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Jazz Perspectives

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She Sang as She Spoke: Billie Holiday and Aspectsof Speech Intonation and Diction

Hao Huang & Rachel Huang

To cite this article: Hao Huang & Rachel Huang (2013) She Sang as She Spoke: BillieHoliday and Aspects of Speech Intonation and Diction, Jazz Perspectives, 7:3, 287-302, DOI:10.1080/17494060.2014.903055

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2014.903055

Published online: 10 Apr 2014.

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She Sang as She Spoke: Billie Holidayand Aspects of Speech Intonation andDictionHao Huang and Rachel Huang

An intimate connection between speech and music in the art of Billie Holiday has beenremarked upon by many commentators and colleagues. “She could just say ‘Hello’ or‘Goodmorning’,” said pianist TeddyWilson, “and it was a musical experience.”1 SingerShirley Horn said that Billie “made music out of speech, or speech out of music, it’shard to separate the two.”2 Stacy Jones refers to “Holiday’s speech-song delivery.”3

Stuart Nicholson notes that at her very first recording session with Wilson, on “IWished on the Moon,” Billie took “very few harmonic or rhythmic liberties, relyingless on syncopation than ironic enunciation—the sound of her voice—for itssuccess.”4 Farah Jasmine Griffin remarks that “Holiday’s rendering of lyrics, especiallytoward the end of her life, often sound more like a poet reading than a vocalist singinglyrics.”5 Henry Pleasants opines that Holiday produced one of “the wonders of vocalhistory. She did it by moving… along – or back and forth across – the thin, neverprecisely definable, line separating, or joining speech and song.”6

“Speech-like” is a deceptive concept: intuitively graspable by every speaker, itsparticular qualities are consequently not often specified, outside the context offormal linguistic analysis. In the linguistic subcategory of phonology, the term“prosody,” encompassing “intonation, rhythm, tempo, loudness, and pauses” stronglysuggests aspects of speech which overlap with music.7 Linguist Dwight Bolinger definesintonation as “a nonarbitrary, sound-symbolic system… conveying, underneath it all,emotions and attitudes.”8 Geoff Lindsey proposes that “[w]e might reasonably expectthere to be formal resemblances between intonational and musical interpretation.”9

1John White, Billie Holiday, Her Life and Times (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount Ltd., 1987), 39.2Kitty Grime, Jazz Voices (New York: Quartet Books, 1983), 156.3Stacy Holman Jones, Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf (Lanham,MD: Altamira Press, 2007), 88.4Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (Boston: Northeastern, 1997), 69.5Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 152.6Henry Pleasants, “The Great American Popular Singers,” in The Billie Holiday Companion: Seven Decades of Com-mentary, edited by Leslie Gourse (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 136.7Ann K. Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis (Cary, NC: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), 4.8Dwight Bolinger, ed., Intonation: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972), I.9Geoff M. Lindsey, “Bolinger’s Challenge: Melody, Meaning and Emotion,” Journal of Linguistics, 27:1 (1991): 190.

Jazz Perspectives, 2013Vol. 7, No. 3, 287–302, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2014.903055

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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Such assertions encourage us to try to establish what, precisely, is “speech-like” about aBillie Holiday vocalization.

Toward the pursuit of this inquiry, the authors prepared a specialized transcriptionof one recorded Billie Holiday performance (“All of Me,” recorded March 21, 1941),which is published below.10 Making reference to this transcription, we propose to high-light several vocal mannerisms characteristic of Billie’s style. These mannerisms includea preponderance of sliding or “kinetic” pitches; a drop of pitch on the voiced conso-nants L, M, N and Y; and soft or “blurred” diction. We will discuss some melodicand rhythmic consequences of these mannerisms; we will then recontextualize themin terms of linguistic analysis of spoken English.

We suggest that each of these three mannerisms tends to erode the distinctionbetween speech and song. The first two do so by importing pitch-distorting behaviors,which are normal and indeed definitive in speech, into the environment of song, wherethey are more exceptional. The third mannerism operates upon our rhythmic discrimi-nations: it undermines our ability to pinpoint the instant of a word’s onset and therebyrenders uncertain the precise duration of a note—a discrimination which is a normalpart of our appreciation of song.

Billie’s art, as represented by this particular performance of “All of Me,” is one ofmelodic shape without abrupt boundaries of pitch or rhythm. The discrete pitchesof a scale or chord are not the defining features of Billie’s melodic landscape. Rather,her lines are supple, continuously-sliding trajectories that, as we hope to demonstrate,both mirror and depend upon tendencies of spoken English.

We will then turn to another of our own transcriptions, this one a composite whichjuxtaposes four different Billie Holiday performances. A rare recording has preservedan interview in which Billie was asked to speak the words to Jerome Kern and OttoHarbach’s 1933 song “Yesterdays.”11 We made a pitch translation of this spokenversion, as well as of portions of three sung performances of this song (1939, 1952and 1956). Examination of this composite transcription suggests that Billie allowed,not only pitch tendencies, but specific pitches and intervals to migrate betweenspeech and song.

