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“... compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look at my work.’ There’s sometimes a melancholy in her photographs of Black life, but it’s offset by the same ironical awareness that infuses the blues. Smith has ...”

“... Lee Daniels’s​ The United States v. Billie Holiday (on Sky Cinema) hesitates a little about what kind of movie it is. Is it about the war on drugs, with Holiday’s career as an important instance in its history? Or is it about Holiday, with the war on drugs as part of the background? When we read a title card at the beginning of the film telling us that in 1937 the US Senate failed to pass an anti-lynching bill, and then another at the end stating that a similar bill considered in 2020 ‘has yet to pass’, Holiday’s repeated singing of ‘Strange Fruit’ feels like a political rather than a musical event, and we are clearly in the first movie ...”

“... been told​ that nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a ...”

“... around Solange’s unusually direct gaze. It’s a gaze we may have seen before in photos of Billie Holiday and Zora Neale Hurston. (It also calls up echoes from much further back, in 15th-century portraiture.) A gaze that refuses the swerve of amelioration; a gaze that makes us feel we are being surveyed. In her videos Solange is often accompanied ...”

“... O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday. This kind of nostalgia can be tiresome: better for each generation to invent a new idea of the new – to enlarge the temple. In his poems, Hofmann has found a way to do this. In each, no matter how short, one feels the pull of three places ...”

“... bodies swinging in the southern breeze,/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,’ as Billie Holiday sang – are part of a history that is erased with every new administration, with every Martin Luther King Day. But the return to chain gangs in the summer of 1995, the hitching of prisoners to posts in Alabama, the purging of books, both ...”

“... and sustain and linger – were Tommy Dorsey (‘the General Motors of the band business’), Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby. Anyone surprised by the inclusion of the latter should do a bit of digging: Crosby is a fascinating character. As well as a subtly revolutionary singer he was a technophile obsessed with recording techniques, and with how best ...”

“... his death in 2009, DeCarava took plenty of pictures of the already famous: jazz musicians like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Scott’s hands. Sarah Vaughan turns and flashes a smile at the camera; Ornette Coleman looks mean and impressive. But there are also the photos of the unknown and unnamed: a garment worker tugging a covered ...”

“... The other memory is a song, and we hear it as the credits roll at the end. The singer is Billie Holiday, and the song is ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. ‘We lived our little drama,’ the song begins. ‘We kissed in a field of white/And stars fell on Alabama/Last night.’ There are too many ironies and undercurrents for me even to begin to list ...”

“... Pastoral scene of the gallant South’, Billie Holiday sang, evoking a landscape of lynched bodies. This was the ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. Certainly a dark version of pastoral but well within the mode’s capacities. If traditional pastoral often idealises the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing ...”

“... comebacks, more wilderness years and sad endings. We might as well be talking about Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter or Judy Garland, and several of them get namechecked here – Callas and Holiday repeatedly. All those women artists wracked and torn, felled by life’s ...”

“... not include jazz. As ‘Francis Newton’ (named after a Communist jazz trumpeter who played on Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’), I wrote a column every month or so for the New Statesman for about ten years. It was a good time to be writing about jazz. Not only did my column allow me an occasional respite from the personal and political ...”

“... kind of style’. Hedda Gabler is at her best ‘when she shows nothing beyond her style’. Billie Holiday somehow ‘retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style’. Hardwick’s own reputation rests on that slippery word ‘style’. Who else would have written of Gertrude Stein:There is nothing hothouse in this peculiar American ...”

“... crimes as daring to look at a white woman. Black bodies no longer swing in the Southern breeze, as Billie Holiday sang. Instead, they are victims of chokeholds, bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks ...”

“... Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls. He was considering an offer from the ...”