Above with Louie Armstrong in New Orleans (Popsie Randolph Collection)
Below with Claude Hopkins on piano.
On Tour With Billie Holiday, Carlton Drinkard and Charles Carney
For one night I got a brief glimpse of what it might have been like to be on tour with Billie Holiday. At least it was as close to being on tour with her as you can get without resurrecting the lady herself.
It’s quite fitting that she is still making waves in Philadelphia, where she caused so much controversy so long ago.
Today all the fuss is being kicked up by Ann Duquesnay, an actress who can sing while portraying the first lady of jazz at the newly renovated Theater of the Living Arts on Philadelphia’s South Street.
A review of opening night was discarded in favor of an off-night show accompanied by Carlton Drinkard, the Atlantic City piano player and casino host who fingered Holiday’s ivory keys for over a decade. Drinkard, I thought, would be the ultimate judge of the show’s veracity.
Carlton doesn’t play piano anymore. He’s been working as a casino host at Harrah’s Marina casino in Atlantic City. I met him through John Colianni, a local piano player who once took lessons from Drinkard, so I knew that Carlton kept his hands in the music even though he didn’t play much anymore.
I met Colianni playing piano at the Bay Club, now Steve & Cookies, the former Strotbeck’s private club in Margate. My friend and bartender and Holiday affectionato Charles Carney told me about Colianni, and how great he was, but I had to see for myself, and after listening to him play for awhile, we talked and I asked him about his connection to Drinkard. Why he would introduce me to him, and shortly thereafter I met Carlton Drinkard himself.
Short, thin and well dressed in suit and tie, Drinkard shook hands with an acquard twist of his arm, that also made him take a drink with his elbo in the air.
Drinkard, in a deep rapsey voice, said to ignore everything that’s in the autobiography she wrote, and the movie based on the book, as they are fiction. As Carlton explained, the piano man in the movie, a character partially based on him, is murdered. “I ain’t dead,” Drinkard said, but did explain that mobsters broke his arm, an injury that prevents him from playing professionally anymore.
The revival of interest in Billie Holiday and her music has been smoldering for years, first with the popular movie staring Diana Ross, “Lady Sings the Blues,” and then there’s the release of two major theatrical productions based on Holiday’s music, including the off-broadway show, ‘Billie Holiday at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” and “Lady Day.”
Both shows were written by Philadelphians, and Emerson’s Bar & Grill is where Holiday performed in Philadelphia when she was arrested.
While “Lady Day” was the rage of the Paris and London theater season last year, a British company produced a documentary on her life that was shown on public television, generating even more interest in her life and music.
“Round Midnight,” a great artsy film about expatriate American jazz musicians living in Paris also features a character based on Holiday, continuing the revival.
So when “Lady Day” finally returned to Philadelphia, I figured it would be appropriate to see it with Carlton Drinkard, along with his prize student John Colianni and Charles Carney, the distinguished Somers Point bartender and Holiday affectionate who introduced me to them.
I got tickets for all of us, and we were going to go first class and take a limo, but when Colianni had to work that night, we were left with two extra tickets and I drove. I picked up Charles and Carlton, and at their instruction, we stopped at the High Point Inn on the White Horse Pike in Absecon for a short bottle of whiskey they shared on the ride to Philly.
On the way, I asked drunkard his opinion of the book, the movie, the plays and the British TV documentary, and he said that they were all flawed, mixing myths, lies, legends and factual mistakes, and in some cases intentional misrepresentations.
The popular myths of Billie Holiday are so distanced from reality that Drinkard said he once considered a libel suit to set the record straight. Only the music, he said, especially her voice, on the old, classic recordings, maintains the truth.
The libel suit, Drinkard said, involved the movie, “Lady Sings the Blues,” in which Richard Pryor plays the piano man, a character based in part on Drinkard. At least the part in which he is killed is related to Drinkard’s experience, but he balks, “I ain’t dead,” he protests, like a later day Mark Twain, who said the rumors of his demise were greatly exaggerated.
The British documentary, Drinkard said, was soft on music and hard on her problems, dwelling too much on the negative aspects of her life. “But that’s what sells shows,” he shrugged.
As for the off-Broadway production of “Billie Holiday at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” well Colianni had seen it and didn’t like it so he never bothered to go to New York to catch it.
“Lady Day” was something else however, and he had heard some good things about it, so the expedition was a night on the town that he was looking forward to.
From the back seat of my car, Carlton Drinkard regaled us with colorful first-person accounts of his life with Billie Holiday, explaining that he first met her in 1949 in Washington D.C. where he was playing piano in a small club to pay his way through Howard University.
“I was going to go on to medical school, and be a doctor,” Drinkard explained, “until I met Lady. She changed my whole life around.”
“I was only 19 at the time,” he said, “but she was already a big, big star. She had apparently heard me play before, and called the club I was working and asked me to play for her while she was in town.”
“I told her no at first, although it was a great honor to be asked,” he said, noting that he was afraid that if it didn’t work out he would have been out of his regular job as well.
