Queens of Jazz: The Joy and Pain of the Jazz Divas

Listen, listen, listen.

Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald,

Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee and Nina Simone.

Five queens of jazz who helped to forge

the soundtrack of American life in the mid-20th century.

Creatures of troubled times,

but resplendent in their poise, virtuosity and musical truth,

these women triumphed, often at great personal cost,

both embodying and transcending their era.

From the way they sounded to the way they looked,

from the joy of seeing them to the pain of being them,

this is the story of the jazz queen.

These are images of the lost world that paved the way

for the great jazz diva.

America at the dawn of the 20th century.

All of the great figures who invented jazz

and the classic American songbook were born in the same period.

They were all born in the 1890s, early 1900s.

They grew up listening to the same thing,

subject to the same social conditions,

reading the same newspapers, hearing the same recordings.

But even though they don't know each other

and may not be thinking of themselves as one big group,

they were all feeding off each other.

Have we seen anybody like Ella or Sarah in the last 30 or 40?

That's a long time, 30 or 40 years.

They belong to their time.

Their time was the mid-30s to the mid-60s.

Three glorious decades

that now seem as remote and romantic as the jazz diva herself.

There is certainly something a bit exotic about them.

And singing those beautiful songs,

full of imaginary late-night hangs

in speakeasies and telling these wonderful stories.

It was a smoky place because people were smoking,

not cos there was a smoke machine and there was a mist in the air

because there was sweat and smoke together,

and there was a grit and dirt about it and it was very cabaret.

People still felt the need to believe in something bigger.

And you strove, you had a reason to strive to be better.

It was a golden era of songwriting, a golden era in great bands

and it was a golden era of singers.

# Love is just like a faucet

# It turns off and on

# Love is like a faucet

# It turns off and on

# Sometimes when you think it's on, baby

# It has turned off and gone. #

The jazz diva transcends ordinary life.

She came into being during the golden age of Hollywood,

which is why she looks like a movie star

and why her demise coincided with the death of old Hollywood.

But while she reigned supreme,

her looks could be as mesmerising as her voice.

It was all about mystery,

and I think mystery is one of the most beautiful things

to feed people's imaginations.

That whole glamour thing that happened,

it happened from ordinary women up,

so if you were in showbusiness and you had photographers,

you had that beautiful lighting and black-and-white

and all of the paraphernalia that goes with presentation.

They look magnificent, they're overly made up,

their hair is in a bouffant, six inches above their heads.

They're wearing these sleek, satiny gowns or beaded things.

And they're beyond gorgeous.

They're very human, very real.

Approachable. Touchable.

Yet...

..better than we are. That's just it.

Nina Simone, she was like a goddess floating through.

Literally, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam,

she seemed to float up the stairs.

She had this gown on,

she looked like the empress from another planet,

like from a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon movie.

The elegance, the surreality of it all,

and the down-to-earthiness of it all, that was unique.

And that was Nina Simone.

The talented female jazz singer wasn't always in control of the way she looked.

Sarah Vaughan's early image as just one of the band

was radically changed by her label, Columbia Records,

on her way to individual diva stardom.

They're the ones who changed her teeth. They changed her hairline.

They're the ones who taught her how to be gowned,

they're the ones who put her in the spotlight

and told her how to stop being the gawky New Jersey girl

who won the Monday night competition at the Apollo.

And to be a diva.

# My heart's in a dither, dear

# When you're at a distance

# But when you are near

# Oh, my... #

But some jazz queens succeeded in creating their own look from the ground up.

Peggy Lee's image as a cool, white,

sexy screen goddess with a voice was entirely of her own making.

She ended up designing her own gowns, and she knew her figure,

she knew what she wanted to look like on stage.

She had a strong idea of who she wanted to be,

who she wanted this persona of Peggy Lee to be.

And she didn't want somebody else to dictate that to her.

# Sitting down, wondering what it's all about

# You ain't got no money, they will put you out

# Why don't you do right, man, like some other men do?

# Get out of here and get me some money too. #

Behind the glamour of the jazz diva often lurks the potent mythology

of a troubled childhood scarred by all kinds of deprivations, hardships and abuse.

It's a sort of cliche now, isn't it?

You know, that, "Well, they had early struggles

"and bad times and it gives depth to what you do," and yet...

I suppose, in a way it does.

