Returning To Lady: A Reflection On Two Decades 'In Search Of Billie Holiday'

Biographies of musicians tend to be either hagiographic or hyper-factual, either shoring up the myths that celebrity produces or burying insight beneath a pile of mundane details. Farah Jasmine Griffin's If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday posed a challenge to biographers — to confront the idealization, desire and judgment that contributes to an artist's legend and expose how such "images and myths...seem to swallow up individuals who are too complex to be explained by them, yet cannot escape their powerful hold." By 2001, when Griffin's book was published, Holiday had come to embody so many different things: racial pride and resistance; feminine melancholy and tragic weakness; dignity damaged by demons from without and within. Fearlessly and with great compassion, Griffin traced the life stories of those assumptions about Holiday and