Reading the Transcription of “All of Me”

Let us consider the representation of pitch in our transcription of “All of Me,” for themoment ignoring the odd appearance of its rhythmic representations. The stemmednoteheads express, in approximate durations, the pitches which form a conceptual scaf-folding for this melody. But by themselves, they would constitute a catastrophic sim-plification of the vocal line’s actual pitch contour. Lines between noteheads indicateslides. The pitches through which they move are indicated by the lines’ placement

10A widely recorded jazz standard, “All of Me” was written by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons in 1931. Ourtranscription is of Holiday’s recording for Okeh (6214), reissued on the compilation Billie Holiday: The Legacy(1933-1958), Columbia/Legacy 47724 (1991).11The spoken version of “Yesterdays” appears on the rare Billie Holiday compilation, I Wonder Where Our LoveHas Gone, Giants of Jazz, LP 1001 (1975).

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on the staff. Wherever possible, where a slide’s initial or ending pitch is not coincidentwith a stemmed notehead, we have indicated that pitch with a stemless notehead. Atmeasure 1, the sliding curve which rises to F and then falls to C does not have a note-head at its apex; Billie’s slide is so continuous here that we prefer not to interrupt itsvisual flow. Arrows below noteheads indicate microtonal raising or lowering of thosepitches. Individual capital letters in the song’s lyrics indicate prominent voiced conso-nants. An x on the staff indicates a prominent unvoiced, and therefore unpitched, con-sonant sound which briefly interrupts Billie’s pitch continuity. Why resort to such anelaborate system of pitch symbols, far more detailed than standard Western musicnotation? Psychoacoustician D.M. Green has asserted in his discussion of speech into-nation that “[p]itch perception is a fascinating area because it appears so simple and yetis a process of considerable subtlety and complexity.”12 If we wish to compare speechand song, our transcription of song must be detailed enough to potentially captureelements of speech’s intonational nuances.

A word here about how our transcription of “All of Me” is to be read rhythmically—and about why the transcription should show any rhythmic values at all, given that weare discussing pitch contours only, and will not be bringing speech rhythms into thisdiscussion. The reason for the latter is twofold. First, this performance happens tobe a particularly effective instance of Billie’s technique of metric displacement, aconcept described by Huang and Huang and which we will summarize here: Billie’sback-phrasing is an extreme dissynchrony with the tempo of the accompanyingband—one so radical that for extended passages, even whole songs, a consistenttempo different from the band’s beat can be applied to her vocal line. We have calledthis vocal-line tempo her “recitation beat.”13

Second, in the process of making a pitch transcription of a Billie Holiday solo, weconfront a conundrum that is at the heart of her signature rhythmic effect. Her timeless,floating quality comes partly from our being unsure how to identify “the beat.” Thepresence of a recitation beat, different from the band’s beat, creates a very special,intoxicating confusion for the listener, who must comprehend time in two simul-taneous and independent tracks. The effect is abetted by Billie’s soft diction andsliding pitches. In order to identify and transcribe a pitch, you have to look for itsboundaries in time. You must decide when it begins, when it is bent and how longit is sustained. Rhythmic and metric events impinge upon a transcriber’s perceptionof those pitch boundaries, as upon a listener’s; melody and pacing are mutually influ-ential. Billie blurs the boundaries between pitches. In so doing, she also renders rhyth-mic boundaries malleable, open to interpretation. Thus over every decision which welisteners make, as we mentally organize the pitches and rhythms we hear, there hovers asense that truth is elusive, and certainty is ephemeral; and this sense, perhaps, is one keyto the Billie Holiday experience. This is the secret to what composer Ned Rorem praised

12David M. Green, An Introduction to Hearing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976), 198.13Hao Huang and Rachel V. Huang, “Billie Holiday and Tempo Rubato: Understanding Rhythmic Expressivity,”Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7 (1994/1995): 181–200 (182).

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Example 1. “All of Me,” 21 March 1941; transcription by the authors.

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as Billie’s artistry “[i]n bending a phrase, stretching a melody, delaying the beat so as to‘come in wrong’ just right… .”14

Our rhythmic notation here is a simple spatial grid. The band’s downbeats arerepresented by barlines. This allows for easy, if rough, visual assessment of Billie’snon-alignment with the band’s beat. Although we have dispensed with visually repre-senting each of the band’s beats and triplet subdivisions, our rhythmic transcription ofthe vocal line is highly accurate. We assessed Billie’s stemmed note values on the basis ofher recitation beat, which in this performance is extraordinarily consistent. The accom-paniment moves at about mm 108 to the quarter note; the tempo of the vocal line is 160to the quarter. This accounts for the appearance, over any given bar, not of four quarternotes worth of music, but of six. Between Billie’s phrases are rests whose lengths wehave not specified. As we have suggested in our previous article (cited earlier), the reci-tation beat is necessarily suspended during rests; otherwise Billie’s successive phraseentrances would get further and further displaced from the band’s beat.