Billie Holiday had a dreadful childhood.

Abused, she was in an orphanage,

she was farmed out to a madam to clean, I mean,

the worst things happen to Billie Holiday as a child.

And people say, "Ah", you know?

You can't listen to Piaf and not know her early life.

You can't listen to Billie Holiday, particularly when she's older

and frailer and absolutely not in the space,

without knowing that she's a drug addict.

You can't do that, you can't separate the information.

# Hush now, don't explain

# You're my joy and pain

# My life's yours, love

# Don't explain. #

There's a part of me that says, you know,

the personal lives of the artists,

I mean, for all we know, Brahms may have had a sour stomach.

But Billie Holiday, we tend to read into it.

But I think that she was such a great artist that her stuff transcended it.

Thousands of people had horrible childhoods

and they weren't Billie Holiday.

They created what they did in spite of it all, not because of it.

Some come from hard backgrounds, of course, but not all of them did.

Sarah Vaughan had a quite nice, middle-class upbringing,

and wasn't too up against it, like, say, Ella Fitzgerald was.

Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were born around the same time.

They both had very horrible, horrible childhoods.

What I don't hear in Ella's voice,

that was very present in Billie's voice, is the pain.

Ella suffered but somehow that did not translate in her delivery.

# My fur coat's so low Lord, ain't it cold?

# But I'm not going to holler cos I still got a dollar

# And when I get low oh-oh-oh-oh, I get high. #

Ella Fitzgerald had a very tough start.

Her mother died very young, she was in an orphanage,

she was running the numbers for the Mafia,

she ended up in some very, very dodgy situations.

So you don't always have to parade your neurotic,

awful behaviour and this terrible life you've had.

# Love for sale

# If you want the thrill of love

# I've been through the mill of love. #

Once Ella gets close to tragedy, to the dark side of Billie,

for instance, it doesn't sound right.

She's acting.

But it's cheerful. Cheerfulness keeps breaking through with her.

# A-tisket

# A-tasket

# I lost my yellow basket

# Won't someone help me find my bask

# And make me happy again, again?

-# Was it red?

-No, no, no, no

# Was it green?

# No, no, just a little yellow basket

# My little yellow basket. #

The shiny, white carapace that was the glamorous facade

of Miss Peggy Lee reflected nothing of a childhood

spent at the mercy of a cruel stepmother

and an uncaring, alcoholic father.

That's how she got through her childhood, I believe, through music

and writing songs in her head and singing.

She didn't want to talk about her problems on stage,

but definitely all of that was there with her when she sang.

It couldn't not be.

For all of those women, the important thing was the music.

They were in it for the music. It was the thing that saved them.

They're trying to solve a problem.

They're trying to fix something and they're grasping at straws,

and sometimes they must feel like they're falling

and they can't grab onto something

that will hold them together and this is the nearest thing.

The effect of years of unhappiness...

..and not having love...

..and not knowing that you really are worth something -

it's very difficult to instil that in someone who doesn't feel that.

Annie Ross knew about childhood unhappiness.

She arrived on an immigrant ship from Scotland to New York in 1934

only to be left there by her parents in the care of an aunt,

the singer, Ella Logan.

Only four years old at the time, Ross was a precocious talent

destined not only to discover the work of the great American jazz divas

but also to be a fellow traveller on the jazz highway.

The first time I heard Billie Holiday,

the first time I heard Sarah Vaughan, the first time

I heard Ella Fitzgerald, it's such a blissful thing to know

that you're young and you've got to listen to all these people.

It's breathtaking.

# Those that have shall get

# Those that don't shall lose

# So the Bible says

# And it still is news. #

I hated being a child.

I hated my childhood. I never wanted to be a child.

I wanted to be grown and free.

# But God bless the child that's got his own

# That's got his own. #

Singing was part of me...

..and it was the one treasure I had.

If singing offered a way out of a bad situation

for a girl with a voice,

her best escape route in the '30s and '40s was to join a band,

most of which were comprised entirely of men.

She might be hired just to be looked at,

to be what the band often called "the canary".

# We keep spending all our time in beauty parlours. #

They were definitely a flower, you know, cos people

maybe get tired of just hearing "Da-doop-da-da,

"da-doop-da-da," hour after hour, blah-blah-blah.

Finally, a singer coming out, she's wearing...she's dressed lovely.

