One thing leads to another
Ethan’s comment about Bonnie Raitt, the lady who plays the blues, brought to mind the phrase “lady sings the blues”, which is a movie starring Diana Ross as the legendary jazz singer, Billie Holiday.
The rest of today, I kept thinking of a poem read for a course during the summer term of 1988 at EAS. All I could remember of the poem was the title “The Day Lady Died”. I’m sure it was about Billie Holiday whose nickname had been Lady Day.
So when I got home just now, I took out my copy of The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry to search for the poem and couldn’t find it. Cuz the list of contents was by author names and I couldn’t remember who had written the poem. Searched the index and still couldn’t find it. In the end, had to google for it, and found it. “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara. Went back to the index of titles in the book and found the poem listed under “D” – “Day Lady Died, The”. Duh, Chet …
For me, the most poignant words of the poem come towards the end:
“… then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”
Read the full poem here
“The Day Lady Died” – Frank O’Hara
And from there, my mind remembered similar lines written for another singer who died the same year as Lady Day, and whose name had the same initials as hers.
“I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.”
(“American Pie” – Don McLean)
The day the music died was the day Buddy Holly died on 3 February 1959. Billie Holiday died on 17 July 1959.
I don’t really know the significance of this post, except as an example of how my mind works sometimes. It latches onto a piece of information and from there, goes on to something else, and something else again … most times unrelated stuff. This time, the connections are the words – one a poem and the other a song – and the two personalities, both of them singers who made enough of an impact to be immortalised thus.