“A short while later a big limo pulled up out front and Lady gets out and come up to me and says, ‘Carl, I need you tonight. I’ll buy out your contract, what is it? $5,000?’ But I didn’t have a contract, so I went with her.”
Drinkard said that when he got to the theater where Holiday was performing, he just winged it, and when it was over, she came out of her dressing room and said, “I want you to be my piano player,” and they never looked back.
Born in Baltimore on April 7, 1915, Eleanora “Billie” Holiday was the daughter of a maid and an itinerant banjo-guitarist Clarence Holiday, who was forever on the road with big bands like Fletcher Henderson and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. As a child she ran messages for Alice Dean, a madam whose gramophone introduced Billlie to Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and singers her father performed with.
After moving to New York with her mother in 1929 she began singing in obscure Harlem clubs where she was discovered by John Hammond, an A & R (Artist & Repertoire) scout for Columbia Records who also “discovered” other talents like Bob Dylan and Bruce Sprinsteen. Hammond had an ear for good music, recognized Holiday’s voice was totally unique, and took her to his brother-in-law, Benny Goodman, who recorded with her in 1933.
Among the musicians she met through Hammond were Goodman’s pianist Teddy Wilson, and saxophonist Lester Young, of the Count Basie band, who dubbed her “Lady Day” because she refused to take tips from customer’s tables. She went off with the refined gentleman who handed her the most, Lewis McKay, a character portrayed by Billy Dee Williams in the movie, “Lady Sings the Blues.”
McKay later lived with his second wife in Camden, New Jersey, and died in Ventnor a few years ago. Both Wilson, who also played with his family jazz band in Atlantic City, and Hammond died recently.
After becoming a sensation on her own, Holiday was arrested for heroin possession, served time in jail, and died while being hospitalized, and awaiting charges of drug possession when narcotics were found under her pillow by a nurse.
Carlton Drinkard believes that the social service system failed her, and that if it happened today, she would have survived because her addiction would have been treated as a medical problem, rather than a legal one. “Today, a nurse would go to the doctor, not the police, and the doctor would have prescribed methadone or something,” Carlton said.
Shortly before she died, Drinkard said that he called her in New York from Atlantic City and she asked him to go with her on one more tour to London and Paris, where she felt more appreciated. “I said, okay, Lady, I’ll go on one more tour if you insist, but that was the last I heard from her.”
By the time we pulled into center city Philadelphia it was raining, so I dropped them off at this Mexican place next to the theater and drove around to park the car. I did find a parking spot close to the theater, which had previously shown classic films but had been recently converted into the Theater of the Living Arts by local promoters Allen and Herb Spivak and Larry Magid, who also ran the Electric Factory concerts company.
To them this small, 400 seat theater is an attempt to revive live, legitimate theater, to enhance the arts as a public service and give those who can appreciate real culture a place to go. And “Lady Day” is the first trail product of the new order of things.
Since Colianni and his wife couldn’t make it, I gave the tickets to a young couple who were walking down South street in the rain. They later wrote me a note saying what a wonderful time they had.
The production’s Philadelphia based writer and director Stephen Stahl met us at the door, noting that the star, Ann Duquesnay would like to meet Carlton Drinkard after the show. Our seats were prime, front and center, but Charles was absent, and we didn’t know where he went until the show was about to begin and Carney waltzed in, a bouquet of flowers in his hand and walked up and placed them on stage for the star of the show.
On stage the set included the band’s instruments and some packing crates, stenciled with the words: BILIE HOLIDAY ON TOUR.
After the band came out and started to warm up a bit, as if to practice, Ann Duquesnay entered the scene in a rain coat and folding an umbrella, as if the had just came in out of the rain.
Set in London near the end of her life, “Lady Day,” as written by Stahl, has Holiday arriving late for rehearsal on the day of her last London performance. While the early monologue weaves the strands of her tragic personal drama, its where the supporting actors are most vulnerable to tripping.
There’s Andrew Boyer, her manager-producer who is trying to yell at her for being late for rehearsal, but how to you yell at Billie Holiday?
Boyer’s real life counterpart, John Hammond, I think, would have been soft spoken and coaxed her.
The childhood retros are necessary to et across the background of her life, and the adolescent fantasies give literal meaning to the cliché “you have to live the blues to sing the blues,” but after awhile you just want to hear her sing.
Through “A Foggy Day in London Town,” “Swing Brother Swing,” “Miss Brown to You,” “Give Me a Pigfoot,” “All of Me” and “Them There Eyes,” you have a selection of Holiday numbers that should satisfy the Holiday buff as well as well as those who thought Billie was a guy.
The retrospection about her life between songs in the first act brings out the strong dramatic background that Duquesnay brings to the show, and for the uninitiated, introduces Holiday’s own background without being too overbearing.
After singing, “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Lover Man,” “You’re Mother’s Son-In-Law,” there’s her signature song, “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s anti-segregationist anthem which Drinkard says she always sang at the end of the set, and which appropriately concludes Act One.