Most of these singers were not of the musical level or experience

of the musicians in the band,

so I don't think that they cared very much about them.

They were a cutie-pie, a guy or girl, they were cute

and the young people came to see them and they sang the song and they got off.

I think the band always was a little bit snooty, ha-ha!

You know, the chick singer was a big joke.

The difference was when a Billie Holiday or an Ella Fitzgerald

or a Sarah Vaughan, even at the earliest stages

were on that bandstand, I think it became very clear to the musicians

that they were dealing with at the very least a peer,

and for probably many of the musicians, somebody who was superior to them.

Ella Fitzgerald, you know, initially people didn't want to hire her

because she was overweight and they didn't think she was pretty enough.

She really didn't look that great. Smelt a bit.

Her first frock was a whip-round from the band.

They said, "We can't have her, look at her, look at her."

And Chick Webb heard her and said, "Yes, but she can sing.

"We can fix the look, we can fix the look but we've got to have her."

The queens of jazz began their careers with busy swing bands

under the control and leadership of famous bandleaders

such as Benny Goodman, Chick Webb,

Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

This meant spending months and months touring on the bus.

18 guys in the band and a girl singer.

There's 200 one-nighters in a row, some of them,

and it was a constant 300-mile trip every night.

Ella Fitzgerald was the life of the party.

She was the only girl on the bus,

with a big orchestra-sized bus travelling around,

whether it was early Chick Webb when she was 16 or Duke Ellington

later on and those guys were working every day, sleeping sitting up.

How did they present themselves night after night as a figure of glamour?

What kind of mental strength and backbone did it take

just to get out of bed and look nice after eight hours on a bus

without being able to eat or use the bathroom on the way,

and then in a crummy backstage dressing room,

if there was a dressing room, probably just the back seat of a bus,

apply the make-up, put on the gown

and go and satisfy what these people who came to hear the band

wanted to see, as the figure of glamour, of sex, of femininity.

It certainly was difficult but, you know, you're young,

so riding on a bus with all these guys was great.

You know, the really hip guys sat in the back.

And I found love there.

Love wasn't the obvious thing to find on a bus full of male

musicians, running on a tank full of testosterone, bound for jazz glory.

Some girls had reputations, I suppose, you know,

she might have done the saxophones first and then the trumpets!

Oh, no, start with the rhythm section, wouldn't you say? Yes.

If you want a good beat behind your singing!

Ha-ha! That was tough, tough on the girl!

18 guys taking a shot at her all the time.

There were guys, sure, I was young, you know?

It was quite a combination of music and love.

It was a fascinating world. I loved it to bits.

But the fascinating world, tin-canned by the tour bus,

would, sooner or later, have to disembark

in those parts of the country where skin colour mattered

much more than musicianship.

There were still, you know, black toilets, black restaurants.

You couldn't go into the white ones. It was kind of embarrassing.

Going to towns where you went in through the kitchen

and people spat at you in the street.

If you were a black woman, your life was untenable in the South

and if you were a white woman,

people thought you were a slut and a whore.

What was it like being a black woman

and singing to all these white guys in the audience that,

you know, were noisy and rowdy and disrespectful, how did you do that?

They had a sense of expression

and a family within the musicians that they worked with.

They did have their art as a kind of salve,

a kind of bond to heal over it for a time.

If being part of a big band offered the black female jazz singer

comfort and protection in a white, male world,

it was also where she learnt about how to be a musician herself.

Ella Fitzgerald, being on the bandstand with Chick Webb every night,

can you imagine what she learned about rhythm from him?

Billie Holiday, for one year, night after night,

with the Count Basie Orchestra.

# Them that's got shall have

# Them that's not shall lose. #

Night after night, hearing that, and also them hearing her.

# Mama may have

# Papa may have

# But God bless the child that's got his own

# That's got his own. #

When you sing with a big band

and you learn the discipline that goes on in the big band,

you're special.

# You're mean to me. #

They weren't in charge of their repertoire.

The arranger said, "I think we'll do this", or the bandleader said, "Why don't we do that?"

And so, in a sense, they had this quite demanding apprenticeship.

Someone like Peggy Lee, when she got with the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1941,

she wasn't the Peggy Lee of five or six years later.

There was time for her to mature.

When you work with Benny Goodman, if you keep your mouth shut,

and watch what's going on, that's a college education -

it is four years of college with Benny.

And that is what she got.

# You had plenty money, 1922

# You let other women Make a fool of you

# Why don't you do right? #

She was just a member of the band.

She was one of the instruments

and she needed to fit in and conform and please Benny.

# And get me some money too... #

Benny said, "Don't do that, don't do that."

HE LAUGHS

That's the way to do it. He's the boss.

But the power of the big band bosses didn't survive World War II.

Nor did the bands themselves -

their personnel decimated by military service, the rebuilding of life

after the war, the expense of big band touring and union trouble.

While the men were at war, a new kind of women had slipped

out of the kitchen and into popular entertainment -

a woman of dubious virtue,

with a troubled past and an uncertain future.

Resourceful, independent, even dangerous. A femme fatale.

Meanwhile, the hippest sidewalks now marched to the tune of a new

kind of jazz called bebop. Modern jazz for a modern age.

Perfect for a new kind of modern musical woman. The jazz diva.

After World War II, when the bands died, the singers were liberated

and the really good ones had a glorious decade in the '50s and early...middle '60s.

They were all signed to major labels,

they recorded with luxurious orchestras and string ensembles.

They were backed up by radio.

There were jazz clubs around the country.

And there were the record companies themselves,

that knew how to publicise them.

The jazz diva's time had come.

Like a film noir heroine, she took centre stage,

this time in a smaller group of musicians

playing more complex music for audiences to listen to,

no longer surrounded by 20 guys in a big band

whose main job was to get people dancing.

Now she was the focus of attention.

With Ella, what musicians listen for is the sheer perfection.

First of all, the instrument, her diction, and her phrasing.

# Heaven

# I'm in heaven

# And my heart beats so That I can hardly speak... #

Ella's music came out so perfect, it would be the

envy of any composer to be able to write the things that she sang.

# Say, hey, hey, hey The bo-o-o-o-o-oy

# From Ipanema

# Say the boy from Ipanema

# Say the boy from Ipanema, Ipanema Yes, the boy from Ipanema. #

They say that when she first joined Chick Webb's band, she would come on

and she was, completely sort of blank.

She would stand there and the music would start

and she would suddenly come to life.

And as long as the music was playing, she was animated and moving about, she was smiling and waving.

And the music stopped, and she stopped.

The great jazz divas were able to steal

the limelight by virtue of their own very special and private instrument,

one that they played inside their own flesh - their voice.

Singing is the most intimate form of music making.

Every other musician on the stage has a filter between himself

and the audience and that is the instrument, but the singer is naked.

It is all about her insights, her diaphragm, her vocal chords.

It is different from every other instrument because of that.

It's inside you. Every part of you goes to making that sound.

The jazz diva is born with her instrument. It is uniquely hers.

They had a good sense of how to make themselves individuals.

And that was something that no-one could really take from them

-and that was where their power was.

-They were copying no-one else.

They were the beginning.

Ella Fitzgerald says that she loved Connie Boswell

and wanted to sound like her. They had people... I'm sure

Betty Smith and the other blues singers from before their days

would have influenced them, but they were trailblazers.

And no-one could blaze a vocal trail like Billie holiday.

# Treat me right, baby And I will stay home every day

# Just treat me right, baby. #

You cannot teach someone to sound like Billie Holiday.

I don't know.

Billie, Billie, Billie!

What have you done? I don't know, it's just so free and natural

and does she care if she was drunk? No. To imitate her would be folly.

You couldn't stop her and say, "You shouldn't do it like that."

It was too subtle, too cute.

Everything has a sheen, a perfection,

-and it seemed so carefree and so lazy.

-Her tuning was impeccable.

She was off her tits most of the time, and her tuning was bang on.

You hear her life and you hear her truth

and I think a lot of people throw out cliches like that.

But it is true. Truth is what you hear.

With Billie Holiday, you begin with the strange fact that she

only has a range of about 12 to 15 notes.

If you were to look at what she sings written down

and then look at the song copy, the song copy the notes go up and down

like this... Billie just goes like this.

It is the opposite of Sarah Vaughan.

Sarah Vaughan could have probably have done opera if she had been born in a different world.

I heard her singing Bali Hai on an opera version of the musical

South Pacific, with Kiri Te Kanawa.

Sarah's voice is as pure and powerful as beautiful as Kiri's soprano.

