Abbey Lincoln

People who work just for money shouldn’t come to this music. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington — I met them when I was a youngster. I was on stage, and they treated me like I was their little sister. Duke Ellington Boulevard is just two blocks up from my house. The street that I live on. They didn’t do anything for money. They didn’t do anything for money. And so they are eternal.

Money is like the cart after the horse. You need the horse. That’s the spirit you ride. And people throw money in the wagon. It’s okay. But I never wished to be rich in money. I don’t want to be bothered with it really. I make a comfortable living. But that is not what I am here for.
Sometimes it is the spirit of the devil that comes. The image makers are wicked. Some people will do anything attract a crowd. Some people have no shame. And they have no love.
You can’t kill the devil, but you don’t have to lay around with him. If you see a lie, you don’t have to join the lie. The devil is the Lie. You can either accept that lie or reject it. I don’t hang with misery. I have always known when to walk away. Thank God. You have to be really careful because you can lose your mind. And that happens to a lot of people, like it happened to Marilyn Monroe. Your habits have to defend yourself in this work.
I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. Even though it is offered to me sometimes. I didn’t do anything for money or fame. In my young life, some of the performers would taunt me. I didn’t go for the “ok-ke-doke.” The “okay, whatever.” I didn’t do that. I have always been myself. “There is only so far you can go with Abbey. She don’t take it. She cannot handle that.” If you can’t call the shots, if you can’t decide how things are going to be, then you learn to accept what is. And what it is, is what it is. They would say, “Abbey’s a nice girl.” I didn’t stick junk in my arms or up my nose. My mother taught me better than that. I wasn’t abused as a child. I wasn’t cursed as a child. I was taught to be respectful of myself.
But if you go against the flow, sometimes you wonder if you are going to work again. Or where you are going to work. Are you going to pay the rent? But you can’t obsess over that. Your principles will see you through. You can’t be a gutter snipe and come to the stage with this music. You have to stand for your principle. If you don’t have principle, the house won’t stand up. If you can’t afford to have principles, if you do what other people do because it is popular, you are wasting everybody’s time.
Billie Holliday didn’t do anything for money. People know when you sell them. If you sell them out, people know it. They might encourage you to do it, and buy the record and everything, but they remember. As soon as Billie Holliday died, they went to do her life story. Her movie. Billie Holliday sang Strange Fruits….They were lynching black men in the South. Black bodies hanging from poplar trees. She wrote God Bless The Child That’s Got His Own. She was a philosopher.
Yeah. She was brilliant. A beautiful woman….Billie’s mother was thirteen when she was born. Mine was thirty‑eight. I am the tenth of twelfth children. My mother was an experienced mentor. Billie didn’t have that. She was working in a brothel, cleaning up behind the prostitutes. That is where she heard Louis Armstrong. She was a beautiful woman. Without her court, she was a queen. Without her court. And her life was painful. And she used drugs to dull the pain. She was arrested. Medicine it was for her. It wasn’t a good life that they gave her, and they used her life after she died to make money with, and lied on her. That was not her story. She did have a painful existence. And she was attracted to men who would hurt and abuse her. Over and over. Billie tried over and over and over again for a relationship with a man. She always found the ones who knocked her down….
I took one husband. I will never take another one here. I am an African woman and I believe in polygamy. I think a man should have a few wives. And respect them all and help them all to live. I am not jealous of another woman. I don’t like hypocrisy. I don’t want to hear, “She means nothing to me.” “Well, then what do I mean to you? If she doesn’t mean anything to you, then I don’t mean anything either. Do you love your mother? Do you love your sister? Well then, love me.”

As Billie said:

Hush now,
Don’t explain,
Just say
you’ll remain.

Heron Dance Interview, issue 23.

Jazz, Max Roach, Sam Shepard

That one man she married was jazz drummer Max Roach. When she talked about him it was with deep reverence. If you look at a photograph of him, you can see how deep he is. I can’t find the quote but remember that she attributed her survival as a young beautiful woman in the movie business in part to Max Roach’s support of her and his pride in being African American. So recently, when I came across a collection of interviews by Ben Sidran, an accomplished artist in a number of different fields: jazz musician (fifteen solo albums), producer, composer, journalist and NPR commentator, I was particularly interested in his interview of Roach. Towards the end of the interview, Roach says:

You know, recently I did something with Sam Shepard. Some music for three of his plays in repertoire. All three were totally different. All three required different kinds of music. And Sam Shepard was a drummer. His father was also a drummer. And, of course, when you look at Shepard, he deals with country-western-flavored things. He deals with avant-garde stuff. He deals with the jazz world. Well, that’s the drummer’s life.
And I began to understand he was a drummer when we did the three plays in repertoire up here at the La Mama Theater. . . .

Earlier this year I quoted from Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids in which she gets into her romantic relationship and creative collaboration with Sam Shepard.