Sliding Pitches in “All of Me”

Cynthia Folio and Robert Weisberg comment on Billie’s “uncanny ability to slide into,out of, and between notes.”15 Doretta Whalen proposes “usages” of Billie’s singingstyle, one of which is “pitch bending… to produce softly rounded vocal lines.”16

Using a sufficiently detailed transcription, it becomes possible to document in technicaldetail some of Holiday’s slides. In addition to their sheer number, the most striking attri-bute of slides in this performance is their specificity of pitch. It is particularly exciting tonote those slides which do not simply connect stemmed noteheads, but whose initial orfinal instants introduce additional pitches to the line, enriching or reinforcing its harmo-nic implications. Such cases include the following stemless noteheads: Initial C at m. 1; Bin m. 3; A and C♯ at m. 5; G♯ at m. 9; G at m. 11; D♯ and D at mm. 13 and 14; E at m. 14;D at m. 16, and C at m. 17 (these last two create a composite transitional line betweenphrases, beginning with E on “them” in m. 15, progressing through stemless D and C,and arriving on F in the course of “your” in m. 17); C at m. 18; C’s at m. 22 and D atm. 23; D at m. 25; F at m. 26; E at m. 27 (between “was” and “my”), and G at m. 30.

The interaction between stemmed noteheads and indicated slides suggests that to con-ceptualize this line in terms of discrete pitches with discrete durations is problematic.Slides, both rising and falling, move into the beginnings of notes and through their dur-ations. The riddle of where, along a sliding curve, to locate the beginnings and ends ofspecific notes confronts us at each moment. At measures 1 and 13 especially, pitch undu-lations are so extreme that we prefer not to commit ourselves to a single pitch or notevalue; we therefore place parentheses around the stemmed noteheads at these instances,as well as at other less extreme instances of the same phenomenon. Conventionally, if we

14Ned Rorem, “Knowing When to Stop,” in The Billie Holiday Companion, 91.15Cynthia Folio and Robert W. Weisberg, “Billie Holiday’s Art of Paraphrase: A Study in Consistency,” Interdisci-plinary Studies in Musicology, vol. 5 (Rhytmos): 247–275 (253).16Doretta L Whalen, “A Sociological and Ethnomusicological Study of Billie Holiday and Her Music” (PhD Dis-sertation, U. of Pittsburg, 1999), Dissertation Abstracts International 61-01A: 25: 261.

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were analyzing pitch or rhythm, we would do so in terms of the stemmed noteheads,conceptually relegating the slides to the realm of the ornamental. Indeed, an eartrained to recognize specific pitches may not recognize the slides at all, without someeffort. But here, the performance and the transcription suggest a modified, perhapsreversed, relationship between structural and ornamental behavior. Specific rhythmsand static pitches are a fragile edifice here, lightly and even ornamentally balancedatop a pitch contour which does not necessarily derive from them.

Sliding Pitch in Speech

The extreme tendency toward sliding pitch in this performance is axiomatic of speech.Simultaneously, it contradicts a conventional conception of song. A sung melody com-posed of “notes” is a series of discrete pitch frequencies, which are assumed not tochange throughout most of the duration of the note. The pitch contours of spokenEnglish are not, normally, this type of melody: “static” or “level” tones, which maintaina single identifiable frequency over time, are rare in speech. Far more common are theso-called “kinetic,” moving or gliding, tones. Conventional Western music notationreinforces the conceptual difference between speech and song. A note in a score rep-resents a single frequency, as well as a proportional length of time. In addition, anotated melody makes what we might call a “quantum leap” from each pitch frequencyto the next. A gliding tone, on the other hand, moves continuously (if briefly) throughan unbroken range of frequencies, infinite as the number of points on a line. Conven-tional notation has no way to represent gliding motion through all the frequenciesbetween two specified pitches, other than the “glissando” symbol.

Spoken English pitch curves have been described as continuously changing in a varietyof ways: high fall, low fall, high rise, low rise, fall-rise, rise-fall. M. A. K. Halliday hasidentified five basic moving pitch contours in English which, somewhat confusinglyfor musicians, he labels “tones.”17 Tone interacts with tonality (distribution of tonegroups) and tonicity (placement of tonic prominence) to create meaning in English into-nation. Following are the tones identified in Halliday’s system:

Simple Tone Groups:tone 1: fallingtone 2: high rising, or falling-rising (pointed)tone 3: low risingtone 4: falling-rising (rounded)tone 5: rising-falling (rounded)

The same terminology can, of course, describe melodic shape in music, but here is thecritical dissimilarity: while a continuous musical contour is extrapolated from a seriesof level pitches, a linguistic melody is frequently kinetic within even the smallest phonicbuilding block. Thus, for example, linguist Kenneth Pike: “When a falling or rising

17M. A. K. Halliday, A Course in Spoken English; Intonation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3–4.

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contour occurs on a single syllable, a glide is formed… , so that the entire contour maybe actualized within that syllable.”18 So significant is sliding pitch in English speech thatit is incorporated into Dwight Bolinger’s definition of the linguistic “tone unit”:

Minimally, a tone unit must consist of a syllable, and this syllable must carry a glide ofa particular kind. This is the obligatory element, and is referred to as the nucleus… ifit is omitted, the auditory effect is of being cut short.19

Bolinger identifies the distinction between sliding pitch, on the one hand, and sustainedpitch, on the other, as a critical difference between speech and song. Bolinger bolstersthis intuition by reference to conventional music notation:

The comparison [between speech intonation and song] runs into problems when weconsider tones that move and tones that are sustained. The concept of “note” (and itsmaterialization in musical notation as a pitch held at a point on the staff) suggests thatsustention is very important in music… . The most casual look at a spectrogram ofspeech will show that steady pitches are the exception, not the rule.20

Thus Bolinger invokes conventional Western music notation to demonstrate thatsliding is not normally a primary carrier of musical information. And indeed, theodd look of our transcription itself suggests that Billie’s melodic priorities are notthose of conventional song. If Billie’s slides were ornamental, enhancing a melodywhose impact resided in its sustained tones, then a conventional-looking transcription,not one based on the preeminence of sliding, would adequately represent her art. Butthis is not the case. We propose that the import of Billie’s slides is similar to that ofspeech slides: not ornamental, not merely enhancement or intensification (althoughthey do serve those purposes), but crucial carriers of emotional content. Holiday’sexpert control of sliding pitch curves may constitute the basis Lori of Burns’21 referenceto Billie’s “subtle nuance of pitch” and Artie Shaw’s claim that “I never heard her hit abad note that was off by even a sixteenth of a tone.”22

Linguists have their own history of disputing the significance of slides, on the onehand, and of specific pitches or intervals, called “target pitches” or “levels,” on theother. Bolinger refers to this history in the following passage:

This claim [that targets, not slides, are the idealized carriers of information in speech]of course implies that what comes between the target pitches is accidental and merelya part of what you do on the way to the level you are aiming at.23

Hart, Collier and Cohen describe an opposing view:

18Kenneth L. Pike, Tone Languages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948), 17.19Dwight Bolinger, Intonation: Selected Readings (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972), 112.20Dwight Bolinger, Intonation and Its Parts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 28.21Lori Burns, “Feeling the Style: Vocal Gesture and Musical Expression in Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and LouisArmstrong,” Music Theory Online vol. 11 no. 3 (September 2005), http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.3/mto.05.11.3.burns_frames.html, accessed 28 March 2014. Shaw is quoted in Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday(Boston, MA: Northeastern, 1997), 107.22Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (Boston, MA: Northeastern, 1997), 107.23Bolinger, Intonation and Its Parts, 28.

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It is the pitch movements, rather than levels, which provide the cues to listeners forwhatever segment in an utterance is supposed to be made salient by carrying a pitchaccent… the phenomenological datum that pitch is heard as a continuum in spite ofthe presence of voiceless and therefore pitchless interludes is taken care of by meansof the notion of pitch contours.24

Despite this history of differing opinion as to the function of sliding pitch, the presenceof slides as a characteristic feature of spoken English is not in dispute.

Slides as Emotional Intensifiers

As to the function of slides, Bolinger concurs with those linguists who believe that“there is more to the story than movement between target pitches.”25 Many linguistssuggest that slides are intensifiers of emotion. Thus, Bolinger: “The glide appears toadd ‘more of’ whatever [emotional content] the skip implies… .”26 He offers theseexamples:

The left-hand schematic represents a glide-less drop from “Don’t” to the beginning of“worry,” followed by a rising glide on the second syllable of “worry.” The right handschematic represents a downward glide on “Don’t,” followed by “worry” with itsrising glide on the second syllable. Bolinger explains:

… the downglide [on “Don’t”] shows more concern on the speaker’s part, adding tothe reassurance.

And similarly, apropos the emotional heightening of

If you say you have done something and I respond with You? The levels [left-handschematic] will show a kind of affected surprise; the glide [right-hand schematic]something more like incredulity.27

Linguist David Crystal28 suggests that not only might a sliding pitch intensify a slide-less pitch-jump; but a slide which changes direction can intensify the effect ofsimpler sliding:

24Johan ’t. Hart, René Collier and Antonie Cohen, A Perceptual Study of Intonation (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 188.25Bolinger, Intonation and Its Parts, 30.26Ibid.27Ibid, 30–32.28David Crystal, “The Intonation System of English,” in Bolinger (ed.) Selected Readings, 114.

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“… extra stress may affect a simple tone… to produce a tone which has a phoneticshape similar to a complex tone.

In this example, the vertical arrow represents a glide-less jump in pitch. The dot abovethe curved glide represents the glide’s loudest point. The original downward slide [left-hand schematic] is modified to produce the curve [right-hand schematic], on onehand, or the original upward jump is transformed into as upward glide, on theother. Either way, sliding both up and down expresses “extra stress,” as comparedwith sliding only down.

John C. Wells highlights the relationship of emotion to the (sliding) contours ofspeech in his discussion of the functions of English intonation, which include an “atti-tudinal function. The most obvious role of intonation is to express our attitudes andemotions – to show shock or surprise, pleasure or anger, interest or boredom, serious-ness or sarcasm, and many others. We do this by tone… .”29 Hungarian linguists IvanFónagy and Klara Magdics offer the following English example of one particularemotion-carrying curve, which they call the “tenderness” intonation:

According to Fónagy and Magdics, tenderness is signified by a gently undulating, highpitch level which descends slightly at the end of the phrase. A falling glide is character-istic of this intonation: “In the long stressed syllables the off-glide (‘portamento’) isaudible (especially in the English and German sentences).”30

Sliding pitch, then, is characteristic of spoken English. In contrast, song is conven-tionally characterized by sustained pitches, reached by intervallic steps or jumps, andless frequently connected by slides. We propose that in the context of song, Billie Holi-day’s high incidence of sliding evokes the definitive contours of speech. Furthermore,even in the context of spoken English, differing degrees of sliding are recognized asexpressing differing degrees of emotional intensity. If Billie’s slides invite us to experi-ence her performances as speech, then perhaps the complex curves and wide range ofher slides affect us as they would in speech: as expressing particularly vivid emotion.

We add here an observation: not only is Billie’s singing extraordinarily gliding incontour; in recorded samples, her speech, too, proceeds along a more continuouslygliding trajectory than is frequently encountered. The gliding quality of Billie’sspeech may be due, in part, to her soft or “blurred” consonants, which do not

29J. C. Wells, English Intonation: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11–12.30Ivan Fónagy and Klara Magdics, “Emotional Patterns in Intonation and Music,” Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprach-wissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 16 (1963): 302.

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define the boundaries of slides and words as clearly as harder consonants might. Just asthese blurred consonants abet the indeterminacies of Billie’s sung line, in speech theysuppress our awareness of discrete words, favoring, instead, our perception of herspeech’s continuous melody. We will pursue this phenomenon below.

Selected Low-pitch Consonants

Voiced consonants are an extraordinarily vivid presence in this performance of “All ofMe.” What is a voiced consonant? We use the term to denote those letter sounds nor-mally identified as consonants, but which can in fact be sustained, with vocalization, inthe way which we normally associate with vowels. Voiced consonant sounds mayinclude: j, 1, m, n, r, v, w, z, th, ng. (The remaining English consonants – b, k, d, f, g,h, p, s, t – are far more difficult, if not impossible, to voice.) Generally, in popularmusic song styles, voiced consonants are allowed longer durations than in classicalstyles, such as bel canto operatic singing. Even acknowledging this, Billie’s voiced con-sonants are conspicuous for their length and vitality.

In our transcription, we have indicated prominent voiced consonants by placing theconsonant letters, capitalized, above the pitches to which they correspond. Frequentlythey include the initial or destination pitches of a slide. They are not restricted to thosepitches, however; Billie often slides through them. Within this general atmosphere ofvolatile voiced-consonant pitch, a pattern is suggested with regard to l’s, m’s, n’sand, in some degree, y’s. There is a tendency for these consonants’ pitches to originatebelow the predominating pitch of the syllable to which they belong: five out of six l’s doso, four of eight m’s, three of six n’s and two initial y’s. This pattern may suggestanother migration of a behavior characteristic of spoken English into Billie’s sungpitch contour.

Linguistic analysts Lehiste and Peterson have compiled data correlating the pitch of asyllable’s nuclear vowel sound with the syllable’s initial consonant. They document aphenomenon which we have dubbed “pull-down,” whereby certain initial consonantsare tied to relatively low-pitch vowels. In their sample, n, 1, and y, especially, producethe most dramatic pull-downs.31 Of course, this is not quite the same as to claim that n,1 and y themselves occur on lower pitches – although the overlap with Billie’s low-pitched n’s, l’s and y’s is suggestive. But Lehiste and Peterson also speak to the pitchrelationship between an initial consonant and its nuclear vowel, as well as to whatthey call “a different distribution of the fundamental frequency movement [for voice-less and voiced consonants]… [A]fter a voiceless consonant… the highest peak occursimmediately after the consonant, whereas after a voiced consonant, especially a voicedresonant, the fundamental frequency rises slowly… .”32 In other words, such consonantsas m and n will tend to present themselves as: 1) lower in pitch than the vowels whichfollow them, and 2) connected to those vowels by a rising slide.

