Okay as much as I wanted to post this one due to many teenage years with some random dreadlocked white guy plinking it on a beaten up guitar:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>Somehow being quite slow it was the one which every aspiring musician learned first.
But I've actually picked this one:
Simply because I think it has much more reasonance with an entire movement. Here was a woman who passed through barriers of clubs where she would not have been admitted under any other circumstance, carried by an incredible instrument that was her voice. If you listen to the piano, it's actually following her lead - she is the instrument.She enters these hallowed halls on a shakey footing, and then she sings this song critising their racism right there in their own environment. And she did this knowing that at any moment she could be dragged from the club and strung up herself. That just by being there she was putting herself in mortal danger. And yet she sung about it. I don't blame her for turning to drugs under those circumstances - and if she had been white, there is no way it would ever have gotten to court because she would have been whisked off to a sanitarium by her record company. Billie had no record company and even if she'd had the money to be able to check herself in, they certainly wouldn't have allowed a black lady in. A sad story, a beautiful voice.
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