Cobb digs deeper into haunted psyche of 'Lady'

"I come out booming and go out dying," veteran singer Joyce Cobb says of her role as Billie Holiday in the one-woman show "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill."

Popular singer Joyce Cobb is taking on the role of jazz legend Billie Holiday for Hattiloo Theatre's production of "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill."

It's the second time around in the role for the locally celebrated singer, who did the show back in 2004 on Theatre Memphis' Next Stage. Two years after that, she took on a similar staging of the life and music of blues singer Bessie Smith at the Next Stage.

For Cobb, these shows provided an education beyond the music. "On stage, it's more coloring inside the lines," she says, remembering the discipline involved.

"It helped that I was already a performer, so I wasn't petrified by the audience," Cobb says. "I'm used to the reactions and nonreactions, and I'm comfortable in my skin coming out on stage. But there were so many theatrical techniques that I didn't know."

Cobb has sung all over town, from Overton Square to Beale Street, with small jazz combos as well as symphony orchestras. "When you're up there singing, you can fall or burn a guitar or whatever you want and it's OK," she says. "But the stage is a wholly magnificent and different world. If I mess up a line, I can't stop and let the piano solo until I get it together. If you cut something, you have to keep going."

And singing as someone else requires finding that character. When she did the Bessie Smith production, she started to get unnerved in rehearsals and had to have a talk with veteran director Josie Helming.

Cobb said, "I never will forget when I went to her and said, 'I can't be Bessie -- her character's too raw, too much for me, and I'm not of that grain,' and Josie just calmly looked into my eyes and said, 'Just tell the story.' And from then on, everything made sense. I don't have to be like her, I'm just there to tell the story."

She is grateful for the lessons learned working with Helming on the Bessie Smith story, and with director J. Noble, who helmed the first "Lady Day." They helped her develop a comfort level with working with a script.

Now she can focus on characterization -- "get into her psyche a little more," she says -- and she's working with director Emma Crystal, a longtime director, choreographer and performer, in crafting the Hattiloo version of "Lady Day."

"Emma is a woman of color while J. Noble was a young white man, so the perspective is different," Cobb says. "Emma is allowing me to go to the forefront of the emotional experience of Billie's life, the experience of being black and second class and set aside and put down. And of course Billie had issues with drugs and alcohol, but it's not about blaming the 'isms' for her addictions. So being of color gives a totally different perspective to the character and the emotions that it stirs within. That would be the difference."

The play takes place at Emerson's, a little bar owned by Billie's best friend in Philadelphia. It's five months before her death, and at that point, she was haunted by the demons of drugs and alcohol. Because she was a felon who had been arrested on a drug charge, she was deprived of her cabaret card, and she couldn't make a living in New York City without it -- something that added to her downward spiral.

"She talks about her life in flashbacks," Cobb says. "She talks about her relationships with her mother and lovers and friends and drugs and death. In the performance, I come out booming and go out dying."

There are 13 songs in what is essentially a one-woman show with only a piano player and bassist sharing the stage. Among the tunes are the well-known "Strange Fruit," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "God Bless the Child."

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'Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill'

Thursday through Jan. 22 at Hattiloo Theatre, 656 Marshall. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays; matinee 2 p.m. Jan. 14. Tickets: $12-$22; call (901) 525-0009, or go to hattilootheatre.org.

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