1992 · Album
Abbey Sings Billie, Volume 2
Recorded 2000 · Verve · Produced by Jean-Philippe Allard
Abbey Channels Billie, Her Own Way
Lincoln doesn't imitate Holiday — she inhabits the same emotional territory and makes it her own.
There's a real risk with tribute albums: the artist either disappears inside the imitation or keeps so much distance that you wonder why they bothered. Abbey Lincoln sidesteps both traps on Abbey Sings Billie, Volume 2 (2000). She knows Billie Holiday's catalog cold, and she's not here to recreate it. She's here to sing it the way only she can — with that slightly weathered, direct, completely unadorned delivery that she spent decades developing. Lincoln was already in her late sixties by the time this record came out, and that life experience is audible in every track. She's not performing sadness. She just knows what these songs are about.
The arrangements are spare, which is exactly the right call. Lincoln's voice works best when it has room, and the backing here gives her that space without leaving her stranded. Songs like 'Good Morning Heartache' and 'Don't Explain' — both so closely associated with Holiday that covering them is almost an act of nerve — come across as genuine rather than reverential. Lincoln sings them like she's telling you something true, not like she's paying respects at a museum.
What makes this volume worth seeking out specifically is that Lincoln had already made her name as a civil rights activist and an original songwriter, someone who had no particular need to revisit the Holiday songbook. That she chose to anyway, this late in her career, says something about how seriously she took Holiday as a songwriter and interpreter rather than just a tragic figure. This isn't Lincoln at her most adventurous — her own compositions push harder — but it's Lincoln being genuinely respectful without being timid, which is harder than it sounds.
