Reading From "Lady Sings The Blues" 1 - Live At Carnegie Hall/1956

This is Billie Holiday's story
Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married
He was eighteen, she was sixteen, I was three
I was a woman when I was six, big for my age
With big breasts, big bones, just a big, fat, healthy broad

So I started working out then, before school and after
Minding babies, running errands
And scrubbing those damn white steps all over Baltimore
And I never got beyond the fifth grade
But whether I was riding a bike
Or scrubbing somebody's dirty bathroom floor
I used to love to sing all the time, I liked music
If there was a place where I could go and hear it, I went

Alice Dean used to keep a whorehouse on the corner nearest our place
And I used to run errands for her and the girls
When it came time to pay me
I used to tell her she could keep the money
If she'd let me come up in her front parlor
And listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on her Victrola
I guess I'm not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse
But I never tried to make anything of it
If I'd heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree
I'd have loved it just the same

But a lot of white people first heard jazz in places like Alice Dean's
And they helped label jazz "whorehouse music"
They forget what it was like in those days
A whorehouse was about the only place
Where black and white folks could meet in any natural way
They damn well couldn't rub elbows in the churches
And in Baltimore, places like Alice Dean's
Were the only joints fancy enough to have a Victrola
And for real enough to pick up on the best records
I know this for damn sure

If I'd heard Pops and Bessie
Wailing through the window of some minister's front parlor
I'd have been running free errands for him
Unless it was the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong I heard as a kid
I don't know of anybody who actually inuenced my singing, then or now
I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pop's feeling

No two people on Earth are alike
And it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music
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
But not music