Billie Holiday began having great successes with slow, melancholy songs that told the age aold conflicts of unrequited love. This began showing up more and more on her recordings after 1942 which coincided with her descent into the whirlpool known as drug and alcohol addiction. She was arrested in 1947 for drug possession, having her NYC cabaret card revoked and being banned from performing in any venues in the Big Apple. When she needed the money desperately and, particularly, Norman Granz needed her for his Jazz At The Philharmonic, she couldn't be available for legal reasons. It was also during the 1940's that her addiction to men who abused her terribly began to manifest itself. Her health suffered and what was once a colorful instrument became coarsened due to age and her many addictions.

Yet there was enough left of her voice to give remarkably moving statements of popular songs. The more tortured the lyrics, the deeper their meaning became under Holiday's still great sense of dramatic intensity. Nowhere is this better served than in the wistful "God Bless the Child."