Diana Does Billie: Lady Sings the Blues at 50

While there’s a special place in cinematic hell reserved for characters portrayed as trumpet players (“The Trumpeter’s Cinematic Curse,” TST, August 2019), the perennial theme of feature films about jazz musicians is the dance between art and tragedy—Young Man With a Horn, Bolden, Round Midnight, Bird, Miles Ahead, Born To be Blue… Knowledgeable jazz people who want accurate history are advised to watch documentaries--feature films are for myth-making and one of the clearest personifications of jazz mythology is Billie Holiday. No surprise, then, that she has inspired twice as many feature films as any other jazz musician and that the history is shaky in both. Last year brought us The United States Versus Billie Holiday (I’ll abbreviate as USVBH) (“The History Behind The United States vs. Billie Holiday, TST, March 2021) and 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Lady Sings the Blues (I’ll abbreviate as LSTB). While they share some familiar cultural tropes, both are reflective of the eras in which they were created. In the early 1970s, the most “progressive” thing one might say about the US film industry is that it was an era of heightened tokenism. While Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ben Vereen sometimes made it into high budget films, most black actors, writers and directors had access only to low-budget Blaxploitation films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem,