Dibs

Stylemaking singer, tragic addict — Billie Holiday is a cultural icon right up there with I Dream of Jeannie and Che Guevara. But now evidence is emerging that Holiday was a big fibber. Lies pepper her ghostwritten 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues — and they pepper the new 50th-anniversary edition from Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, appearing in bookstores today — according to Richard L. Eldredge of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Ohio’s Oxford Press. “Don’t expect a lot of accuracy from the late singer,” Eldredge warns. “Even the first line of the book — ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married’ — has been proved inaccurate…. Holiday’s parents never married and were scarcely together at all, except at the carnival (or dance) in Baltimore on the night in the fall of 1914 when she was conceived…. Holiday also takes credit for helping to create her signature song, ‘Strange Fruit’ …in truth, the searing depiction of lynchings in the South was written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City who thought Holiday would be the ideal singer” to record it.
An interesting sidenote, not mentioned in the article, is that Meeropol adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But now here’s the totally nutty thing. The ghostwriter’s name had a vaguely familiar ring for Dibs! Sure enough, a quick search revealed that Dufty was the author of a 1975 book warning about eating too much sucrose. The book was called Sugar Blues. How weird is it that the same guy wrote two books thirty years apart whose titles ended in the word “blues”? Admit it, that’s weird! Dufty also coauthored a book about the macrobiotic diet. Back to Billie Holiday, via Eldredge: “While a riveting read, one of the reasons [LSTB] might have been allowed to go out of print in the 1980s was a growing controversy regarding some of the information in Holiday’s story…. Historical accuracy isn’t of paramount importance to author David Ritz, who provides the foreword for the book’s 50th anniversary re-issue. ‘The question should be, ‘Do we get a compelling character that jumps off the page?’ The answer with Lady Sings the Blues is yes. A good first-person memoir becomes a piece of the artist.’” … That should prove a great relief to James Frey.