Lady Sings the Blues

7/5/2025

I’ve never really be an huge fan of Diana Ross’s voice, but there’s no getting away from her personable and visceral performance here as the flawed jazz musician Billie Holliday. With Motown’s Berry Gordy at the helm it was always going to lead on the music and it does that effectively too for the most part whilst giving us the basic bones of her turbulent battle with narcotics. We start in that position so often inhabited by aspirational young black Americans, a poverty stricken environment where sex was all too often the way young women made a living, before she gets that lucky break in a Harlem nightclub. That introduces her to Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams) who takes up the management of her career. Unlike with many of her contemporaries, though, he is genuinely interested in his pro