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HOLIDAY, Billie, with William Dufty.
Lady Sings the Blues.
Publisher: Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956
Stock code: 41787
Price: £7,500 Currency Conversion
First Edition, First Impression. Inscribed vertically, and quite expansively, across the first blank, "To Mr. & Mrs. Chuck Landis, Stay Happy Always, Billie Holiday." A paradoxically evocative inscription in view of the painful story told on the pages that follow. Landis was the owner of the Largo Club, the most successful strip club on Sunset Strip - now the site of The Roxy Theatre - home to the likes of Candy Barr and Carol Doda, and hang-out of the gangster Mickey Cohen. Inscribed copies are exceptionally uncommon. "Billie Holiday remains among the most difficult of jazz artists to understand or study. Surrounded by a disturbing legend, it is very difficult to hear her clearly. The legendary suffering and mythopoeic pain which countless admirers have actively sought out in her work make it difficult for the merely curious to warm to a singer who was sometimes a baffling performer... [she] was a singular and unrepeatable talent whose finest hours are remarkably revealing and often surprisingly - given her generally morose reputation as an artist - joyful." (Cook and Morton Penguin Guide to Jazz) A biography which in many ways compounded the legend - "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three." - and, when filmed in 1972 with Diana Ross as Holiday, introduced a new audience to this remarkable performer.
Octavo. Original red cloth, title blocked to spine in silver and black, in dust jacket. Pictorial endpapers. Very light toning, a touch of bleed from the cloth onto the tail edge, only affecting the last few pages, cloth just whitened at the corner tips and with a narrow - 2mm - strip of sunning at the head of the spine, jacket slightly rubbed, short splits at some folds and some associated creasing, mild chipping head and tail of the spine, but a very well-preserved copy of a book that is notoriously hard to find in collectable condition.
