“One for My Baby and One More for the Road”

It happens in an instant, a gentle touch, a brief episode.

We are seated at a table, surrounded by people, conversation buzzing all around us. My hand rests on the sticky surface, fingers spread, open. Your fingers find mine, your touch the shock of the whole affective world shifting (Massumi, 2002).

There’s no one in this place—no one except you. And me. And we are present, touching—there-then and here-now—witness to worlds colliding in a common body-melody, throwing us together in a “sensory refrain” (Stewart, n.d., p. 8).

Body registers the intensity of a sensation—the affect, not the feeling—that the tongue cannot name, that the mind does not recognize (Massumi, 2002). Touch promises movement—something expectant and vibrant that jolts us out of the stillness and quiet of our own subjectivity before we can open our mouths to speak (Hemmings, 2005), except perhaps, in sound, in song—that contact zone between body, rhythm, and affect. Voice faster than language, skin faster than word.

*

It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me

So set ‘em up Joe, I’ve got a little story you oughta know. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

“One for My Baby and One More for the Road” was written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer for the 1943 movie musical The Sky’s the Limit and was performed in the film by Fred Astaire. Countless performers have recorded the song: Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Sammy Davis Jr., Marvin Gaye, and Bette Midler (“One for My Baby,” n.d.).

Billie Holiday.

Though “One for My Baby” is most often—most affectively—associated with Old Blue Eyes.

Frank. Sinatra.

Cigarette, glass of scotch, single spot, fedora blocking the glare. Nothing but a voice and a piano. Those eyes and that song. And the story? The story goes something like this:

Sinatra recorded “One for My Baby” while nursing the heartache of his on-again, off-again relationship with Ava Gardner (Astaire, 1943), a “sexual volcano” who shared Sinatra’s appetites, desires, and perversities (Kaplan, 2010).

*

We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode

Make it one for my baby and one more for the road. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

Though Gardner is absent from the story, baby; loving women is something to be talked away, a torch that must be drowned, a narrative device in a predestined plotline. Like the sorrow found in the bottom of a glass of scotch. The intimacy here is between Frank and Joe, the story an opening to an intensity. A queer sort of intensity, if you ask me. Though perhaps we should ask Frank.

*

I got the routine, so drop another nickel in the machine

I’m feeling so bad, I wish you’d make the music dreamy and sad. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

The story of torch goes like this: A torch song is a narrative about unrequited love, formulaic plotline for idealizing and dramatizing white, middle-class, heterosexual heartbreak (Holman Jones, 2007). And as a “standard,” torch songs are so “familiar, so over-learned,” they offer listeners—offer us—the seemingly singular performance of an authentic and autobiographical “I” (Cook, 2001, para. 11).

So what about intensities? What about queerness? What about Frank?

There’s a story.

*

Could tell you a lot, but you’ve got to be true to your code

Just make it one for my baby and one more for the road (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

In Parables for the Virtual (2002), Brian Massumi writes about the disconnect between the predictability of a narrative form—like a torch song—and the suspenseful, disruptive intensities or affects they produce (pp. 26-29).

Between staying true to a code and having one too many.

Between the road and the vibrating, pulse of the heat rising up off of the bodies that travel along it.

He writes of the resonance and vibration of emotions that are “in excess of any narrative or functional line,” that “register an already felt state, for the skin is faster than the word” (pp. 26, 25).

*

You’d never know it but buddy I’m a kind of poet

And I’ve got a lot of things to say. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

And Massumi—perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not—tells the story of the relation of formulaic narratives and intensities by telling the story of the meaning of Frank. Sinatra.

Here’s how it goes:

Sinatra is too much: His eyes are too blue, his voice too mellifluous, his gestures too smooth (Massumi, 2002, p. 249). He connects the too-muchness of these qualities by “linking the movements of his body into a carnal melody,” by composing a performance in which his excess affords Sinatra “liberty of movement”: a degree of circulatory freedom in the world contracted into “that ineffable quality of blue” (p. 249).

