haesco
brilliant
Oh every time it rains, it rains
Pennies from heaven.
Frank Sinatra recorded this song. So did Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong. So did bluesman Big Joe Turner out of Kansas City, and the white power skinhead group Skrewdriver—which shows how music can link even the most disparate people together. But if you really want to hear this song, if you really want to believe in pennies from heaven, you have to listen to Lady Day…you have to listen to Billie Holiday with her sexy fragile saxophone voice, because that woman had a life that reached all the way from pennies to heaven and back again.
Don’t you know each cloud contains
Pennies from heaven.
You know she had a life, Lady Day. Nothing like the life this child will have. But every time Billie Holiday sang this song, there was something of this child in her. Something of every child in her, something that remained hopeful. Not optimistic, she wasn’t that naive, but hopeful. Hope is pennies that fall from heaven.
So you can look at this child—this hopeful happy optimistic fortunate white girl—and you can know Billie Holiday was singing for her as well. You can know that when she sang this song, Lady Day was for a moment a child in a swing on an unseasonably warm day swaying lazily, surrounded by pennies.
So when you hear it thunder, don’t run under a tree.
There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
