Sunday Is Lady Day

Billie Holiday's first and last albums; from 1952's Billie Holiday Sings, to Billie Holiday in '59.

Critical consensus (that suffocating thing) generally dismisses the 'later albums' as inferior, but in reality all her contracted albums are later. Those seven short years can't be representative of a career stretching back to the 'thirties.

An Allmusic fat-head graces the internet with this *finger-waggle* review of her last album:

"In many ways, a sad event. 1988 reissue of an album with Ray Ellis and his orchestra. It's poignant in a tragic way."

That's it, in full.

Is it also in many ways a poignant event? Tragic in a sad way? The suspicion that our reviewer hasn't even listened to the album (or if he did, he didn't hear it) is strengthened by the farcical one-and-a-half stars he bestows upon it. The considered nuance of that half-star, eh? Then Wiki, which should know better, quotes it in its own coverage, and so further cements critical consensus.


The fans' opinions on Amazon are more positive and better expressed, but you don't have to be a fan to appreciate a great artist at the end of her career and her life. The album was hurriedly (and gloomily, and unnecessarily) marketed as Last Recordings after her death, and the sublime cover [at left - Ed.] literally defaced with a scribbled title. In her life, Holiday never sang a note that wasn't worth hearing, and here she is, still singing from her heart, that bruised place, still beating.

It's pressure that turns coal into diamonds. Shine on, Billie.