No. 258: Hittin' That Note

No. 258: "Hittin' That Note"  Billie Holiday
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This is a short story about decay. About beauty and sadness.
No. 258 is Billie Holiday, drawn with a Dixon 308 Beginners pencil.
Both began sharp but ended worn down to nearly nothing.
This picture is from 1947, about midway through her career and near the end of its peak.
She died in 1959 with 70 cents in the bank and $750 with her.

Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times wrote:
Holiday died: Friday July 17, 1959 at 3.10, age 44 in Metropolitan Hospital, room 6A12, New York, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. 

She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her ... The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.

It is not her voice that makes her memorable, for it is thin and raspy, and more so near the end. It is her phrasing, which remained impeccable. It's also, at times, her choice of songs and lyrics that reflected her struggles. "Strange Fruit," "God Bless The Child," and my favorite, "The End of a Love Affair," which appeared as the last song on Side 2 of  "Lady In Satin" -- but only in the mono version!

This drawing was the end of my love affair with that Dixon 308, a fat black drawing stick that used to be doled out in elementary schools as kids learned handwriting. Do they still teach that? The big and black 308s are gone. Ticonderoga makes a yellow 308, and I'll be ordering a $9 box -- and I know that they will not be the same.

The impression left by the original, however, will last. 

My God, that was a lot of graphite.