31Ilse Lehiste and Gordon E. Peterson, “Some Basic Considerations in the Analysis of Intonation,” in Bolinger (ed.)Selected Readings, 370.32Ibid, 372; emphasis added.

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Lehiste and Peterson do not specify whether the particular accent or dialect of theEnglish speaker impinges upon these issues. They refer only to “American English”and do not specify the geographic origins of their language samples. Alan Cruttendennotes that “[i]t is often said that the intonation of Black American English is very differ-ent from that of General American… it is… reported that it uses more rises, a widerkey, and a higher register (including much use of falsetto).”33 Nonetheless, we findLehiste’s and Peterson’s data to be tantalizingly parallel to Billie’s tendency in “All ofMe.”We use the term “tendency” advisedly: in Billie’s line, as in Lehiste and Peterson’ssample, the pitch relationships of 1, m, n and y to their following vowels are not uni-versal. They are, however, present frequently enough to be a nexus of similaritybetween speech and song, in this case.

Soft or “Blurred” Diction

In speech as in song, consonants normally serve to demarcate the boundaries of asyllable or word. They can do so not only conceptually but also physically: they caninterrupt an ongoing flow of vowel sound with brief silence, as well as with somedegree of percussive or explosive quality. In Billie’s usage they often lose this func-tion, becoming soft-edged. We have commented above that in speech, Billie’sdiction was extremely fluid. In song, she uses consonants to enhance, rather thanto interrupt, the continuity of the microtonal melody which slides through them.In our transcription, the unvoiceable t’s, c’s and one th (at m. 7) produce rareinstances of silence in the course of a phrase. Yet Billie manages to soften the per-cussion even of some t’s and c’s. Note especially m. 24, where the final “t” of“without” becomes a “d” sound, moving smoothly into the “y” of “you.” Holiday’sexceptional diction creates an intricate and circular speech-song relationship. Hercontinuously-sliding pitch contours render her speech musical and her singingspeech-like; in each case, her soft-edged consonants allow the continuity of herpitch curves to emerge.

“Yesterdays”: Specific Pitch Connections in Speech and Song

What of the specific pitches through which Billie’s sung contour travels? Are thespecific range and pitches of Billie’s speaking voice influential in her choice of sungpitches? If so, the interrelationships between her speaking pitches and other influenceson her melodic choices are bound to be as intricate as a Gordian knot. Obviously asong’s original melody, as well as its harmonic accompaniment, exert their weighton Billie’s melodic contours, as do her artistic choices of individual pitches. Theseelements entangle themselves with any influence that Billie’s speech tendencies mayexert on a particular performance.

We do not propose to unravel the fabric of these interfacing elements. But we dooffer our pitch transcription of one spoken version and three sung versions of

33Alan Cruttenden, Intonation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 143.

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“Yesterdays,” which suggests a powerful identity between the spoken and sung per-formances. Did Billie’s versions of the “Yesterdays”melody originate in her speech ten-dencies? Was her spoken performance informed by her awareness of the melodiccontours she preferred to apply to this song? Are both of these scenarios in fact accu-rate? In whichever direction influences may have traveled, from speech to song or thereverse, the interaction of pitch in the two modes of performance are remarkable.Please note that we transcribed the spoken version first, before we began workingwith the sung versions. We hoped by this means to avoid, as far as possible, uncon-scious transfer of pitches, on our part, from song to speech.

Example 2. “Yesterdays,” comparative transcription by the authors.

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We have identified the four performances, which span a period of 17 years, by theyears in which they were recorded. The spoken version, as indicated above, comesfrom a 1956 recording. We will refer to this version as “Recit.” The sung versionswere recorded in studio in 193934 and 195235, and a concert version was recorded inCarnegie Hall in 195636. We will refer to these versions by their recording dates.

The parallels between the recitation and each of the sung versions are very striking,in terms of overall range, interval choices on specific words, and even specific pitches.Some parallels are not apparent if we consider only predominating pitches; as we mightexpect, they appear when we consider the initial and final pitches of slides, as well. It isparticularly striking that the spoken performance of “Yesterdays” hovers very close tothe F♯ minor key of the sung versions; this despite the presence, in the background ofthe recitation, of a guitarist playing in D minor! This resonates with phonologist DavidBrazil’s (1985) observation on intonation that the pitch of the first content word of anutterance is the “key” of that utterance and an indicator of the attitudinal stance of thespeaker. Brazil conceives of “key” as independent of pitch accents, referring to relativelocation in the speakers range.37

There is also a provocative instance, detailed below (see no. 3, “olden days, goldendays”), of a letter-sound that migrates from one pitch to another when a neighboringletter-sound is omitted from one of the sung versions. This phenomenon is somewhatreminiscent of the “pull-down” effect discussed above, and tantalizingly reinforces asense of vivid interaction, in Billie’s art, between the processes of speech and ofsong. Below, we detail some of the parallels between the four versions, using thesong’s words as reference points for our observations.