# Sweet and clear as can be

# Come to me

# Here am I

# Come to me

# If you try You will find me

# Where the sky meets the sea

# Here am I your special island... #

I wanted to be her manager.

# Come to me... #

But Sarah was of

the school that her manager had to be her guy, you know.

And that was her school.

She always felt that way.

And she never found the right guy.

I was not interested in being Sassy's guy.

I respected her as an artist, I thought she was a beautiful woman,

but that wasn't what I wanted,

and so that didn't work.

Sarah was a great artist who also understood modern jazz,

also understood modern harmonies,

because she came up through

the Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie era.

She was THEIR singer.

# I don't know why, but I'm feelin' so sad

# I long to try... #

Just about the first record she made

had Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker on it,

and it was a bebop record.

And in the late '40s, she's singing the sort of thing

that most instrumentalists couldn't get at, let alone singers.

And she never, ever put a foot wrong.

The jazz divas were able to sing

in a way best suited to their individual range and personality

because of technical advances in microphone technology.

As these sculptural devices became more sensitive,

so the jazz voice could become more detailed and powerful

or more conversational and minimal.

Someone like Billie, who came up in the age of the microphone,

couldn't belt out loudly.

But they could...

they could bring it down to like what Marlon Brando did later, which

is just to that, you know, that essence of the slightest movement.

No jazz diva embraced the microphone age

more than Peggy Lee whose solo career motto was,

"Softly, with feeling,"

which she coupled with method-actor minimalism.

APPLAUSE

# Never know how much I love you

# Never know how much I care

# When you put your arms around me

# I get a fever that's so hard to bear

# You give me fever... #

She kind of toned it down and made it almost conversational

and made these rowdy clubs that she sang in come to her.

She's almost purring at you, isn't she?

And the sound is so intimate.

# Fever, in the morning

# Fever all through the night... #

Stillness. And...

she's just, like...like that.

And her hands, she's like, still.

# You give me fever

# When you kiss me

# Fever when you hold me tight

# Fever... #

Just two pieces. Bass and drums.

# Fever, ba-dum! #

That was her arrangement, you know.

She would whisper when she sang,

and she sang beautiful, slow tempos

and she sold the lyrics.

And she made you believe it.

Peggy Lee believed that every song was a little story that had to

be acted out and stage-produced.

The person she chose to do this was Miss Peggy Lee,

a persona she constructed right down to the last detail.

We would go into the dressing room

and she would start her transformation with make-up,

with hair, with the costume,

and I would watch this person,

my grandmother,

become Miss Peggy Lee, the star.

And then I would run around,

go out on...into the theatre,

and watch her, and it was amazing.

I have to say, it was amazing for me.

And then she'd come off stage,

and she would just be high.

And then she'd say, "Oh, I'm just famished,"

and we would go to McDonald's

or Carl's Jr or something. Wendy's.

But Peggy Lee was white.

Popping out for a bite to eat after the show hadn't always been an option

for those singers who were black, however famous they were.

Racism was still at the very dark heart of jazz in America in the '60s.

The struggles for African-American female singers were doubly daunting.

Well, they are queens.

I mean, they're royalty in American culture,

but they're royalty

during a fractious time in society,

before desegregation in America.

To be a black woman in America before the civil rights movement,

and even during the civil rights movement, is...

has got to be something that's unimaginable today.

They'd be people that would be worshipped around the world

and couldn't go into a restaurant in America.

This created tremendous psychological problems.

These ladies experienced that, even though they are divas.

They could be well-known, selling, you know, tens of thousands

of records, and they're going to have these moments every day.

And if there's trouble in the land...

..then you gotta sing about it. You've got to.

And that's what these women did.

# Southern trees

# Bear strange fruit

# Blood on the leaves

# And blood at the root... #

Those singers can deliver performances

that reach a level of emotional uneasiness

for the audience that is profound.

# Black bodies swingin'

# In the Southern breeze

# Strange fruit hangin'

# From the poplar trees. #

Protest music. Jazz has always been protest music,

and it's supposed to be.

Sometimes, when we listen to Ella Fitzgerald,

we hear her sunny disposition.

# Oooh... #

We think that we're not hearing

so much of a reflection of the tough times of the eras

when we hear someone like Billie Holiday, but I think if we take

a step back and think, "What did it take for Ella to present that face?"

