Billboard : 12/22/1956
Spotlight on… selection

Lady Sings the Blues is the title of the singer’s recently published autobiography, and this LP offers a worthy musical complement to it. Here she offers new readings of the great songs that made her career. There are pleasant tunes like Too Marvelous for Words – but it’s mainly in the blues where she is in a class by herself. The touching God Bless the Child and the heart-rending Strange Fruit are classics. Travelin’ Light and Good Morning Heartache are also Holiday properties of note. Lady Day is in good voice now, and these new readings will be much appreciated by her following. One sour note is the unattractive cover.

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Down Beat : 01/23/1957
Nat Hentoff : 5 stars

Lady Sings the Blues, I understand, was a rather stormy session in its first eight tracks; but to a listener who wasn’t there, it comes through as a characteristic, satisfyingly troubling, indelible Billie monologue. Tempos are generally slow with some walking-medium.

No other singer now in jazz gets so fully into the bloodstream as Billie still does. The writing is slim and functional, but it’s too bad there are no instrumental solos. Billie in the past has often been spurred by imaginative horn observations, and in any case, the album would have benefited from the tonal contrasts and exchanges of ideas. But Billie still has the best vocal game in town when she’s playing for keeps. Note, for example, the remarkably effective, understated I Thought About You on which Billie is backed only by Tucker. Nowhere on the record is any personnel listed.

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Liner Notes by Unknown

Lady Sings the Blues, which is of course the title of this album, happens also to be the title of an important book in the jazz field – Billie Holiday‘s autobiography in which Lady Day does sing the blues, sings them honestly and without self-pity. It would have to be that way in print since there’s little appreciable difference between Lady Day in print and Lady Day on record. What is there is there – and nothing is held back. “If you find a tune and it’s got something to do with you, you don’t have to evolve anything,” Miss Holiday has written. “You just feel it and when you sing it, other people can feel something, too.” Well, that just about sums it up. With the selections in this album, as in the others that have preceded it, Miss Holiday sings it – and it is there for anyone to feel. There are the somewhat pleasant tunes, Too Marvelous for Words, which Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting wrote back in 1937, and the Jimmy Van Heusen-Mercer song, I Thought About You. Bust mostly, with Billie, it is the blues in this album – the title song, to begin with, her own immensely touching God Bless the Child, and the heart-wrenching Strange Fruit. The same sentiment is expressed along more commercial lines with Love Me or Leave Me and Willow Weep for Me and, with a sharp strain of irony, in Trav’lin’ Light and Good Morning Heartache (whose title is in itself an ironic juxtaposition of sentiments).

Billie Holiday, as everyone knows by now, has led a torn and tattered life – all of this is revealed candidly in her autobiography. But the fact is, the printed word can explore only so many subtleties of human experience. For the rest – well, when Lady sings the blues on record, singing with everything that is in her, the subtleties are there. They are all there.