"One for My Baby and One More for the Road": Queer Affect and Billie Holiday

This essay considers Billie Holiday's performance of One for My Baby, as an affective lamentation that both moves and creates movementinto another kind of relation, another kind of loving, another kind of bodily intensity. When Billie sings to the bartender, a proxy for an absent other and lost love, I'm kind of a poet/And I got a lot of things to say/And when I'm gloomy, you simply gotta listen to me/Till it's all talked away . . . So make it one for my baby and one more for the road/That long, long road, we experience self-storytelling that creates a relation marked by an a sense of vitality, dependent on mutual vulnerability, and animated within a field of power. Holiday's One for My Baby becomes an occasion for performing queer affective intensitya corporeal and emotional embodiment that leaves us feeling alive, open, and possible.