I think, with all these iconic figures we're talking about,

whether it's Billie, Sarah, Ella, all those great

African-American women who were trailblazers,

anything and everything that we saw of them on the stage spoke

to their condition of the time.

This is either by omission,

or you have to dig deeper underneath the surface to see these things.

The youngest of our jazz queens found omission impossible.

You don't need to dig very far beneath the surface of Nina Simone's

music to find the racial indignation of the last of the great jazz divas.

# I don't belong here I don't belong there

# I've even stopped believing in prayer

# Almost but not quite... #

She took the race issue on in that she actually became involved

with the whole civil rights movement.

She took it on at a very different level.

# Well, that's just the trouble

# Do it slow

# Desegregation

# Do it slow

# Mass participation

# Do it slow

# Unification

# Do it slow

# Do things gradually

# Do it slow

# But bring more tragedy

# Do it slow

# Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?

# I don't know, I don't know... #

There was a woman who had enough balls to talk about the things

that nobody wanted to talk about and do it in a way that it wasn't

entertainment tonight and it wasn't television, it was real,

and it was significant.

# You don't have to live next to me, love

# Just give me my equality, love

# Everybody knows about Mississippi

# Everybody knows about Alabama

# Everybody knows about Mississippi

# Goddam. #

Here's somebody with a great talent and a great genius

and a great composing genius,

who took a social stand to the detriment of her pop career.

She was being moulded to be like Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald.

There was a song she sang after the death of Martin Luther King.

There was...such disgust in her voice, she gets to this lyric,

"He was not a violent man."

-SOFTLY:

-# He was not a violent man... #

Now, she could sing it that way. But she sang it...

# He was not

# A vi-i-i-i-olent man... #

She just...she just squalls all the juice she possibly could.

# He was not a vi-i-i-olent man

# Tell me, folks, if you can

# Just why

# Why was he shot down the other day? #

The voice is sometimes not beautiful.

She is not easy to listen to sometimes, sometimes she is

so in the space of whatever it is she is telling you, that there is no

distance between the information and you, and it rips your heart out.

# And did Martin Luther King

# Just die

# In vain? #

Nina Simone didn't have a choice.

Ella Fitzgerald didn't have a choice.

They do what they do, so when one tries to figure out, "Did they trade

"this off at the expense of that?" They didn't have a choice.

Nina Simone's voice wouldn't work, her brain wouldn't work,

her heart wouldn't beat,

if she wasn't going to sing Mississippi Goddam.

I choose Nina over all of them because she was crazy enough

to do it, and she was sane enough to make it sound right.

She was also the kind of woman who, apparently she put

a man at gunpoint to return a pair of shoes, which is pretty crazy.

I like that story.

She was proud, but the jazz diva proved that love has no pride.

Although she transcended her time, she seemed to be its victim

when it came to romance.

Behind all the poise was the pain of man trouble, which she

endured like a sacrificial heroine for those audiences

that preferred their jazz divas coloured blue.

Billie Holiday was a masochist.

Literally, a masochist, from what I understand.

She chose bad husbands, she chose bad lovers, my next-door neighbour,

the late Billy Taylor, told me a story of seeing her

beat up once by her manager husband in a club in front of other people.

Even though she has always been reported to be at the very

least bisexual, if not often gay, she loved men,

she liked having a man in her life.

And she chose the worst possible man, I mean,

she just chose one thug after another.

Sarah Vaughan, whom I knew quite well, did not do a lot better.

She just seemed to choose men who would exploit her.

I'm going to say something that will make a lot of women very unhappy.

But all those singers, every one of them, needed a man.

They needed a man behind them.

You need that support, and for a man to take that time to give you

that support means he doesn't have his own life.

They were taken advantage of.

They all ran into problems because these guys looked upon them

as meal tickets, and they needed that.

I don't know why, but philosophically,

psychologically, they needed that.

What is interesting about all of them

is the number of times they all get married.

You know, there is a big thing going on with marrying a lot.

I think that is partly because that is protection, there is

a lot of marrying your musicians.

Peggy Lee's first marriage was to Benny Goodman's guitarist,

Dave Barbour. They had a child.

But that turned out to be only the first of four marriages

for Peggy, who was likely to greet a husband with

the unwelcome news that dinner was not ready, but the song was.

She really did want that white picket fence,

that dream of everlasting love, a family, she really wanted that.

