Singer, composer, actress, lover, wife, writer, pleasure seeker, drug addict, icon, commodity, myth and mystery: Billie Holiday is still one of the most famous jazz vocalists of all time. But Holiday's image - the gifted torch singer with insatiable appetites for food, sex, alcohol and drugs - is not the full story. Farah Jasmine Griffin's enchanting investigation of Holiday, her world and how she is remembers, at last fully liberates Lady Day from the tragic songstress myth.

Griffin argues that the stereotype of a black woman who can always take centre stage to command an audience because of her incredible ability to feel, but not to think, continues to hide the real Holiday from public view. Instead of a mindless 'natural' with incredible talent but no discipline, Griffin's Holiday is a jazz virtuoso whose passion and technique made every song she sang forever hers. Instead of being helpless against the racism, sexism and poverty that dominated her life, Holiday is an artist, willing to pay a tremendous price to change the sound of jazz forever. And far from being an independent spirit whose greatest legacy is that all hurdles can be overcome, whatever the odds.

A Billie Holiday fan for as long as she can remember, FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin'?: The African-American Migrations Narrative.

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