I CRIED FOR YOU

1936

I CRIED FOR YOU * BILLY HOLIDAY * VOCALION 33 * UK

Billy Holiday is accompanied on this sublime recording by pianist Teddy Wilson; trumpeter Jonah Jones: alto saxophone, Johnny Hodges; baritone saxophone (he plays that opening chorus), Harry Carney, guitar, Lawrence Lucie; bass, John Kirby and Cozy Cole on the drums. The music was called Swing in the mid 1930s, it was a new sound, fresh and captivating, young people would be pulled towards its sound, the lyrics of the songs would speak to them, tell them what it was to be 'grown up' like they now were; what life was really like when you were no longer a child. They would listen intently to the songs learn the words, get drunk on them, take them to be their own; to become their thoughts, their reason, their moral and spiritual understanding; in the day time they would sing them, or hum the melodies, move through time to those fascinating rhythms that were embedded in their minds, and in the evenings, they would gather together and dance, love or just stand and transmute to their music, their Swing music, being played, just for them; which was invariably at this time live spontaneous and enhanced, beyond qualification, with the cooperation of the audience. Now, though Swing music has been downgraded in the modernist tradition of new is best, we still have those studio versions of this art form that those devotes would have heard on their radios and in bars (juke boxes) or at home on their record players, records that are just plain beautiful like I Cried For You, we can sometimes approach that transcendency that was unconscious and so natural to the young back when Swing was new.