# Some day

# We'll build a home on a hilltop high

# You and I... #

She wanted that dream of the folks who live on the hill,

that song was her favourite song, and it's not surprising,

it's just about this love that grows old together and stays together.

# And we'll be pleased to be called

# The folks who live on the hill. #

DOG BARKS

That, unfortunately, is not what she got.

But what she did get was this unbelievable career.

So the choice, life or art, isn't straightforward

because what you get from art is life.

Meanwhile, Billie Holiday made private disappointments

the very subject of increasingly painful public performances

in the unflinching glare of the spotlight.

# But I love him

# I don't know why I should

# He isn't true

# He beats me too

# What can I do?

I do sing it and I always preface it with saying,

"Well, it's of its time, you know." It's still a great song.

# He'll never know

# How my life is just despair... #

And you know, "sometimes he beats me" is in the lyric.

And, "I don't know why I should, he isn't good.

"He isn't true, he beats me too, but what can I do?

"Oh, my man, I love him so."

You think...

SHE EXHALES

# What's the difference if I say...? #

I always imagine outside the spotlight, the circle of rather

blank-faced, mild-looking men rather interested by this,

and the women, I think, just think, "Thank God it's not me."

# For whatever my man is

# I'm his. #

The question is, what were people...

what was the attraction for people?

Schadenfreude is one of the more disturbing aspects of the human condition,

that we get pleasure out of pain, other people's pain.

They're singing the songs, the emotions,

and sometimes the solutions to life's problems.

They're sometimes solving it, the question,

solving the problem for people.

One person has a hard time and the other person in the audience

listens to it and hears those words, like,

Ray Charles, Hard Times, man.

# My mother told me Before she passed away

# Said darling when I'm gone Don't forget to pray

# Cos there'll be hard times Hard times

# Who knows better than I? #

You know, when he says that, I listen to that and I go, "Man!"

Well, I soon found out just what she meant,

had to sell all my clothes just to pay the rent.

I did that eight times in my life.

Man, when someone writes a lyric that is real, everybody understands.

I mean, it sounds like you're talking about the Greek Furies

all of a sudden and we're going back to the whole problem

of catharsis, you know, that we all need that.

We need to believe in these stories

in order to purge the pain from our own lives.

Another way to purge the pain from your life was to develop

a keen appetite for all kinds of drugs -

jazz's default setting in the bad old days.

I think singers in the '50s would be stumbling upon all sorts

of stuff going on, you know, heroin was rife, cocaine,

you know, everybody was smoking reefers, everybody.

I think you'd have to dodge it to come out unscathed, you know.

In the '30s and '40s, and I've interviewed a lot of musicians on this,

the idea that heroin was suicide was not genuinely known.

It really wasn't.

People thought that they could take it and if they exercised a lot

and ate well, that it was less dangerous than alcohol.

'It's one extreme to the other.'

You're either really busy or not have anything to do whatsoever,

you're teetotal or you're getting drunk all the time.

Loads of different things, it's all...

There's one extreme to the other in most musicians' lives.

As with everything else in the world of the jazz diva, Billie Holiday

fulfilled the role of drug addict better than any other jazz queen,

with fellow heroin user Annie Ross

sometimes on hand to take care of her.

When she was really bad...

..and when she wasn't, I would go up to her little apartment.

I remember I even gave her a bath because she said, "I'm too weak,"

I said, "I'll do it," and I would sit by the bed, so that as she smoked,

she wouldn't burn the place up,

and she would watch cartoons. She loved cartoons.

And I was happy to do it. I mean, this was my idol.

Did Billie need to be on drugs? Did Lester Young need to be on drugs?

Did Charlie Parker need to be on drugs?

You know...maybe they did.

Maybe they did. Maybe that was part.

And...all I know is they could play a song and make you cry.

Thank you. And now I'd like to do a little tune,

entitled Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone.

The last time I saw Billie live, her voice was light and...

"Ooooh, what a little moonlight can do to you"

and you know, lovable, huggable Emily Brown,

Miss Brown, she was singing all those songs.

# Please don't talk about me when I'm gone

# Though our friendship ceases from now on... #

I says, "Lady, you sound better than I've ever heard you,"

and she says, "I'm straight now, George, I'm straight."

Talking about drugs.

"You've got to help me."