After the intermission lights went on, Charles introduced Carlton to the young couple who used John Colianni’s seats, and after a few seconds of muffled small talk, Charles grabbed Drinkard by the arm and escorted him to the front door, talking and shaking a cigarette in his hand.
“Did he really know Billie Holiday?” the girl asked, while her boyfriend wanted to know, “Did they really go next door for a drink?”
When Carlton Drinkard returned, before I could ask him his opinion of the show so far, the curtain went up and Holiday was decked out in her gown, white gloves and guardenias in her hair, ready to sing. Her voice is all that we have left of the real Lady Day, that’s what made her famous, and that’s the vehicle that this whole production is riding on.
“My Man,” “God Bless the Child,” “Good Morning Heartache,” “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” “Ain’t No Body’s Business But My Own,” “Billie’s Blues,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “What A Little Moonlight Can Do,” all showed us tht Duquesnay is a fine singer who does justice to Lady Day.
Although she did break up some of the concert songs with some ramblings about her bust in Philadelphia, it’s the songs and the singing that give Act Two its magic, with such tunes as “Mean To Me,” “You’ve Changed,” Don’t Explain,” “I Can’t Get Started Without You,” “Violents For My Furs,” and “I’m Pulling Through.”
From an audience of applause I could distinguish Charlie’s cheers, and regardless of what Carlton’s opinion was, I really liked the show.
The college kids stuck around after the shown and quizzed Carlton, and I could overhear him setting them straight, “She wasn’t really a blues singer, only had about two real blues songs in her entire repertoire. She was a jazz singer, and she didn’t play around. She was faithful to her husbands,” he said, stretching the plural.
Then when the band came out, their eyes lit up when they heard Carlton Drinkard was there, and that he worked with Holiday and knew the songs, and wanted to know how they were arranged and if they were doing them right.
The musical director and pianist William D. Jolly shook Drinkard’s hand as Carlton said, “You boys were great. I don’t believe how much I really liked the show.”
As Jolly’s brother, bass player Elton Brett, and drummer Johnnie Croom crowed around to hear Drinkard talk, he answered Jolly’s question, “You know that one song where you drop a beat? Well that’s supposed to be a faster tempo,” and “I know you can do it, because I heard you do it, you guys are good.”
I thought they could have been given more play, taking some of the burdon off Duquesnay and putting the spotlight on each musician for a solo, but that was just my thoughts.
Not wanting to be too critical, Drinkard said, “but you guys don’t want to hear that.”
“Yes we do,” Jolly replied, “we want to know the way you did it. We weren’t there, so it’s up to you to tell us.”
When Duquesnay came out, dressed as a pedestrian, holding Carney’s flowers, she came up to Drinkard and hugged him saying, “Thank you for the flowers, they’re wonderful.”
Carlton looked at Carney as if to say, “Flowers, what flowers,” as Charles had put Drinkard’s name on the tag, giving him credit.
“You are what’s wonderful,” Drinkard told the talented singer and actress from North Carolina. “Every once in awhile I caught a glimpse of Lady that sent a shiver up my spine.”
After a photo was taken of Drinkard with Duquesnay and the band, she was introduced to Charles Carney, who has a fascination for Billie Holiday’s music, and Charles held open the door for her as she opened her umbrella and walked out into the South Street rain.
Carlton, I asked, cutting through the myth, the lies and wrong beats, does she have the flavor, the spirit of Lady Day?
“Yes,” he said, smiling, “she’s got it.”
Just as I thought the night was over, and Carlton was saying to Charles, “why didn’t you tell me you sent her flowers in my name?,” Carney said, “Let’s go back to Atlantic City where I know where there’s a young girl who sings in a casino lounge who will make you cry.”
Billkelly3@gmail.com
Carney, Charles F. 77 of Somers Point, died peacefully on February 18, 2006. His daughter Colleen, a son-in-law David, Carole and his pal Andrew were at his side.
Charles was a legendary bartender in the Somers Point area. He began his career at Steel's Ship Bar, went on to Mac's, Gregory', Mothers's, The Med., The Shangra-Laa, Crab Trap and the world famous Anchorage.
Chrales is the brother of the late Frank. He is survived by his brother George (Violet) of Collingswood, NJ; his childrean Charles and Sean of Miami Beach, Fl. Colleen (David) McIlroy of Sunset Beach, CA and his partner and soul mate Carole Rubino of Somers Point. Relatives and friends are invited to his viewing Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006 from 9:30 to 11 Am,m St. Joseph Church, 612 Shore Raod, Somers Point. Followed by a Mass of Christian Burial at 11AM. Interment Seaside Chemetery. In lieu of flowers the family requests memorial contributions to the DOn MacBeth Memorial Jocky Fund, P.O. Box 18470. Encino, CA 91419. Arrangements by Terranova Funeral Home Inc. www.terranovafunderalhome.com
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