1) Yesterdays, yesterdays: A falling fourth, F♯ to C♯, is significant in all four versions.The explosive “y” of the recitation (Recit) becomes scoops on “y” in the 1956version, as well as on the second “y” of the 1952 version. The syllable “days”carries a sliding pitch in both of its occurrences in the Recit version, as wellas both times in 1952 and once in 1956.

2) Days I knew as happy sweet sequestered days: The minor third, F♯ to A, is signifi-cant in all four versions. In Recit, the predominating pitches of “Days I knew ashappy” are all G♯. However, slides terminate on A and F♯. In the 1939 version,predominating pitches on “Days I knew as happy sweet” include six A’s, whileinitial and terminal notes of slides are F♯. From the first “Days” of this phrase tothe second syllable of “sequestered,” all four versions show a whole-step rise intheir predominating pitches. In the sung versions, the rise is A to B; in Recit, the

34Billie Holiday: The Complete Commodore Recordings, CMD-2-401. Recorded 20 April 1939, World BroadcastingStudio, New York City.35Billie Holiday: The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959, Verve 5130859 (CD reissue, 1995), recorded inthe studio probably on 27 July 1952, by Billie Holiday and her Lads of Joy.36The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live, Verve 833767-2 (CD reissue, 1991), recorded 10November 1956, Carnegie Hall, New York City.37David Brazil, The Communicative Value of Intonation in English (Birmingham, England: English LanguageResearch, 1985), 189.

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rise is G♯ to A♯. A rising slide on the first “Days” of the phrase occurs in all fourversions. From the last syllable of “sequestered” to the final “days” of the phrase,1956 shows a half-step drop (A to G♯). The half-step drop is preserved, butmoved over to become a drop on the syllable “days,” in Recit (E to D♯), 1939(A to G♯) and 1952 (A to G♯).

3) Olden days, golden days: From the first syllable of “Olden” to the first syllable of“golden,” predominating pitches in both the 1939 and 1952 versions show ahalf-step drop (A to G♯). In Recit, this drop appears as a whole step, B♭ toA♭, terminating on the same enharmonic pitch as the other two versions’drop. The descending phrase “Olden days” is expressed with an overall pitch-range of a sixth in Recit (B♭ down to D♭), 1939 (A to C♯) and 1952 (A toC♯), and as a seventh (B to C♯) in 1956; “golden days” comprises, total, awide fifth in Recit (A♭ to low D♭), a sixth in 1939 and 1952 (G♯, or enharmonicA♭, to B). In 1939, the sixth-interval range mentioned above is incorporated intothe stepwise motion of the original melody by means of voiced and pitched l’s inthe words “Olden” and “golden.” In 1956, a pitched l appears in “Olden,” not aslow as in 1939, but well below the pitch of the syllable which follows it. In 1952,however, the sixths appear as slides on the o’s of “Olden” and “golden,” ratherthan involving the l’s which follow the o’s. Note that the changed function of thel’s here may be related to the absence of d’s from “Olden” and “golden” in thisversion. The words occur in the 1952 recording as “Olen” and “golen,” orperhaps “goden” with a very light d. “Golen” appears in Recit as well. InRecit, a whole-step descending slide is present on each “days” (E♭ to D♭;lowered E♭ to lowered D♭). All the other versions display a whole-step dropor slide on the second “days.” The 1956 version also shows an exaggerateddescending slide (of a fifth, G♯ to C♯) on the first “days.”

4) Days of mad romance and love: A descending fourth between the predominatingpitches of “Days” and “love” obtains in all four versions. In Recit, the interval isA to E; in all three others, it is F♯ to C♯. A descending fifth in the course of “madromance” occurs in Recit (high G♯ to C♯), in 1952 (E to A) and in the spoken“mad” of 1956 (F♯ to B). The half-step drop from “and” to “love” in 1956 (D toC♯) is echoed in drops or descending slides on “love” in all the other versions.Recit slides from E to D, then drops to C♯; 1939 and1952 show slides from Dto C♯.

These consistencies among the four performances of “Yesterdays” coincide sugges-tively with results from Folio and Weisberg’s analysis of three versions of “All ofMe,” recorded over a period of 13 years. They observe that:

… one also sees similar patterns across years, indicating that Billie’s interpretation ofthe melody did not change drastically over the years. Statistical analyses supportedthose conclusions… Billie’s melodic interpretation of “All of Me” was similar fromperformance to performance, even when 13 years intervened.38

38Folio and Weisberg, “Billie Holiday’s Art of Paraphrase,” 260.

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It is tempting to speculate that this consistency, within a given song but over a span ofmany years, owes something to the versatile yet consistent structures of speech intonation.

