"Holiday said motherf - all the time, in her gravelly elegant way," recalled Dufty, sitting in his City Hall office.
Dufty can still summon up the speaking voice of the glamorous lady who clasped him to her breast and sang to him. The other is another Bay Area resident, singer-lyricist Lorraine Feather, daughter of the late critic Leonard Feather. He's one of the childless singer's two godchildren. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true."īevan Dufty would agree. "Her voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain," wrote the noted ghostwriter David Ritz, who did autobiographies of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and many other musicians, in the introduction to the new edition of "Lady Sings the Blues." Despite the factual inaccuracies, "in the mythopoetic sense," Ritz says, Holiday's memoir "is as true and poignant as any tune she ever sang.
His aim was to let Holiday tell her story her way. Dufty, a New York Post writer and editor then married to Holiday's close friend Maely Dufty, wrote the book quickly from a series of conversations with the singer in the Duftys' 93rd Street apartment, drawing on the work of earlier interviewers as well. As a convicted felon - she did a year in a Virginia federal prison after a 1947 dope bust in Philadelphia - the singer was barred from performing in New York clubs where booze was sold. The book, recently republished by Harlem Moon in a 50th anniversary edition, was written when Holiday needed money. It was a ghastly end for a woman whose subtle artistry, with its rhythmic freedom and bare emotion, changed the sound of jazz and pop singing, and continues to seduce and move people who listen to her records.
She was busted for drug possession as she lay dying. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. Ghostwritten by the late newspaperman and author William Dufty, the father of San Francisco SupervisorBevan Dufty, "Lady Sings the Blues" was published three years before Holiday died in a New York hospital at age 44. The singer tells the story of her bruised life - a tale of teenage prostitution, racist indignities and abusive men, heroin addiction and heavy drinking, corrupt cops and jail time - without self-pity. Yet for all the factual inaccuracies and exaggerations for which the book has been taken to task since its publication 50 years ago, "Lady Sings the Blues" captures the tart voice and unflinching eye of one of the most affecting and mythicized artists of the last century. When she was born, her mother was 19, her father was 17 and they never lived under the same roof. Like other stories in this frank, funny and compelling book, what's on the page doesn't always jibe with the facts dug up by Holiday's biographers.
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