Billie Holiday by John Szwed5/22/2023 Szwed’s book persuasively reappraises one of the most influential American singers of the 20th century, even if, in the end, it falls short of resolving Holiday’s paradoxes into a cohesive whole. Now, on the centennial of her birth, John Szwed, a veteran biographer and jazz musician, seeks to redress this imbalance with his valuable “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth.” Conceived as a “meditation on art and its relation to her life,” rather than a straight-ahead biography, Mr. Photo: William Gottlieb/DRP./getty Imagesīillie Holiday’s fabled personal crises, the struggles against chemical dependency, sexual abuse and racism, have long threatened to overshadow her Promethean stature as an artist.
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