Sinatra embodies that freedom, that excess, that too blue in an “incredibly personal way—‘my’ way” (p. 249). His too blue expresses the singularity of a life as the life—heterosexual romance and life-force as a collectively wanted, desired, and attainable (p. 249). Massumi says that Frank’s “way of connecting lyrical movements of language to bodily movement to contextual circulations was . . . so forceful that it became literally contagious. . . . Sinatra lyrically reinvented heterosexuality as a popular culture virus” (p. 250).

Massumi doesn’t see this kind of contagion as violent or damaging, no; he sees it as an elegant example of how the personal, the “singular” is presented and taken up as “the qualitatively transformative and collective movement it is: as affective rather than objectified” (p. 252). And there is a catchy rhythm and optimism to this reading, to the promise of movement between bodies and static states of being that tunes us in to processes of becoming and possibilities for change.

Though I wonder what happens if Massumi’s story of Frank—the story of our smooth mover of bodies and of collectives—doesn’t only reinvent heterosexuality as a popular culture virus (and thus in possession of the possibilities of alternative significations and embodiments) but also/instead gestures toward the fraught yet still potentially transformative movements of queer intensities. Queer affect. Transgressive movements made not without hesitation. Arrest. Constraint. I wonder if we can feel and hear and experience this happening when Billie, and not Frank sings “One More for My Baby”?

*

That moment—that jolt of voice faster than language, of skin faster than word—sets to music a body-melody we have not let ourselves name, hear, or sing. Not for a long, long time. That moment, that melody makes you ask whether the “more” you seek—more risk, more love, more pleasure, and, according to Massumi, “more belonging” (pp. 255-256)—is the story of being and wanting too much in a too-little world. That movement makes you wonder whether your body can bear the weight of this affectively social—and not singular, not autonomous—difference on the way to the more you seek (Hemmings, 2005, p. 562)

*

And when I’m gloomy, you simply got to listen to me

Until it’s talked away. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

Holiday’s rendition of “One for My Baby” and other torch songs tells different story about heartbreak and intensities and queerness. About being too much in a too-little world.

Like Frank, Billie is too much—just not too blue, too pleasing, or too smooth. No. Holiday is too fat, too rough, too political. She, too, links the movements of her voice and her body to a carnal melody, but those connections don’t extend to liberatory movement or circulatory freedom. No, no.

Holiday is the singer who goes through the back door while the white orchestra uses the front, whose choice to perform the searing critique of Strange Fruit is credited to everyone but her or cited as the beginning of her decline (Brooks, 1991; Clarke, 1994; Margolick, 2000). Or as Richard Brody (2015) puts it: Her “ideas, her career and her art” are inseparable from the “hardness, the ugliness, and the danger [racism—and sexism] imposes” (para. 14).

If you listen to the common refrain of the critique of Holiday’s voice (and career and body), her too much is embodied in an incredibly personal way. Hers is a singular insatiability, weakness, and failure—captured not in the lyrics of “My Way,” but, instead, of “My Man,” the quintessential torch song: “Oh my man I love him so. . . ./I don’t know why I should/He isn’t good/He isn’t true/He beats me too” (Williametz & Charles, 1996). A familiar tune.

Now, I have written, and others have written (Brody, 2015; Davis, 1998; Holman Jones, 2002, 2007, 2010; Szwed, 2015) that Holiday’s body-melody, her artistry, lies in her power to create a personal constellation of movements, the kind of which Massumi believes can be so forceful [they can] be collectively spread” (Massumi, 2002, p. 250). That Holiday’s performance bodies forth the resistive power of voicing and living and loving otherwise that communicates to the rest of us what else might be possible (Holman Jones, 2010, p. 285).

Though unlike Sinatra’s smooth surface, Holiday’s body-melody moves subtly, underneath the lyrics and behind the beat, singing how the song doesn’t—can’t—tell the whole story. A counter melody to Sinatra, Holiday’s performance doesn’t condense individual autonomy and conjoin a collective desire so much as signal a break, a rupture, in the oppressive pressure of white, middle-class heterosexual lifestyle and life-force (Davis, 1998, pp. 173-179; Holman Jones, 2010, p. 285). When Holiday sings a torch song, she “reinvents” her body as her own—a “body connected to other bodies by shared judgments of the social” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 565). Her critique is voiced not from outside but within social constraint and meaning.

