Blackburn's principal contribution to that understanding is a sense of who Holiday's friends were. The interviews about her Baltimore girlhood constitute an oral history of a 1920s ghetto, not such an easy thing to come by; the later materials, which predominate, do the same for the jazz life, which is better documented, and also the sporting life, which is less so. But it's the sum of the documentation that's so impressive. Billie Holiday was a difficult, profane and sometimes imperious woman. She was a junkie and an alcoholic; she had sex with many men and women; she was hot-tempered and ready to clock anyone who gave her grief. Yet the love emanating from these interviews flows never-ending. Holiday wasn't just adored by her fans (to an unusual degree for a nonsuperstar, although not for what today we call a cult artist); she was adored by her friends and colleagues, and the paucity of backbiting is a clue to her greatness. Most artists are selfish as a way of life, and Holiday would always take what was offered her, especially if it would get her high. But she was also great fun to be around, certainly up till her miserable end and often then, and generous by nature, by which I mean something less showy and manipulative than the impulsive largesse of a Presley or Sinatra. She attracted her circle not with her power or charisma but with her spirit.

To Blackburn's credit, the sporting lifers come through as remarkable individuals: the stepfather who cherished Billie and the stepmother who envied her; the dancer who was her mother's confidante and the good-time girl who was her pharmacist's wife; the pimp and the madam; the two comedians and the five pianists; the white Southern bisexual woman who froze her out and the white Southern homosexual man who propped her up; John Levy the Good who played bass as opposed to John Levy the Evil who played her; the mousy secretary and the slick lawyer who shared her last days; the narc who busted her and still thought he was her friend. Holiday's last husband, Louis McKay, is captured in a brutal taped phone call, and Blackburn adds to Kuehl's roster portraits of spaced-out sweetheart Lester Young and people- collecting bitch Tallulah Bankhead. She also goes on about the irrationality of US narcotics policy, although she argues cogently that Holiday's heroin addiction was less severe than myth would have it--she seemed to kick at will, and even the chief witness for the prosecution, accompanist Carl Drinkard, who clearly wanted to believe Holiday was as hopeless a junkie as he was, allows that unlike him she didn't shoot up to get straight: "It was not just to keep from getting sick; she actually enjoyed using drugs." Although many claimed she was only happy singing (and many claimed she didn't believe she could sing), Blackburn's Holiday is a woman who enjoyed a lot of things. As O'Meally concludes, she chose very young to reject the straight world, and she had a ball doing it.

"People don't think I like laughing. They don't think I lead any kind of normal life," Holiday complained to secretary Alice Vrbsky. And she had a right. By 1957 or so, Holiday's circumstances were bleak. She'd lost friends, she hated McKay as she'd come to hate all the other toughs who'd turned her on, and with no manager and an unearned reputation as a no-show, she wasn't getting enough club work, although Norman Granz had been overseeing some of her greatest sessions. But as Blackburn and Griffin insist, our lady of perpetual suffering was a reductive sensationalization based on her 1947 heroin conviction, which was probably a setup. Not that Holiday resisted the cliché the way she might have. Her autobiography cashed in on her notoriety, and because hard living--especially alcohol--had roughed up her instrument and sapped her sass, her late recordings often foreground her pain. Nevertheless, musically and personally, the transmutation of suffering was never all or even most of what Billie Holiday was about. Coming up when I did, I used to share O'Meally's view that the late recordings old-timers disparage were markedly superior to the music of her 20s--in O'Meally's words, "more nuanced and evocative." But listening intensively as I've read these books, I've come to feel not that their vocal attractions are somehow lacking, because her voice almost always comes through, but that they don't laugh enough--even if, as O'Meally makes clear, they laugh more than I could once discern.

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