“GOD BLESS THE CHILD” (1941)

Billie Holiday wrote the words to “God Bless the Child” after a disagreement with her mother over money. Her mother asked for some financial help to open an after hours club, and Holiday refused. Later, describing how she came to write the song, Holiday recalled her argument-ending comment: “I said ‘God bless the child that’s got his own,’ and walked out. I stayed sore for three weeks. I thought about it and thought about it. One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head. Then I rushed down to the Village that night and met Arthur Herzog. He sat down at the piano and picked it out, phrase by phrase, as I sang it to him.” Songwriter Arthur Herzog Jr. was responsible for a small number of songs, and is best known for his collaboration with Billie Holiday. They also co-wrote the standard “Don’t Explain.”
Holiday wrote “God Bless the Child” while she was under contract to Columbia Records; in 1941 she made the first recording of the song for its subsidiary, Okeh Records, and the song peaked at #25 on the pop charts that year. Sidemen at that session included trumpeter Roy Eldridge, pianist Eddie Heywood and bassist Grachan Moncur II. By 1941 Holiday already was well established as a jazz singer, performing in New York City’s 52nd Street clubs like Kelly’s Stables and the Famous Door. She wrote a number of songs that became jazz standards and their themes often related to her life experience. By the time she wrote “God Bless the Child,” she had indeed become “the child that's got his own.” She was working at Kelly’s Stables, accompanied by piano great Art Tatum, and earning a salary of $300 per week - but it had not always been that way.
Born in 1915, Holiday grew up on the tough streets of Baltimore; her parents never married, and her father, Clarence Holiday, played no role in her upbringing. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, reputedly operated a brothel and Holiday frequently was sent to board with relatives. Her early years were characterized by poverty and abuse, and by age 12 she was working in a waterfront brothel. She said, “I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.” While the words of “God Bless the Child” may have gotten their immediate inspiration from an argument she had with her mother, they reflect a bitterness and cynicism that must have had roots in the hard world of her childhood.
In 1929 Holiday moved to New York City with her mother and began singing for tips at tables in Harlem nightclubs. She changed from her birth name of Eleanora Fagan to Billie Holiday in 1930, taking her father’s surname and Billie from an actress she admired, Billie Dove. She got her big break in 1933 when the legendary producer and talent scout John Hammond happened to hear her singing in a small Harlem nightclub. He said of that fortuitous occurrence, “My discovery of Billie Holiday was the kind of accident I dreamed of, the sort of reward I received now and then by traveling to every place where anyone performed...” She was signed to a Columbia Records recording contract and began working with musicians of the caliber of Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie and Artie Shaw.
Holiday said that her musical role models were Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, whose records she first heard as a child in the Baltimore brothel where she worked. But no matter what she took from them, she developed her own style of jazz singing, a style which hadn’t existed prior to her. She was the first jazz musician to routinely improvise using her voice as the instrument. Meg Greene in her biography of Billie Holiday states, “Holiday transformed the art of jazz singing, and it is no exaggeration to say that modern jazz singing began with her. Before she appeared on the scene, jazz singers rarely personalized their tunes. Only blues singers, such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Dinah Washington, did not sound generic and interchangeable. Bored by the popular songs that she had to sing and record early in her career, Holiday experimented by altering both the rhythm and the melody. She phrased behind the beat and added harmonies derived from her favorite horn players, such as Louis Armstrong and Lester Young. The results were often magical.” Holiday herself said, “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, not music.”
Holiday recorded numerous versions of “God Bless the Child.” It was the most commercially successful song she wrote and she included it as part of her standard concert repertoire. A wide diversity of musicians have covered it, including the rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears, country singer Crystal Gayle, folk singer Dave Van Ronk and avant-garde improviser Eric Dolphy, who performed it on the bass clarinet, an instrument rarely used in jazz. But no one has done it any better than its creator, Billie Holiday. Click here to listen to her version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk7bPZcHpa8&feature=related
Billie Holiday died in 1959 at the young age of 44, suffering from the effects of drug and alcohol addiction and hard-living. Yet 50 years later the artistry of her singing continues to influence musicians and attract new fans. Music journalist and producer Ashley Kahn said of her, “If one female voice has become a part of all of us, one we can still hear in the songs sung by most modern-day singers, echoing her blend of heart and soul and jazz and rhythm and blues...it’s Billie Holiday.”