‘God Bless The Child’: Billie Holiday’s anti-nepotism anthem
Behind the iconic voice of Billie Holiday lay an incredibly tough life. From her childhood to her tragic death, the singer’s talent, breaking through and making her name known, was a cry of survival, endurance and the lust to create a better life for herself. Through addiction, abuse, legal injustices, government surveillance, and so many other trials, Holiday held on tight to one person and one person only: herself. With no family money to fall back on and no one to help her get a leg up, ‘God Bless The Child’ became an ode to people just like her who had nothing but what they’d earned themselves.
At every turn of Holiday’s story, tragedy and trauma follow. Before even coming of age, she’s suffered through an unstable childhood, a violent assault that for some reason led to her being punished as she was shipped off to reform school, and then upon release, she found herself working at a brothel at just 13.
But, it was at that brothel, where she did minor chores and helped the workers, that she first heard jazz. Playing on record players from the bedrooms, she listened to the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, falling in love and realising exactly what she wanted to do: to sing and make music that moved people like that, so she moved to New York to do it.
It didn’t get easier, though. With no one to give her a helping hand, as her mother worked in restaurants and her dad had run off when she was just a baby, she had to build it all from the ground up. She’d take any job she could get, singing in any club that would let her, working night after night on any stage she could step onto. And eventually, when her looming talent was finally recognised by the right people with the right money, things worked.
The rest was history, really. Holiday went on to have an influential career and an immeasurable impact on music, but it wasn’t without strife. Racism affected her opportunities at every turn, addiction majorly held her back, and then, after the release of ‘Strange Fruit’, she became the target of government surveillance, using the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ to squander her career at any opportunity, eventually causing her death as she died from drug withdrawals while under arrest.
But if there is one thing Holiday is a beacon for, it’s endurance, drive to survive, and proud independence. She was a bold artist who would say things exactly as they were, and ‘God Bless The Child’ is a perfect example of that as she dropped the typical topics of love or heartache female jazz vocalists usually mused on to make a poignant social point.
“Mama may have, Papa may have / But God bless the child that’s got his own,” she sings as the central lyric to this ode to people making it work on their own. Writing a piece of pride and respect towards making things work on your own and succeeding despite the odds, it’s an anti-nepotism song from the 1940s, long before our modern obsession with the topic.
Initially, the song stemmed from a real-life argument she had with her own mother. When Holiday first took off and saw the financial spoils of her work, she gave her mother some money to open a restaurant. Later down the line, when times were getting harder for the singer, her parent refused to help her. Having given but never got, her lyricism is so apt when she sings, “Money, you’ve got lots of friends / Crowding round the door / When you’re gone, spending ends / They don’t come no more.”
But the song is more nuanced than just a reaction to an argument about money. “Them that’s got shall get / Them that’s not shall lose,” she sings in the opening lines, especially spilling out the fact that is still sadly prevalent today that the rich will always get richer while the poor struggle. It’s a sad fact that children of affluent families will always find things more accessible and, in turn, be able to earn more. However, for Holiday and the countless other poor and working-class people trying to make it work, striving for achievements always comes with a price that they often can’t afford, keeping them from greatness.
Sharp and observational, but also richly celebratory for people like Holiday who are determined to succeed despite it all, ‘God Bless The Child’ remains as important today as ever.
