CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS : HOLIDAY, MERCER POSTHOUMOUS HONOR

Jazz vocalist Billie Holiday and lyricist Johnny Mercer were given posthumous career achievement awards at the 29th annual Grammy Awards on Tuesday.

Holiday was honored with the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences’ lifetime achievement award, while Mercer was given the academy’s trustees award.

It would have been all but impossible for Holiday to have won a Grammy during her lifetime. The academy gave its first awards only a year before her death, when Lady Day was far past her prime. Fortunately, lifetime achievement tributes are not about what happened to an artist after the fall, but rather what was achieved during the spring and summer of a glorious career.

Holiday’s life in music certainly was glorious. No singer since her time has failed to acknowledge her significance as the ultimate creative artist in jazz vocal history.

Holiday’s singing career began by accident. Wandering through the Harlem clubs looking for a job, flunking an audition as a dancer, she was asked whether she could sing. She sang “Trav’lin’ All Alone,” was promptly hired and within a year had been heard by many celebrities, including Benny Goodman, with whom she made her record debut; John Hammond, who produced her long series of unforgettable sessions with Teddy Wilson, and Artie Shaw, thanks to whom she became the first black singer on tour with a white orchestra.

What was it about Lady Day that set her apart? She knew nothing of the mechanics of music, learned her songs by ear and brought to them a personal timbre, a poignant beauty that was beyond definition. She could sublimate the most trivial of tunes with a shifted accent, a slurred note, a subtle pulse.

When we met, she was making the first record date under her own name, with Bunny Berigan and Artie Shaw as sidemen. She turned “Summertime,” then a new song, into her own bittersweet anthem; then, when she ran short of material, John Hammond said, “Billie, why don’t you just sing some blues?” Out of that chance remark came “Billie’s Blues,” one of a handful of songs in an idiom which, despite the title of her book and of a horrendously inaccurate posthumous movie (“Lady Sings the Blues”), was not her main identification.

Nobody today can know the experience of sitting in a small 52nd Street club watching Holiday with just a pin spot on her, reducing a noisy audience to dead silence with “Porgy” or “Lover Man” or the song about a lynching, “Strange Fruit.”

When I took her to Europe for what proved to be her first and last continental tour, on the few nights when she sang “Strange Fruit” in a concert hall, Holiday would abruptly leave the stage and, no matter how great the applause, would not return. Singing it took too much out of her.

The world knew far too well about the trouble she saw--the unending fight with drug addiction, with no-good men, with racist humiliations. One prefers to think of her beauty, no less physical than musical; of the Holiday who won all four Esquire gold awards, one of which she received from Jerome Kern here at the Philharmonic; or of the Holiday who had a musical love affair with Lester Young, the saxophonist who was the central figure on so many of her recorded masterpieces.

It has been almost 28 years since Holiday died at age 44 of an overdose and was arrested on her death bed for possession of drugs, half-forgotten and almost broke. But Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and their peers will never forget. The lifetime achievement Grammy follows less than a year after Hollywood acknowledged her with a star on the Walk-of-Fame sidewalk.

Holiday was the vibrant voice of soul, in the truest sense of that greatly abused word. As a human being she was sweet, sour, kind, mean, generous, profane, lovable and impossible, and nobody expects to see or hear anyone quite like her ever again.

It is not by chance that the songs “If You Were Mine,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Day In Day Out,” “Trav’lin’ Light,” “Mandy Is Two” and “Sentimental and Melancholy” all were recorded by Holiday and all had lyrics by Mercer. Holiday’s path crossed with Mercer’s often enough to provide the basis for a series of performances in which the words and her reading of them created a unique symbiosis.

Mercer, who died in 1976, was that rare individual in the songwriter’s universe, a man of intelligence and sophistication whose wit and sensitivity were a constant delight, whether he was writing songs or singing them in a hip, engaging manner that graced his recordings with Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman and in a long series of his own sessions for Capitol.

Like Holiday, Mercer was sui generis. His loss was one that called not for replacement, since that is impossible, but rather for rejoicing that he was among us for a while.

The following is a list of recordings elected this year to the academy’s hall of fame:

“And the Angels Sing,” Benny Goodman and his Orchestra. RCA Victor. 1939.

“Bela Bartok: The Complete String Quartets,” Juilliard String Quartet. Columbia. 1950.

“Blueberry Hill,” Fats Domino. Imperial. 1956.

“If I Didn’t Care,” Ink Spots. Decca. 1939.

“Tosca,” Maria Callas and others. Angel. 1953.

“South Pacific,” Mary Martin, Ezio Pinza and others in original cast. Columbia. 1949.