Book review: Billie Holiday – The Graphic Novel by Ebony Gilbert, David Calcano and Lindsay Lee

That word ‘novel’ carries a lot of baggage here. Of course the most famous fictionalised account of Billie Holiday’s life is her own autobiography Lady Sings The Blues with it’s famous opening, Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.

Cartoonist Keith Knight provides a raison d’etre for this book in his foreword. It’s about teaching history through comics. ‘Dynamic stories like this need to be told in dynamic ways….Comix do that’ a teacher says.

Like Lady Sings The Blues this biography aims to capture a milieu rather than presenting the life as a series of events and it is graphic in both senses of the word in that it’s a picture book and it doesn’t shy away from depictions of drug use, overt and secondary racism, violence, imprisonment and alcoholism . All of the major musical characters are in there, (Lester Young, Artie Shaw and Count Basie) along with the predators who profited from her talent.

We follow her from prostitution in the back streets to Carnegie Hall through all of her ups and downs, her loves and losses, her adulation in France and being made to ride the hotel’s freight elevator back in the USA because ‘the guests are uncomfortable with negroes taking the public elevator’.

Billie is front and centre in most of the frames; several pictures fill a whole large (25cm x 25cm ) page with full page portraits of Young and Basie in particular. Billie’s in concert pictures are striking, with her surrendering to the music, reaching out, eyes closed. The dominant tones are purple and lilac with occasional splashes of red. Reminisces and flashbacks are in shades of brown sepia.

It is a book that repays a second look. There aren’t many words in it, (probably as many as are in this review) but the images reward a revisit. Whilst the detail is often limited there is an energy and movement to many of the images, not least those covering the violence inflicted on Holiday, both by her manager/lover, Louis Guy, and during her time in prison.

Throughout the book there are listening suggestions highlighted within the story (Easy Living, Them There Eyes, Strange Fruit, God Bless The Child, Good Morning Heartache, All of Me) which should send the reader to their online music provider to help them realise what Lady Day was all about, and why we still care about her, though I cheated and listened to an extended edition of Lady in Satin.

It’s a good idea to represent black icons in a way that makes their lives accessible to new generations and I enjoyed this book more than the last book I read about Billie Holiday (John Szwed’s Billie Holiday – The Musician and the Myth, which is a bit hit and myth). The bibliography at the end of The Graphic Novel refers to With Billie by Julia Blackburn and I would recommend that tome along with Stuart Nicholson’s biography of her if you want a more detailed, and true, telling of the story. Dave Sayer

Billie Holiday – The Graphic Novel by Ebony Gilbert, David Calcano and Lindsay Lee published by Fantoons; Illustrated edition (2021) (ISBN-10:1970047135, ISBN-13:978-1970047134)