And from there I thought of something I read in a great book, Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian. She interviewed Ellen Stewart, director of the La Mama theater:

Here you are waitin’ to know about cree-a-tivity. Lemme tell you somethin’, baby. Carin’ is where it’s at. Trust me now because I know what I’m talkin’ `bout — you got a love for what you’re doin’ and everythin’ else, all the rest of this cree-a-tivity stuff you’re wonderin’ `bout, baby, it just comes.

Part of what you give up as a creative person living outside New York City or Los Angeles or somewhere with a concentration of highly-accomplished artists, in my case in the Adirondack woods, is the opportunity to associate and collaborate with other highly-creative people. I know I’m living the life I should live with the people I should live it, but part me of yearns for that.

I’ve written before about the creative explosion that occurred in American in the 1950s in both jazz and painting. I wasn’t aware though of the extent to which the two fed off each other.

Ben Sidran’s interviews (from the book Talking Jazz, an Illustrated Oral History), in particular his interview of jazz musician Don Cherry (trumpet, pocket trumpet, flute, African string instruments) got into that a little.

Ben Sidran: What was the scene like at the Five Spot? I know a lot of musicians were coming around to check the group out.

Cherry: Yeah. And a lot of artists. It was mostly the support of the whole art scene. Painters from the Cedar Bar, you know, de Kooning and Bob Thompson and Larry Rivers, LeRoi Jones and poets like Ginsberg. It was just the whole scene – Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffmann was the whole inspiration of the art scene at the time. I can remember Chamberlain, many other names come to mind, because everyone came at one time or another. And musicians from Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis and Coltrane came a lot. And Mingus and Phineas Newborn and Max Roach, they would come, and sometimes they would sit in. Even Lionel Hampton came one night and sat in.

It just so happens that when I paint I tend to listen to jazz from that era, especially Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. The freedom of that music, the experimentation, the subtle delicateness and the boldness of it – it was a truly great decade in American creativity. Art feeds off art.

Abbey Lincoln’s thoughts on the music and life of Billie Holliday (as described in yesterday’s Reflection), led me to look up and think about something I read years ago:

At the time of recording ‘Billie’s Blues’ (clarinetist Artie) Shaw was impressed enough to suggest that Billie join the band he was organizing, but Billie, who had heard Benny Goodman talk vaguely in the same way three years earlier, shrugged the suggestion off. She couldn’t see a white bandleader and a black vocalist overcoming the Jim Crow restrictions that many ballroom owners and club operators firmly believed in.
It was not that Billie was unduly cynical, but recent events had made her more and more realistic. In June 1936, Joe Glaser again asked Ed Fox if he would feature Billie at the Grand Terrace, Chicago (for seventy-five dollars a week). This time, Fox reluctantly agreed. The engagement was to be one of the shortest of Billie’s career. She left New York full of enthusiasm, knowing that she was to be accompanied by Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, which contained several old friends.
The optimism quickly faded. After one performance, Fox made it clear that he thought Billie’s style of singing was entirely unsuitable for one of his shows. Each night, he began shouting at her as soon has she had finished her set. Billie, mindful of previous rows with owners kept calm for longer than usual. However, when she was called into Fox’s office for a show-down the battle was two-sided. Twenty years later Billie recalled the viciousness of the row. She recounted: ‘Jesus Christ, they ran me out of Chicago. Ed Fox, who owned the god-damn Grand Terrace said, “What the hell, my Grand Terrace. Why the fuck should I pay you 250 (sic) dollars a week to stink my god-damn show up? Everybody says you sing too slow. Get out.” Fox, who had seen his fair share of violence in Prohibition Chicago, felt that he had met his match when Billie began hurtling office furniture at him. He fired her then and there, no salary, no recompense.
Several of Fletcher Henderson’s band felt that their leader should have helped Billie, either by getting her re-instated, or by obtaining travel expenses for her. However, Henderson deliberately avoided getting involved. Babe Matthews, then working with Nat Cole’s Band at the Panama Café, was asked to take Billie’s place immediately.
Someone once said that Billie in a full rage was ‘as wild as a tigress’, but usually her anger passed quickly; soon after the Chicago debacle she was full of despondency. Back in New York she go no sympathy from Joe Glaser. Billie recalled Glaser saying, ‘You’ve got to speed up the tempo, you gotta sing hot stuff.’ Billie remembered saying to Glaser, ‘I want to sing like I want to sing … that’s my way of doing it.’ Later, when the conversation became more heated, Billie ended the meeting by saying, ‘Look, you son-of-a-bitch, you sing it. I’m going to sing my way. You sing your way.’ The outlook soon looked less bleak when Billie heard that the sales of her own recordings were gradually increasing.
John Chilton, Billie’s Blues: The Billie Holiday Story 1933-1959

Babe Matthews may have taken Billie’s place at The Grand Terrace, but not her place in history. Matthews played by the rules and disappeared.

I salute Billie Holliday’s courage. When you listen to her music, she’s not the most melodic singer around. Ella Fitzgerald, at least in that era, probably better deserves that title. But there was so much depth, spirit, courage in Holliday’s voice and work.

Billie Holliday did it her own way, persevered with her vision despite rejection, had the courage of her conviction, and it ultimately prevailed. I salute that.