Billie Holiday ~ Stormy Blues 1977 Analogue pressing. Double Vinyl / 2LP set Verve/Polygram Records - 823 230-1 Y-1 Vinyl are VG++ to Mint-, mostly Mint- : a few, very faint and minor inner-seeeve-type surface-marks and some very minor, occasional "background-wear" faintly heard between some tracks and during a few, very quiet segments. Gatefold cover is VG+ with corner-bends and wear, edge and cover-wear. Original plastic inner-sleeves have intact seams. Out of Print

"The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues,  changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like  and actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing. 's highly stylized reading of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song or the band. She made clear her debts to  and  (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted 's big sound and ' feeling"), but in truth her style was virtually her own, quite a shock in an age of interchangeable crooners and band singers.

With her spirit shining through on every recording, 's technical expertise also excelled in comparison to the great majority of her contemporaries. Often bored by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record early in her career,  fooled around with the beat and the melody, phrasing behind the beat and often rejuvenating the standard melody with harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players,  and . (She often said she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life -- a series of abusive relationships, substance addictions, and periods of depression -- undoubtedly assisted her legendary status, but 's best performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Strange Fruit," her own composition "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and accomplished vocal performances ever recorded. More than technical ability, more than purity of voice, what made  one of the best vocalists of the century -- easily the equal of or  -- was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.

's chaotic life reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915 (a few reports say 1912) when she was born . Her father, , was a teenaged jazz guitarist and banjo player later to play in . He never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and left while his daughter was still a baby. (She would later run into him in New York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her sessions before his death in 1937, she always avoided using him.) 's mother was also a young teenager at the time, and whether because of inexperience or neglect, often left her daughter with uncaring relatives.  was sentenced to Catholic reform school at the age of ten, reportedly after she admitted being raped. Though sentenced to stay until she became an adult, a family friend helped get her released after just two years. With her mother, she moved in 1927, first to New Jersey and soon after to Brooklyn."...  -allmusic

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