Ain’t Nobody’s Business If the Lady Sings the Blues

That romantic vision is personified by Diana Ross, who remains the dominant figure in the film’s legacy. Ross purports to not have had any acting training before the film, but she remarked that she heard and took to heart that “acting is believing.” And, indeed, her belief in her embodiment of Billie Holiday suspends all disbelief, so much so that she was nominated for best actress at the Academy Awards. This was no small feat. Another film that featured music as a character within its storyline that year was Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, who ultimately won the Oscar in that category. Also in the running that year were Maggie Smith for Travels with My Aunt, Cicely Tyson for Sounder, and Liv Ullmann for The Emigrants. This is all to say that Ross’s performance placed her in the company of some of the best actors not only of that year but also of that era. As a result, there is often little talk of another standout performance in this film: Billy Dee Williams as Louis McKay, Holiday’s lover. But seeing Williams in this film was transformative for me. Up to that point, his Louis McKay was the first confident, capable Black male figure in my life who also knew how to express love.

Growing up in the 1970s, I didn’t know men with both the style and the patience of Williams’s Louis McKay. And if there were any men in my life with talent, they weren’t trying to use it to help a woman build her career. (The smaller role of Piano Man, played by Richard Pryor, is also something of an anomaly: I can’t think of another straight, cis, Black male character in a ’70s movie who shares a friendship with a woman that remains completely platonic.) But many films that year were filled with all kinds of negative portrayals of Black men who didn’t exist in my world either, and those images seemed to dominate the screen. The blaxploitation films of the ’70s seemed to say, You should hate whitey and have some hos, too. Remember that in 1972, Super Fly was a huge box-office success, and was condemned by the Hollywood NAACP. In a kind of roundup of films with Black subject matter, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that Super Fly was “the one recent black movie that has any original distinction as a film,” while at same time calling Lady Sings the Blues “very long” and “very dim-witted.” But in my mind, Louis McKay was cooler than Super Fly’s protagonist, Priest (Ron O’Neal). McKay seemed like a character to aspire to be: he had great clothes; could have any woman he wanted but chose a woman with talent; seemed to be respected by everyone, Black and white; and made fidelity look cool. Isn’t that better than being a pimp? The infidelity of my father caused a lot of stress in my childhood, so pimps always looked a bit cartoonish to me; even at a young age, I knew that pimpin’ was neither that easy nor that glamorous. I could also see my mom wishing for a Louis McKay who was faithful and patient as much as Billie Holiday must’ve wished for the same.

In a year that saw the release of other notable Black films like Blacula, Black Gunn, Black Rage, Across 110th Street, Hammer, and the accomplished but downtrodden Sounder, Lady Sings the Blues was an outlier with its story of Black love, Black talent, and Black success combined with a Black female lead. Blaxploitation films were filled with action heroes, pimps, Black nationalist activists, and independent, strong Black women who didn’t need a man. Despite the allure and box-office success of these films, there were Black women—and, let’s be clear, Black couples—all over America who still believed in love.

Lady Sings the Blues is as true as any romance can be, but, no, it is not strictly a biography of Billie Holiday. The singer’s life becomes a vehicle to tell a love story—a Black love story—and so Holiday’s true biography is not really central to the script; hell, it didn’t seem central to her autobiography either. Pressure put on her and her cowriter, William Dufty, forced them to omit Holiday’s relationships with Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton, and Orson Welles from the memoir. The agents and studios of those stars couldn’t have their talent’s reputations sullied with such details. Billie Holiday is as much a character as any other in this heavily fictionalized story, whose greater aim is to depict love through African American iconography. Why not?

As reimagined in the film, Louis McKay remains faithful to and supportive of Holiday both through her career ambitions—which include going on tour in the ’30s with an all-male, all-white band—and through her ultimate heroin addiction. Williams plays this role with a subtle charm that seemed remarkably antithetical to the bravado of pimps prevalent during the acme of the blaxploitation period. The question around the barbershop at the time was why a brother with money, bespoke suits, and model good looks would be faithful to a woman who was that much trouble. Louis McKay embodies an unconditional love that would edge into sentimentality if not for the sadness behind his eyes. The best scenes between Williams and Ross have little or no dialogue; their relationship is built in close-ups and one-shots, not medium two-shots. When you see how they look at each other on-screen, you see the pain in McKay’s gaze, even when Holiday doesn’t see him looking her way.