Lady Sings the Blues summary

Sadie is sick and can’t work. She and Billie are in danger of being evicted from their Harlem apartment in the middle of winter. Despite the bitter cold, Billie walks up and down 133rd Street looking for work at restaurants and juke joints. She keeps coming up empty – until a sympathetic piano player at Pod’s and Jerry’s asks Billie if she can sing.

Billie says, yes, she can. She asks the pianist to play “Trav’lin All Alone,” which is exactly how she feels. She pours her soul into the song. When she’s done, the customers have tears in their drinks, and Billie has $38 in her pocket.

Billie is on the road with Artie Shaw and his band, who are all white. They’re playing in Kentucky when she spots a sheriff who has trouble written all over him. Instead of leaving the stage to avoid a conflict, Billie bets two band members the sheriff will hassle her. Sure enough, he insults Billie during the show – but she just laughs and collects her winnings.

Scenes like that are common for Billie while she’s touring the country with Shaw in 1937. It was just as bad, if not worse, a year earlier when she was on the road with Count Basie and his band, who were all Black. There was the time in Detroit when the crowd at the Fox Theater thought Billie was too light-skinned to be on stage with Basie and his band. The solution, despite Billie’s protests, was to darken her skin with grease paint.

After escaping the segregated and racist America she found on the road, Billie finds an integrated place to perform in New York City: Café Society Downtown. Her career skyrockets during her run at the new, progressive club. It’s where she writes “Strange Fruit,” her famous protest song inspired by the Lewis Allen poem and her father’s death in Dallas. It’s where she rubs elbows with the New York City elite. It’s where she becomes a star.

But after two years at Café Society – and performing seven nights a week with no days off – Billie wants something new. She finds her fresh adventure in California, where she’s surrounded by other stars.

Billie's feeling good about life – her fortunes are rising, and she’s falling in love with Jimmy Monroe. Her mother, however, tells Billie that Monroe will never marry her. So, mostly out of spite, Billie elopes with Monroe in September of 1941. She proves her point – but the price is steep.

Monroe introduces Billie to heroin, and they get high together. But when Monroe goes missing in Los Angeles, Billie finds herself hooked and alone. She’s sick and can’t find any heroin on her own. So she slinks back to New York, dopesick and broke.

Alderson Prison in West Virginia is segregated, but conditions are better than they were for Billie on Welfare Island. She gets a job in the kitchen. She learns to knit. She makes jewelry. But Billie never sings during her sentence in Alderson.

She’s still hesitant to make music when she’s released. But ten days later, Billie is playing in front of a packed house at Carnegie Hall. She’s inspired to return to working on stage full-time, but she can’t do that in New York because of her criminal record. Eventually, she finds a way around the problem: Joe Levy.