Reading From "Lady Sings The Blues" 1 - Live At Carnegie Hall,1956

This is Billie Holiday's story

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married

He was eighteen, she was sixteen, I was three

I was a woman when I was six, big for my age

With big breasts, big bones, just a big, fat, healthy broad

So I started working out then, before school and after

Minding babies, running errands

And scrubbing those damn white steps all over Baltimore

And I never got beyond the fifth grade

But whether I was riding a bike

Or scrubbing somebody's dirty bathroom floor

I used to love to sing all the time, I liked music

If there was a place where I could go and hear it, I went

Alice Dean used to keep a whorehouse on the corner nearest our place

And I used to run errands for her and the girls

When it came time to pay me

I used to tell her she could keep the money

If she'd let me come up in her front parlor

And listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on her Victrola

I guess I'm not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse

But I never tried to make anything of it

If I'd heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree

I'd have loved it just the same

But a lot of white people first heard jazz in places like Alice Dean's

And they helped label jazz "whorehouse music"

They forget what it was like in those days

A whorehouse was about the only place

Where black and white folks could meet in any natural way

They damn well couldn't rub elbows in the churches

And in Baltimore, places like Alice Dean's

Were the only joints fancy enough to have a Victrola

And for real enough to pick up on the best records

I know this for damn sure

If I'd heard Pops and Bessie

Wailing through the window of some minister's front parlor

I'd have been running free errands for him

Unless it was the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong I heard as a kid

I don't know of anybody who actually inuenced my singing, then or now

I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pop's feeling

No two people on Earth are alike

And it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession

Let alone two years or ten years

If you can, then it ain't music

It's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something

But not music