# It makes no difference

# How I carry on... #

Four weeks later, she was dead.

# Please don't talk about me when I'm gone. #

Lady was dead at 44. Long live the Lady.

She was, of course, the first of the great jazz divas to die on the job

but they all had to face the treachery of their own unique instrument,

their body, letting them down.

# I know that I'll

# Be contented with yesterday's memories

# Knowing you'll think of me

# Once in a while. #

In the latter years, her highs were getting lower and lower,

and her lows were also not there.

She was only singing in the middle range of her voice.

Ella Fitzgerald, with only this much,

saying more than anybody else.

She lived for it.

And even though she'd nearly smoked herself to death

and had both her legs amputated and she's wheeled onto the stage,

she's still doing it.

Sarah Vaughan had that funny joke.

She'd be perspiring, she'd have a drink of water,

and she'd say, "Every night, I come up here looking like Lena Horne

"and I go home looking like Sarah Vaughan."

And, you know, so she would make fun of that. She became heavier.

She became more diva-like. But she was Sarah Vaughan.

And she could get away with that because her genius

was so undeniable.

# We seem

# Like passing strangers now

# How can you hurry by?

# There were never two who loved

# Half as much as you and I... #

# Don't look for me... #

Peggy Lee decided to keep Miss Peggy Lee the performer alive

until the bitter end.

You can still be running a fever when you're virtually bedridden.

She arrived in a limousine.

And they wheeled out this wheelchair in sequins!

# Don't smoke... #

It was covered in sequins!

# ..in bed. #

And she came in, she went, "Thank you.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you."

And they announced, "Miss Peggy Lee."

APPLAUSE

The lights went down, the lights came back up, and like magic,

there she was.

Now, imagine this woman,

having had a stroke, wearing a blonde pageboy wig,

big glasses with rhinestone so you were distracted from her face a bit.

And she started to sing Fever.

MUSIC: "Fever"

She used to always start with her hand out like that.

Always when she started that song.

Well, she'd clearly had a stroke, so what they did,

they had the drummer play the sound and her hand lightly snap,

but there was the drummer, like, right on time,

-and when she got to the point where she said...

-# Fever... #

..she held both hands up like that

and then brought them down in a series of steps!

She no longer had the fluidity or the timing

in terms of her hand movements,

but still you learn how you can adjust a performance.

I think it's really hard for a singer

to age in front of us on stage,

when you're a beauty and you're singing about desire

and you're trying to be sexy

and you're singing Fever and Big Spender and I'm A Woman...

# I can wash out 44 pairs of socks and have 'em hangin' on the line

# I can starch and iron two dozen shirts

# 'Fore you can count from one to nine... #

But then do you stop? She didn't want to stop singing.

But in truth, it was curtains for the jazz diva by the mid-'60s.

She was consigned to history by the triumph of pop and rock,

leaving her struggling to remain relevant,

forced to cover the odd Beatles song.

# Been a hard day's night

# I should be sleeping like a log

# But when I get home to you I find the things that you do

# Will make me feel all right... #

# And he's got another woman now... #

But Nina Simone, who had always embraced every kind of music,

made it across the bridge from the lost world of the jazz diva

to soul, R&B, gospel and beyond.

# Hey, lordy, lordy, mama

# What you gonna do about it?

# Hey, lordy, mama... #

There's a lot of singers and a lot of people in the world,

but nobody reminds me of Nina.

# Tell me what you gonna do now? What you gonna do? #

I wish I could have met her

and hung with her and got in all kinds of trouble with her.

That would have been my sister. I'm not in trouble enough.

I'd like to be in trouble with Nina Simone.

# And don't know how to treat him... #

Nina is just a big soul that nobody...

I don't even know how they got her into a casket,

cos her soul was so big, she didn't have a place to go.

You know?

The Ellas, the Sarahs, the Billies, the Dinahs, the Anitas,

the Peggys, they become more and more magical

because we know we're never going to see their like again.

These women were the first, they are the originals and the best.

And I often wonder... why I even bothered doing it,

cos it's been done so well before!

These are women that were artists

and they found a platform to be artists,

and to be heard and to be accepted

and to be subtly, you know, freed.

# Me myself and I

# Are all in love with you

# We all think you're wonderful We do

# Me, myself and I

# Have just one point of view

# We're convinced

# There's no-one else like you... #

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