Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year

Biographer Alexander (Rough Magic) traces in this stellar and sometimes-devastating account the remarkable life of a “jazz legend” whose voice “had nothing to do with reality but everything to do with the truth,” as poet Owen Dodson once put it. Using as a narrative frame the artist’s final year—during which she dealt with cirrhosis of the liver and professional setbacks—Alexander flashes back to defining events of Holiday’s life, including engaging in prostitution as a teen, struggling with alcoholism, spending stints in prison for narcotics possession, and entering into a string of abusive marriages, the last of which—to Louis McKay—lasted in name until her 1959 death, when he inherited her assets even though she’d planned on divorcing him. Despite such challenges, Holiday—who’d changed her name from Eleanora to the more commercial-sounding “Billie” in her late teens—emerges as an artist who felt most alive while performing and conveyed in her songs the often-dark truths of her life better than any journalist could. Chronicling Holiday’s career, Alexander covers in meticulous detail her early successes; collaborations and friendships (she developed an especially close relationship with saxophonist Lester Young); and the music itself, including 1958’s Lady in Satin, her penultimate album and a “masterpiece of longing and sorrow” made singular by her beautifully “damaged, tortured voice.” The result is an excellent biography befitting of its inimitable subject. (Feb.)