Billie Holiday, The Arranger, Part 3: "Them There Eyes" Through the Years

I’ve shown in Part 1 and Part 2 that Holiday designed many, maybe most, of her arrangements of songs, even though that has never previously been discussed. We started by looking at “Them There Eyes.” Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1931 (his radio broadcast versions in 1937 and ‘38 are very similar to the 1931 recording), and Billie’s 1939 version is influenced by his.

Thank you to subscriber Richard Schiavi for reminding me that Count Basie’s guitarist Freddie Green, not usually known as a singer, recorded “Them There Eyes” on September 27, 1938 with the “Kansas City Six,” featuring Lester Young. Holiday and Green were in a relationship at that time. (It’s usually reported that he was married, with three children, but the biography by Green’s son says that his wife died in 1936 during the premature stillbirth of another child.) They met during the year that she toured with Count Basie, from March 1937 to early March 1938. (She was with the Artie Shaw band from March until the end of 1938.)

As Stuart Nicholson notes in his well-researched biography of Billie, this Kansas City Six session is evidence that she had worked out her arrangement, and was probably using it in performances, long before she recorded it. According to Eddie Durham, the electric guitarist on the recording (yes, there were two guitars, one acoustic and one electric), she had taught Green her vocal line in advance. Then, she was present in the recording studio and coached Green and the group on her arrangement. And as he sang it into the microphone, she was standing in front of him mouthing the words. That’s why this version is so close to what she herself recorded on July 5, 1939. He starts on one note, as both Armstrong and Holiday did, and ends with “sparkle, bubble” (instead of “They sparkle, they bubble”), which is a Billie trademark.

There were two takes recorded and of course only one was released on 78 rpm, but both are readily available today. Nobody knows which was recorded first, because producer Milt Gabler did not generally number them in the order recorded. Here is Freddie Green’s 1938 rendition from the take that appeared on 78 rpm. This one is a bit more lively than the other take:

Green is not a great singer, but he does a creditable job, for sure. But it’s especially important because the fact that Billie taught it to him is very strong additional proof of my point, that Billie was her own arranger.

OK, so in the last post we heard her first recording of the song, the one from July 1939, and noticed that in addition to what she taught to Green, when she repeats the song after the solos (which doesn’t happen on Green’s version), she talks about “little brown eyes,” changes other things, and she tags on her own ending: “Ah mister, talkin’ about those eyes!” You can hear both of her vocals from the 1939 recording in the previous post, and read about the many details of her arrangement, but here is the very end just to remind you how totally original and brilliant she is:

She uses a version of that same ending in the next surviving performance, from 1948. At the end she now sings, “Look out, Mister.” And listen to the newly affectionate way that she says “Oh, Baby,” near the beginning of this excerpt from the “Just Jazz” concert series in Los Angeles in 1948:

“Live” recordings like this were not intended to be sold to the public. But in 1949 she recorded a brassy big band version, at a slower tempo, arranged by Sy Oliver for commercial release on Decca Records. I mentioned that when she worked with a big band, an arranger had to write out her ideas for the larger group. So Oliver wrote out her climb up the scale into the second chorus, which was a feature of all her recordings of this song going back to 1939. It was a great way to build up the momentum going into the finale.

In 1949, when she climbs up at the start of her second vocal, after the instrumental solos, Oliver has the band echo her. This may have been her idea. And this time she has a new ending: “I’m looking for the boy with the wistful eyes—I fell in love with ‘Them There Eyes’!” This was certainly her idea. It would be beyond belief to imagine that somebody told her to add that. Why would they? This is Billie’s invention, her own arrangement, without a doubt.

Please listen to the ending of her Decca recording here:

“The Boy with the Wistful Eyes” was a reference to a popular song from 1941 by that name, which most of her listeners would remember. It was recorded that year in vocal versions by the Earl Hines big band, the pop band of Mitchell Ayres, singer Meredith Blake, and others. Billie had a clever idea when she added that to her arrangement.

For the rest of her career, she performed a scaled-down, small group version of this popular Decca recording, “wistful eyes” and all. Let’s listen to one complete performance from the Storyville Club of Boston in 1953. This club was the first venture of pianist George Wein, who later founded the Newport festival. Among the many highlights, notice how she pauses after “My heart is jumping, You started something,” leaving out “with them there eyes.” Here her regular pianist Carl Drinkard plays the role of the big band, echoing her at the start of the second chorus at 0:56. And this time she does something new—she sings the “heart is jumping” line at 0:35 in a sing-songy way:

That performance is a good example of what people love about her fifties work. Sure, her voice is very different from the earlier recordings, but there is a quiet intimacy, and a spoken-word quality, that are very affecting.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this examination of Billie Holiday, the arranger, and how she created her distinctive versions of “Them There Eyes” over many years. I’m working on more essays about Billie Holiday—and about lots of other things too, of course.

All the best,
Lewis