The High Priestess

The High Priestess of Soul would have been 90 years old today.

All hail.

Nina Simone - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Live 1968)

Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, 21st February 1933 – 21st April 2003)

[More Nina]

Simply the greatest singer of them all

"The one radio voice that I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I'd sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words." - Doris Day

"Ella's voice becomes the orchestra's richest and most versatile sound." - Arthur Fiedler

"Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest of them all." - Bing Crosby

"The best way to start any musical evening is with this girl. It don't get better than this." - Frank Sinatra

"She has been one of my all-time favourite singers for many years and still is - she's terrific." - Perry Como

"She was the best. She was the best there ever was. Amongst all of us who sing, she was the best." - Johnny Mathis

"I call her the High Priestess of Song." - Mel Torme

"I was there from the beginning, and it was obvious from the start what she had that night at the Apollo. My goodness, what she's done with it." - Benny Carter

"Whatever she does to my songs, she always makes them sound better." - Richard Rodgers

"Ella is simply the greatest singer of them all." - Pearl Bailey

"If you want to learn how to sing, listen to Ella Fitzgerald." - Vincente Minnelli

"Ella is the boss lady. That's all." - Billy Strayhorn

"She brings out the best in everybody, making everyone work that much harder to keep up with her." - Andy Williams

"It is so much fun to sing with Ella. It is so nice to sing with someone who does more than make a pretty noise." - Jo Stafford

" She is amazingly creative, bringing so much more to a song than just a singer. She is a first-class musician and the most gracious person in the world." - Marty Paich



"A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside... I'm going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do."

"I sing like I feel."

Today is the centenary of one of the greatest voices who ever lived, Miss Ella Fitzgerald.

There are no equals.

Ella Fitzgerald- Here's That Rainy Day

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (25th April 1917 – 15th June 1996)

A cry against conformity, a shriek against boredom

"[Camp is] always, and at whatever cost, a cry against conformity, a shriek against boredom, a testament to the potential uniqueness of each of us and our rights to that uniqueness." George Melly, from the preface of Camp - the Lie that tells the Truth by Philip Core [one of my favourite books of all time].

The epithet "Camp" could have been invented for Mr George Melly, whose 90th birthday it would have been today. Paradoxically "Good-Time George" was not particularly effeminate, nor robustly homosexual (although he had many "flings" - as recounted in detail in his first volume of autobiography Rum, Bum and Concertina), yet he exuded a flamboyantly defiant air of swagger against the po-faced world of Jazz purists, perpetually displaying his "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration" [to quote Susan Sontag's epic Notes on Camp], and was eternally adored for it - equally by those who were "in on the joke", and by those who merely appreciated the work of a supremely talented "English eccentric" and raconteur.



Who else but George - a huge fan of the likes of Bessie Smith and her contemporaries - would dare to perform (with his gravelly baritone voice) a Trad-Jazz cover of Jelly-Roll Morton and Lizzie Miles's I Hate A Man Like You, gender references intact? And that was just one among a huge repertoire of boundary-pushing, somewhat smutty covers he did, not least I Want My Fanny Brown:

George Melly - I Want My Fanny Brown

He even sang lead vocals on a song about an archetypal "Dirty Old Man", Old Codger, the b-side of Walk On By by The Stranglers...

Stranglers featuring George Melly - Old Codger

Who but George would bring lurid, luminously-coloured zoot-suits and velvet fedoras to the stage at venues ranging from Ronnie Scott's legendary West End venue to cabaret clubs in New York to the Reading Festival? He even took it a step further when the mood suited him, according to his obituary in The Telegraph:

On one occasion at Ronnie Scott’s Melly had decided to perform in full drag, and sent John Chilton on to the stage to tell the audience that he was indisposed - but that, luckily, his aunt Georgina, who knew all of his songs, would valiantly fill the gap. "Georgina" duly swept on stage, and the disguise was so complete that the audience was wholly deceived.

He was uncompromising in his anti-religious stance (Mr Melly was at one time President of the British Humanist Society), spoke voluminously about personal freedoms - in particular his support for the permissive society in the 60s - and, as well as myriad fellow Trad-Jazzers, counted among his friends a coterie of like-minded "eccentrics" including Molly Parkin, Francis Bacon, Maggi Hambling, Peggy Guggenheim and even Rene Magritte.

"Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not." [Sontag again]

And, for those of you of more of an "artistic" bent, why not join George in a special BBC Arena documentary about his love for Surrealism? Here's The Journey", or The Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist:

BBC 'Arena' documentary, 1978 - George Melly on Surrealism - The Journey

Alan George Heywood Melly (17th August 1926 – 5th July 2007)

More of the marvellous Mr Melly here, here and here.

There's no damn business like show business

"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."

"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."

"There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up."

"You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”

"I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know."

It is the centenary of the birth of Billie Holiday today.

Here is "Lady Day" herself, live, on Art Ford's Jazz Party in 1958:

Billie Holiday at Art Ford's Jazz Party

Facts:

• As a child she ran errands for the girls in a local brothel in return for the privilege of listening to recordings by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.
• She chose the stage name "Billie" after her favourite actress Billie Dove.
• Her most famous/notorious anthem was Strange Fruit, described as the "first (black) protest song", which described the horror of lynchings of black people in the USA; it was in fact written by a a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City, Abel Meeropol.
• She was first arrested on drugs charges in 1947, and on her deathbed in 1959 was again under arrest for possession of narcotics.
• Billie claimed to have never read her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (it was mainly ghost-written by William Dufty).

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan, 7th April 1915 – 17th July 1959)

Bulldaggers!

From the review by Lisa Hix in Collector's Weekly:

When Gertrude “Ma” Rainey - known as “The Mother of Blues” - sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie/ Talk to the gals just like any old man,” in 1928's Prove It on Me, she was flirting with scandal, challenging the listener to catch her in a lesbian affair. It might not seem like a big deal to us now, but back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail. The good news for women-loving chanteuses like Rainey, Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley is that blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America, female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing their unconventional desires...

...the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants” to inhabit, as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.

[According to Robert Philipson, director of the documentary:] “In lyrics, they talk about ‘bulldaggers,’ which is they called butch lesbians at that time, or ‘BD women,’ ‘BD’ being short for bulldaggers. There were references to being ‘in the life,’ which was understood to mean same-sex activity.”

In 1930’s The Boy in the Boat, Ma Rainey’s protégé Bessie Smith sang, “When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look ‘em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties - have the lights down low - only those parties where women can go.” A married woman who kept a female lover on the road with her, Smith is known to have exploded at a girlfriend, “I got twelve women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”

With short cropped hair and a tuxedo, the lesser-known Gladys Bentley commandeered the crowd at Harlem’s Clam House in the 1920s, singing cabaret, tickling the piano keys, and flirting shamelessly with the women in the audience. The only one of these women to openly exploit her lesbian identity, she was known for taking popular songs and giving them lewd lyrics; and she asked the audience to help her improvise naughty lines.

“Harlem’s 133rd Street was called ‘Jungle Alley,’ because there were so many nightclubs on it,” Philipson says, explaining that Harlem had the only Roaring Twenties jazz clubs and cabarets in the country that drew white “tourists” curious about “race music.” “The Clam House was famous because it had Bentley, reveling in her image as a ‘bulldagger.’ Because of her, it became a place where black lesbians and gay men would go to hang out. White sightseers from downtown would check out her show as well.”

And so we went to the fabulous British Museum (of all places) this afternoon (as part of the Camden & Islington LGBT History Month celebrations) to see a showing of the utterly magnificent T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s documentary. Here, for your delectation it is, in its entirety:



Camden & Islington LGBT History Month 2014