"May be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday." - NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.

Donald Clarke was given unrivalled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s - interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Blatimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction, creating what Newsday called a "thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her miliea."

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