Vinyl Record

Billie Holiday - Lady Sings the Blues

Billie Holiday - Lady Sings the Blues on LP vinyl. A 1956 Jazz record available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel, Ireland.

LP · Jazz · 1956

Available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel.

Buyer notes: 1956 LP, currently available from the Kilmorna Collection Jazz shelf. Pay for pickup in Listowel or ship within Ireland for EUR 5.50.

Lady Sings the Blues is more than a Billie Holiday album title; it is one of the central phrases of her mythology. Released late in 1956 alongside the autobiography of the same name, the record gathers performances from 1954 and 1956 and finds Holiday looking back without turning herself into a museum piece. The album carries a biographical shadow, but its force is musical: she is still shaping standards and blues-inflected material with a phrasing intelligence that makes each song sound personally addressed. The title track, written by Holiday with Herbie Nichols, gives the record its frame. Around it sit performances such as Good Morning Heartache, No Good Man and Some Other Spring, all of which benefit from the late-career grain in her voice. Holiday is not trying to sound untouched by experience. She sings as if experience is the instrument, and the band understands that the drama should remain close, not inflated. What makes the album endure is how it balances public legend with private control. Holiday had already become an icon by the time this record appeared, yet the singing resists easy pity. The damaged edges are there, but so are command, timing, humor and steel. Lady Sings the Blues is a portrait album in the deepest sense: not a complete life, but a room where the life presses against every song.

Lady Sings the Blues matters because it connects Holiday's recorded art to the public story that surrounded her without reducing the music to biography. It is one of the key late Clef and Verve-era documents, showing how she could turn familiar repertoire into autobiography through phrasing alone. The record also preserves the title song as a major part of the Holiday canon.

This is the Billie Holiday album to own when the shelf needs the bridge between the singer and the legend. It has historical weight because of its connection to the 1956 book, but it rewards listening beyond that context. Collectors who value interpretive singing will hear a master making the lyric, the tempo and the emotional angle feel inseparable.

Autumnal vocal jazz and blues-shaded standards, carried by intimate ensemble support, frayed tonal color and phrasing that turns recollection into drama.

Recommended for: Collectors interested in Billie Holiday's late-career mythology; Listeners who want jazz singing with biographical weight; Fans of blues-inflected standards and intimate vocal storytelling.

What year was Lady Sings the Blues released? Lady Sings the Blues was released in late 1956, in connection with Holiday's autobiography of the same name. Is Lady Sings the Blues a studio album? Yes. It is built from studio sessions recorded in 1954 and 1956, with Holiday supported by leading jazz players of the period. What are the key songs here? Lady Sings the Blues, Good Morning Heartache, No Good Man and Some Other Spring are central to the album's emotional shape.