gravestone for lady - tony scott

tony scott wrote an elegy for billie holiday in swank magazine back in 1960. i found it sixty some years later at an estate sale in cherry hill, still pulsing with warmth and grief.

i'd like to share that with you today.

billie holiday spent time in atlantic city during the years when kentucky avenue was alive with jazz. club harlem was the center of it all, a black-owned venue that drew legends from across the country, including ella fitzgerald, cab calloway, duke ellington, and billie herself.

Gravestone for Lady

tony scott

originally published in Swank (July, 1961)

Did you ever stop to think that Lady might say get that goddam stone off me I been carrying too much weight all my life? Did you ever stand in contemplation in front of Lady and think what she meant in the pattern of life? What she stood for, how she felt? Lady hated to have people stand and stare at her because she knew you were thinking is she on junk... see how she looks... where will she end up?

Now that she ended up let’s put a stone over her so everyone will know, so those who did or didn’t dig her can shake their heads and mutter some words to themselves or others and sound profound.

Forget it.

You won’t get relief from guilt or know how to live your life because she lived it her way through circumstance and then choice. How many ways can you be an outcast? You’re a Negro. You sing jazz. You’ve used junk. You won’t take crap from anybody. You grew up in poverty. You don’t sing a lyric, you live it. You won’t sing songs that some idiot record man swears will be a hit. You’re a wandering minstrel with no home and every person you sing for is out to decide what you’re doing, thinking, using.

Leave her alone if you need a marker.

It won’t help her now and if it helps you she ain’t gonna like it because she didn’t trust nobody when she could see you. If you want to satisfy Lady really then figure out what she was trying to tell in her songs. You might start on Strange Fruit.

What feeling are you looking for when you stand in front of Lady’s grave, respect for a person, a jazz singer, or is it maybe a religious feeling? What is it, maybe some day you can tell me. Were you at the church when she was laid out? All I could think of was would Lady say if she could see some of the people there. Oooeee. When I think of all the times she told me stories about them. The graspers! I had the feeling she would rise up and flip the church. The graspers and rejectors were there by the carload, heads bowed and solemn-looking, counting the attendance of the ministers till mourners should continue. You should be allowed to pick your own choices to attend your funeral—everybody there will be testing their consciences to see if they had hurt Lady in any way and I’m sure they came up with clear consciences.

It’s so hard to remember you said or did anything to hurt a person who is dead so you think of all the good things you did while she was alive. You might have to reach like mad but you had to otherwise you would feel as though you had been part of the drag and that would be a drag even though she had it coming to her and you had the world to her in those last days, she was in the old days. That’s what people were saying, she just ain’t got it no more—or maybe it’s you that ain’t got it no more.

The last thing Lady sang was If I Didn’t Have You — no, it was Ain’t Nobody’s Business What I Do.

Did you hear her? Were you there? She was at the Phoenix Theater on Second Avenue in New York. Her voice was bad but she was getting $300. She hadn’t worked in three weeks and had to be supported to the stage from the dressing room. She was all doped up and yet she had to sing. Do you want to know why? She needed the money. Her nose was dripping, she could barely stand up, she was shaking all over and had the strength of a 90-year-old woman and still she sang. She said for the money. Were you there? Did you like the way she sang? Did she move you? Did you get that old feeling that you like to get? Did you hear Lady sing or did you just see it? You know the old Lady, you know the guts, the sound, the soul that you heard. I mean, you dug Lady sounded. Or weren’t you there? Were you backstage? Because backstage they were trying to figure out a way to stop her from going on. Man, she’ll ruin the show. What will the people think? Suppose she goofs? Suppose she dies? What’s she using? Guts, that’s what she’s using. Do you know this will be the last, yes last time they ever hear Lady sing? She will be dead in a week. But no, she only goes into a coma and lasts two months in a hospital.

Were you at her last concert? Did she groove you? If she didn’t, try to forgive her, she was singing on an empty stomach.

Why worry about where she was born or where she is buried, why not listen to her records and find out what she was saying. What she said and acted like was a cover because she didn’t know what she was herself. It would have scared her to find out. I know what you mean about having a marker over her grave. You need something to mark where Lady is because some of us had no marker in real life. The trouble with death is it separates people who lived together and end up buried far away from each other. I don’t know who lies buried next to Lady but I bet it’s someone who wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you mentioned her name to them when they were alive. We live among friends and enemies and die among strangers. Why be so indignant about an unmarked grave? Stop looking for the guilty parties. Do you know what she would say? Did you have her address or phone number when she was alive? Did you know where she was staying anytime? Why do you want to know where she is now? Do you know what her name was on the stone? Billie Holiday was the name you knew her by but you would never find her unless you looked for Eleanora Fagan and I don’t think that you’d be welcome.

THE END

i'll dig deeper + share my thoughts this wednesday in my weekly substack email: https://thedivinghorse.substack.com/