For once, judge the book by cut of its jacket. The cover portrait that adorns Julia Blackburn’s new Billie Holiday biography ‘With Billie’ shows not the iconic image of heroin ruin, but a proud, imperious figure shrouded in smoke, shoulders draped with furs, beloved Chihuahua at her feet.

“I’ve never seen it used anywhere,” says Blackburn, an Orange Prize short-listed novelist whose previous biographical subjects include Goya. “It seemed to be the person I was trying to describe. You see how serious she is, and what a thinking person she is, a streetwise thinking person.”

‘With Billie’ was assembled by Blackburn from more than 150 taped interview transcriptions conducted over 30 years ago by one Linda Kuehl, herself something of a tragic figure. Kuehl supplemented the testimonies of former lovers, pimps, musicians and Federal narcotics agents with legal documents, hospital records, court transcripts, royalty statements, shopping lists, postcards and private letters, planning to write a monumental biography of the singer for New York publishers Harper & Row. The magnitude of the task got the better of her. After a Count Basie concert one night in January 1979, she wrote a suicide note and jumped from her third floor window, and her cache of research material passed into the hands of a private collector.

“I found out about it through another book written about Billie Holiday that used it as well, but in a very cutting-and-pasting way,” Blackburn explains. “I finally got the phone number of the man who had it. I went to New York and looked through this box of interviews, it was all complete chaos, and I just had a day to go through an enormous lot of stuff. It’s very haphazard, but I quite like that. If I’d had everything, I don’t think I could have coped.”

Blackburn wisely avoided trying to shoehorn those depositions into a linear narrative structure and instead allowed the various voices to contradict as well as corroborate each other’s statements. The result is akin to a stage play in which the supporting cast line up to testify about the absent lead character.

“It’s so nice to think that there is no truth!” Blackburn says. “I wanted to give everybody the chance to say their piece. I liked the idea of giving dignity to all these people. And I was interested to see if Billie could emerge not as a victim. She was always dismissed as not being political, and I felt that while she was not vocal, she certainly wasn’t stupid. Okay, she was a heroin addict, an alcoholic and all that kind of stuff, as were many of her contemporaries, but it became increasingly apparent to me that it was more to do with how she was treated by the FBI and narcotic agents, that she was selected for several reasons, obviously there was a big file on her.”

One of the more remarkable interviews contained within the book is with one such agent by the name of Jimmy Fletcher, whose good terms with the singer didn’t keep him from busting her. Fletcher’s account of his investigative methods frequently enters ‘LA Confidential’ territory.

“That thing of saying how he trained informers,” Blackburn affirms, “it’s so down to earth.”

As for Holiday not being an overtly political artist, it’s been argued by many – not least David Margolick, author of the excellent ‘Strange Fruit – Billie Holiday, Café Society, And An Early Cry For Civil Rights’ – that ‘Strange Fruit’ was perhaps the most powerful protest song of the last century.

“You see it as she sings it,” says Blackburn. “She did quite often say, ‘I’m a race woman.’ She got on as easily with white men and blacks, but she’s not somebody who was going to be able to face the McCarthy un-American Activities Committee and fight her corner. She couldn’t speak when she was brought up before the authorities. When she was cornered she began to fall apart and became a kid, as it were.

“The same with her singing. If she was in front of a crowd that wasn’t listening she couldn’t sing, but the moment she sensed that it was working, she could. So the whole business of what a hopeless decline it was… in Paris at the end of a European tour they booed her off stage, but then when she was playing The Blue Note, trying to make enough money to go home, people said she sang fantastically because they listened to her.”

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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.