the autobiographies of jazz musicians such as