Love songs are as old as music itself and their golden age was arguably the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley era which endured from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of the 1950s. This was a time when popular music was dominated by white male composers and lyricists –– Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and their contemporaries –– whose work would go on to form what, for want of a better term, is collectively referred to as 'The Great American Songbook.'
Billie Holiday, who was born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on 7 April 1915, was one of the finest interpreters of this material who ever lived, a singer blessed with a voice that, while neither as supple nor as soaring as that of her rivals Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, was nevertheless swinging, deeply soulful and, once heard, impossible to forget.
But what makes Holiday such an unusual artist for her time –– she recorded steadily between 1933 and her death at the age of forty-four in 1959 –– is the fact that she was a black female performer who occasionally wrote her own material and managed to record it when this was a largely unheard of practice even among the most popular white male vocalists.
While Holiday was only able to record a handful of her own compositions, the few she did record –– Fine and Mellow, God Bless The Child and Billie's Blues are other deservedly famous examples of her overlooked skill as a lyricist –– are the artistic equivalent of anything produced by anybody working in the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley tradition, notable for their emotional truthfulness in an age when the majority of love songs were written to a standardized formula which took the form of either a celebration, a lament or an exercise in the creation of appealing romantic fantasies. (Think of a tune like Pennies From Heaven, with its depiction of an idealized world in which storm clouds literally rain money onto the earth –– an understandably attractive image to those living through the Depression where finding a job, let alone enough to eat, could be a constant daily struggle for many people.) Socially unacceptable activities like adultery were never mentioned and nor was the idea that a lover would or, more scandalously still, should be willing to accept the philandering of a partner despite the fact that many people in all walks of life did precisely that every day of their lives.
It is this willingness to speak the plain undiluted truth that makes Don't Explain such a landmark example of the songwriter's art. As Holiday recalled in Lady Sings The Blues, the 1956 autobiography she co-authored (or at least claimed to have co-authored) with writer William Dufty:
One of the songs I wrote and recorded has my marriage to Jimmy Monroe written all over it… One night he came in with lipstick on his collar… I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. 'Take a bath, man,' I said, 'don't explain.'
That should have been the end of it. But that night stuck in my crop. I couldn't forget it. The words 'don't explain, don't explain,' kept going through my damn head. I had to get it out of my system some way, I guess. The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases to myself. Suddenly I had a whole song.
I went downtown one night and sat down with Arthur Herzog; he played the tune over on the piano, wrote down the words, changing two or three phrases, softening it up just a little.
This is one song I couldn't sing without feeling every minute of it. I still can't. Many a bitch has told me she broke up every time she heard it. So if anybody deserves credit for that, it's Jimmy, I guess –– and the others who keep coming home with lipstick on their faces.
When that stops happening, Don't Explain will be as dated as the Black Bottom [a popular dance of the 1920s]. Until then, it will always be a standard.
It is, of course, much more than simply its lyrics which have made the song a standard. The melancholy tune and Holiday's wearily restrained delivery of it, pitched somewhere between that of a French chanteuse and the female torch singers so popular during her childhood in the 1920s, are impeccable as is her phrasing which replicates the rhythms of ordinary human speech without descending to the kind of histrionic shmaltz so beloved of vocalists of earlier generations. It is an adult song performed in an adult manner for an adult audience –– something else that was unusual in the ultra-conservative recording industry of 1945. It demonstrates what a uniquely gifted vocalist Billie Holiday was and proves the theory that when it comes to composing meaningful and affecting song lyrics, less is invariably more.
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
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Last updated 16 March 2021 §
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