Though there’s more. And this more is part of what signals the difference between Billie and Frank, between heterosexual contagion as affectively collective movement and queer intensities as the composition of affectively recognizable and resistive social worlds. Holiday’s buzzing body-word/body-world is felt and sensed in the disconnect between what happens—or what we think happens—on the stage of Holiday’s performances of “One for My Baby” and “My Man” and her queer offstage intensities, which are not referenced or spoken in performance. Not unless you ignore what is being narrated by white, middle-class heterosexual male managers, authors, and musicians and listen instead to what isn’t being said.

*

Well that’s how it goes and Joe I know you’re getting’ anxious to close

So thanks for the beer, I hope you didn’t mind my bending your ear. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

Where Holiday’s white male managers, producers, and biographers are relentless in their naming and discussion of Holiday’s queerness (Clarke, 1994, pp. 345-349; Griffin, 2001, p. 53; Nicholson, 1995, p. 174; see also Holman Jones 2007, 2010), Billie is subtle both in the music and in her public life; though her silence isn’t a denial of queerness or complicit with Sinatra’s endorsement of the “heterosexual lifestyle.” It is, instead, an ellipsis, an open mouth refusing to sing the homosexual/heterosexual binary, voicing an affective state that might mean and might be valued differently (Hemmings, 2005, p. 564).

Holiday has her way with “My Man” in the same way she fails to tell Joe the story—any story—about her brief episode in “One for My Baby.” She tells us we “just gotta listen to her until it’s talked away,” leaving us waiting. She pauses, waits a few beats, takes a breath.

She opens her mouth and sings: “Well that’s how it goes.”

And gives us . . . nothing.

Holiday’s failure to tell the story of her brief episode gestures toward all she couldn’t say subtly or outright in her music or her time. Brody (2015) reminds us that “The times were censorious,” and that Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues—and I would argue, her performances—offer us a “picture of a world in which speaking the truth could get you slaughtered or imprisoned” (para. 16). They certainly got her kicked out, passed over, and banned (Brody, 2015).

*

But this torch that I’ve found, it’s gotta be drowned

Or it’s gonna explode

Just make it one for my baby and one more for the road. (Arlen & Mercer, 1943/1971)

What if “My Baby,” what if “My Man,” is a woman—Tallulah Bankhead, with whom Holiday had an “intense, stormy relationship” not unlike Sinatra’s with Gardner (Brody, 2015, par. 10)? What if the body-melody of that performance—of this performance—connects the singularity of one woman’s queerness in meaning and in time to an affectively vital movement that can be “collectively spread” as a “recognizable and intelligible alternative to dominant signification” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 564; Massumi, 2002, p. 250)? Wouldn’t that be another story all together?

In her reading and critique of Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s articulation and use of affect theory, Clare Hemmings (2005) asks us to consider affective encounters and attachments “in the context of social narratives and power relations” and to account for how some bodies are freed up and transformed by affective intensities (and affect theory), while others are “captured and held” by those same intensities and theories (p. 564). She goes on to suggest that we hear affective intensities not as songs we repeat over and over—body-affect-emotion—but rather as an “ongoing, incrementally altering chain” of melodies—“body-affect-emotion-affect-body”—that double “back upon the body” and influence “the individual’s capacity to act in the world” (p. 564). If we listen to the ongoing, incrementally altering chain of Holiday’s body-melody-affect-emotion-affect-body-melody, we pick up strains of what a queer affective intensity might promise and mean in a too-little world. Another story all together.

*

Your fingers entangled in mine, heart racing, breath taken. In that moment, we discover one another, connect the singularity of our desires in relation to a world and the possibility of a shared life.

In that moment, too much opens out into a queer and affectively vital movement that composes a legible and recognizable and “rhythm of living” (Stewart, n.d., p. 1). Voice to language. Skin to word.

A torch ignited, not drowned.

A song that connects wanting more to the long, long road—a route embodied in the “quivering of experience” and “unsignified intensities”—that that stretches out before us (Stewart, n.d., p. 17). One more, once more. For my baby. For the road.