Andra Day

Andra Day was introduced to Billie Holiday’s work when she was 11 years old. She was taken but confused by Holiday’s voice at first. It didn’t sound like the powerhouse soul and R&B singers she was accustomed to hearing. But the more she listened, the more she learned what it might mean to, as she’s described it, “sit in her own voice.”

Billie Holiday had influences too – Louis “Pops” Armstrong and Bessie Smith foremost among them. Her phrasing comes straight from Armstrong, who she used to listen to on the Victrola as she scrubbed floors at Alice Dean’s bordello in Baltimore when she was a girl. Holiday wrote in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, “I spent many a wonderful hour listening to Pops and Bessie. I remember Pops’ recording of ‘West End Blues’ and how it used to gas me. It was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words.”

Like Armstrong, Holiday didn’t need words. Her voice was so shot through with emotion that every note carried the weight of a life lived – every heartbreak, every hardship, every flirtation and affair. But her voice wasn’t reserved solely for conveying the contours of a romance; it could also carry the pain of a people. The 1939 protest song “Strange Fruit,” which has been called the “beginning of the Civil Rights movement,” was the second Billie Holiday song Andra Day ever heard, and it’s been with her ever since.

Her voice was so shot through with emotion that every note carried the weight of a life lived

Day took two lessons from Holiday about sitting in your own voice. The first lesson was personal. It’s about style and the type of fearlessness that allows you to set someone else’s ideals aside. To own one’s voice is to be unmistakably yourself. No one else sounded like Billie Holiday or turned a phrase like James Baldwin or moved across a stage like Katherine Dunham.

The second lesson was a social one. It’s about living in the world and being unafraid to tell us what you see – it’s about the truth. To own your voice is to own its sound, its personal power, and its political potential. It’s why Billie Holiday could give us “Lover Man” and “Strange Fruit,” why Nina Simone could give us “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “Mississippi Goddam,” and why, because she learned her lessons well, Andra Day can give us “Gold” and “Rise Up.”

Andra Day is sitting in her voice. She combines the personal and political as effortlessly as Holiday and Simone because the personal and political really aren’t all that different. Asked to parse the two, Day said, “I’m a human. I’m a person. I’m a Black woman in America. The social affects the personal. The personal affects the social as well. It’s just a matter of what I’ve experienced – the cacophony of what I’m feeling and what I’m seeing.”

And in that beautiful cacophony, you will hear legacy, truth, and the ever-accumulating weight of a life being lived.