The story of how Billie Holiday's "Violets For My Furs" became my favorite love song

So, here is the story of how Billie Holiday's "Violets For My Furs" became my favorite love song. (This is another post that I actually wrote a while back, but I share it with my students perhaps partly to prove that I really am a writer.)
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In the category "I Freakin’ Love This Song": Violets For My Furs, by Billie Holiday

By Gale Cady Williams

Published in Spinner online music magazine, October 2010

Maybe it’s that I love violets. Maybe it’s the imagery of spring’s sweet violets juxtaposed against snow. Maybe it’s that this song was on the first mix tape that my then-future husband made for me soon after we met, with Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin on one side and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on the other. (How could I help but marry a man who would give me that?) Then again, maybe it’s the crackling heartbreak in Billie Holiday’s voice that hooked me from the first time I heard the song, “Violets For My Furs.” 

On the 1958 Columbia album Lady in Satin, recorded not long before her death in July 1959, Billie’s voice was not what most critics regard as her best. Many purists dislike the album for the lush Ray Ellis orchestral backing, as opposed to the pared-down early jazz trio recordings of the 1930s and ‘40s. And yes, on this album, Billie's voice at age 43 carries the full testimony of years of drug abuse, hardship, and heartbreak twice her age in grief ­‑‑ and on no song more than Violets. Her once-lovely voice cracks at the highs and lows, but this only serves to underline the song’s powerful emotional impact and the Yeats’-like vivid imagery of the song, giving a crackled patina to the song's testimony to a longer life’s worth of heartache and the singer’s poignant joy at receiving rare spring wildflowers in December:

“You bought me violets for my furs, and there was April in that December. The snow drifted on the flowers and melted where it lay. You pinned the violets to my furs, and gave a lift to the crowds passing by. You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs: That we fell in love completely the day that you bought me violets for my furs.”