Conclusion

In these parallels and others, the fourfold transcription of “Yesterdays” shows anuncanny correspondence between Billie’s recitation and the three sung recordings,over the course of nearly two decades. Specific intervals and pitches possibly carriedfrom a prototype of the song into the recitation; the richness of slides, and the specificpitches and location of slides, possibly carried from habits of speech into the sung ver-sions—these phenomena suggest that Billie’s speech and singing reinforce one anotherin a seamless loop. This sense of an endless reciprocity of influence undermines theconceptual distinction between speech and song. In so doing, it renders the question:“in which direction, exactly, do the influences travel?” of rather less import than thefact of the reciprocity itself.

We do not propose that reciprocity between speech and singing is unique to Billie. BenSidran’s analysis of Black language and music in America is centered on the concept that“the quality of vocalization of tone is a major characteristic of all Black communication inAmerica and, particularly, of Black music.”39 Charles Suhor notes that many jazz musi-cians and critics have reinforced scholarly ideas about the music–language relationship injazz performance. He cites this example: “Sidran and others have long noted similaritiesbetween Louis Armstrong’s talking and singing, and his phrasing and projection of toneon the trumpet.”40 It may be relevant that “Pops” was one of Billie’s avowed idols andperformancemodels. The relationship between vocal performance and speech intonationreaches beyond Black music, and indeed, jazz. Michael Daley observes about Bob Dylan’sperformance of “Like a Rolling Stone,”

I am… aware that singing is not speech, and other factors do enter the semantic andaffective landscape of musical expression. Nonetheless, a look at Dylan’s use of pitchin this song, through the lens of linguistic speech intonation, goes a long way towardexplaining the precise nature of Dylan’s communication of meaning in sungperformance.41

Billie Holiday was, however, one of the supreme practitioners of the art of interwovenspeech and song; and the opportunity to transcribe and compare her spoken and sungperformances of the same song is both unusual and deeply instructive. We may returnnow with deeper insight to the testimonials of scholars and colleagues. Critic and jazzbiographer Gary Giddens observes that Billie “inflected words in a way that made evenbanal lyrics bracing… .”42 Jazz scholar William Bauer comments on how Holidayallows “the speech rhythms and the emotional development of the words to reshape

39Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 7.40Charles Suhor, “Jazz Improvisation and Language Performance: Parallel Competencies,” Etc., A Review ofGeneral Semantics, 43:2 (Summer 1986): 136.41Michael Daley, “Vocal Performance and Speech Intonation: Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’” Oral Tradition,22/1 (2007): 96.42Gary Giddens, “Lady Gets Her Due/The Complete Lady,” in Gourse (ed.) The Billie Holiday Companion, 91.

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the music… .”43 Bauer goes on to discuss “the subtle play in a jazz singer’s perform-ance between improvisation and paraphrase, a play which enables a singer’s own speechrhythms and inflections to shape the vocal line… .”44

Bobby Tucker, Holiday’s accompanist from 1946 to 1949, provides an illuminatingdescription of his early encounter with Billie’s style. The quote irresistibly suggests thatTucker, at first attuned to the normal parameters of song, by the second set hadswitched his focus to the processes of speech. Tucker was initially unimpressed withthe singer, but when asked by clarinetist Tony Scott what he didn’t like about her,

Tucker was taken by surprise. “There’s no sound,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s a flatthing”… it was during that night’s second set that he “started listening to what shewas saying and how she was saying. And once you start that, you can’t get awayfrom it” [… .] “She could just literally tear you apart with how she could say alyric. She could get into a lyric like no one I’ve heard yet.”45

In an art so closely related to speech as Billie Holiday’s, one as imbued with emotionalinflection as speech is, the speech-like processes are definitive, not cosmetic. The rangeand placement of slides, abetted by soft, equivocal diction, are some of the importantcarriers of emotional meaning in Billie’s performances.

Abstract

The authors investigate the processes underlying Billie Holiday’s oft-remarked “speech-like” singing. They identify sliding, or “kinetic,” pitch as a definitive characteristic ofspeech intonation, and discuss the relationship between kinetic pitch and the com-munication of emotion in spoken English. They also adduce a connection betweencertain spoken consonants and the pitches of the vowels which follow them. Theyanalyze five Holiday recordings in terms of kinetic pitch and consonant/vowel “pull-down”: three versions of “Yesterdays” (J. Kern), one version of “All of Me” (G.Marks and S. Simons) and one recitation of the lyrics of “Yesterdays.” The authors’pitch transcriptions of all five performances, including the recitation, demonstrate ahigh incidence of kinetic pitch and of consonant/vowel pull-down. Parallels betweenthe one recited and three sung versions of “Yesterdays” are heightened when kineticpitches are specified and included in the analysis.

43William R. Bauer, “Billie Holiday and Betty Carter: Emotion and Style in the Jazz Vocal Line,” Annual Review ofJazz Studies 6 (1993): 109.44Ibid, 143–144.45Robert G. O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), 52.

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