Tribute to Billie Holiday

Dear Friends,

Please join me this Sunday, July 26th at Church of the Master (122nd & Morningside Avenue, Harlem, NY) at 10:00 am.*

This is a very special service for me and nothing would please me more than to share it with my friends like you.

It will be unusual for a Sunday service, but I know it will be received well by those who are present. The basis for this special service is the fact that on July 17, 1959, I was standing in Billie Holiday's room at Metropolitan Hospital. She was under police guard as she began her last journey, traveling all alone. Her death was more than a conclusion of a troubled individual life. For me, it was the end of something that has not completely returned to American music or American life. A few days later, I was asked to deliver her eulogy at her funeral.

We know that the inevitable face of death makes all lives tragic, but Billie was special to our time, our condescending pity. The pity is helped into place by how grace, class, sex and politics are used to belittle even those whose lives have been enhanced by superior talent.

We are hearing so much these days about, and a lot of whining, about how terrible a life Billie Holiday lived, because she was a black woman with a 5th grade education and she was a drug addict. As a singer, she seemed to enjoy telling the tales of degradation that went with the troubles of race and drugs. But neither had as much to do with her talent or her artistry as many would like to delude themselves into believing. Holiday singing is what made her special to herself and special to her listeners who enjoyed treating her like royalty.

Billie Holiday was so unique, in every way, that it is ridiculous to pretend that she can be completely explained by her color, her gender, her sparse education or any of the other definitions or limits that are supposed to tell us what we need to know. There is no better example than her singing--her sound odd, her voice small, her range narrow. Still, she polished to a charismatic gloss her singular skill at expressing emotions so intimate and so pure that few have the nerve to try to reach them or even reach for them.

Billie Holiday was not a loud singer, and there is no vulgarity in her work. There was nothing cheap or obvious about her art. She brought a harsh and vulnerable dignity to sorrow, but was far from lacking in the charmed delivered by unsentimental joy. Holiday was a woman who entered her 40's, who knew what had happened to her, what she had to do with it, and audibly revels in how great a gift she had received. Whatever she might have been any place else, was transcended when the singer took the stage.

I love you, Billie, deeply. I miss you, Billie, mightily. God Bless You Child-You had your own.

At the service on Sunday, Dwayne Grayman will sing that great piece of Billie's, "God Bless the Child that Got His Own" and maybe a few others.

Remember...God Loves You! And I love you too!

-Reverend Eugene Callender
www.dreugenecallender.com


*Please note summer services hours:
July and August Church services begin at 10:00 am


Thought for the week: "Love is a dangerous thing. God's love is unconditional. I choose to love, no matter what the circumstance. I choose to love because it is the only thing worth living for."

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