Growing Up Andra Day
On screen, the rising hitmaker introduced Billie Holiday to a whole new generation of fans. But the Golden Globe winner has other stories to tell. Here, revisit Day's L'OFFICIEL Art Spring 2021 cover story in honor of the star's birthday today.
Photography Alexi Lubomirski
Styled by Laura Ferrara
Andra Day is not Billie Holiday, except when she wants to be. And lately, she’s wanted to be. Her leading role in Lee Daniels’ film The United States vs. Billie Holiday has kept her channeling the jazz singer all the way through awards season. Her song “Tigress & Tweed” was inspired by Holiday’s favorite perfumes. Her stage name is even borrowed from Holiday’s own nickname, Lady Day. She can sing like Holiday, bling like Holiday, and mouth off like her, too. And when she walks, as it were, in Holiday’s shoes, she makes Billie’s end seem a lot less blue.
Yet most of the time, Day is someone else. She’s a 36-year-old woman who answers to a different name and to a bracingly frank and loving family that is now peppered up and down the West Coast. Cassandra Monique Batie, as her father named her, is a green-eyed daughter of Southern California; a middle child who grew up quick-with-the-comebacks in southeast San Diego, where most of the city’s Black population lives. The Batie (pronounced BAY-tee) family, and others south of Interstate 8, moved there to work in or alongside the Navy’s massive Pacific Fleet. They are Navy people, as her Master Chief dad was, or Marines. And yet, their corner of San Diego is the farthest from the ocean and the closest to Tijuana, Mexico, which may be why she speaks good Spanish, memorizes taco menus, and recently appeared on the San Diego rapper Ryan Anthony’s album Barely See the Beach 3.
“What is Grace and Frankie?” asks Day, when she hears the name of the popular Netflix show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin that takes place at a San Diego beach house, just north of where she grew up. She says some of the whiter and tonier parts of the city can feel remote and sometimes unwelcoming to kids from Paradise Hills. “I need to check that out.”
Day’s neighbors in San Diego, and farther south in Chula Vista, frequently turn southward for their aesthetic inspiration, toward cultures and tastes that resonate more deeply with the area’s robust Mexican and Mexican-American population. It’s no wonder that in 2015, Day arrived at her NPR Tiny Desk concert in Washington, D.C. looking like Rosie the Riveter done up as a barrio goddess. Bobby pins kept a yellow scarf wrapped around her bouffant, with the bow tied pleasingly up front, and a bright green hair clip held her coppery bangs in place. She wore giant, gold hoop earrings, lots of bangles and ring, after ring, after ring—as well as a leopard print scarf, a white sweater, and a patterned palazzo pantsuit that conjured images of piña coladas and tropical breezes.
Danny Barker, the New Orleans-born National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, used to say that an audience listens first with its eyes. So the people on that day heard longer-than Barbra Streisand-polished nails, Eartha Kitt-ish eyeliner, and Sade-painted lips. In other words, they saw exactly what Day wanted them to see: a bona fide around-the-way-girl made good. “I do it for the hood girls,” she explains. “And it’s not just where I’m from. It’s a thing. It’s girl shit, as in, ‘All right, I might not have the money, I might be struggling with this, I might be emotionally dealing, but I’m about to make sure these edges are laid, and that this ponytail is straight, and these earrings are on, this makeup is bold, these lashes are long, the heels are popping—this outfit is fresh.’ Because it makes us feel good. Sometimes [that] can give you that little extra jolt of confidence.”
Day’s natural sound is dynamic and raspy, part torch singer, part anthem-belter, part come-from-behind-the-beat jazz vocalist. “There are a lot of parallels to Holiday in the amber quality of her tone,” says Howard Reich, the longtime jazz writer for the Chicago Tribune. He calls Day’s vocal flights “meaningful.” That she can slip into Holiday’s voice so easily may obscure the fact that she’s conversant in the other heavenly sisters of jazz, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and Nina Simone—20th century women whose work any serious student of American music will encounter.
I was always trying to get away with everything…I had this period in my life when I would steal my mother’s car and joyride around. —Andra Day
“In church they say, ‘Study, to show thyself approved,’” explains the singer Quiana Lynell, who won the 2017 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. “In jazz, you have to show that you’ve done that work to get the vetting of everyone—the bookers, the agents, and the other musicians who would consider working with you. Instrumentalists can explore and explore. For vocalists, it’s harder.” That’s because, at some point, Fitzgerald, Washington, Vaughan, and the others need to be quiet. The most important hurdle for any singer, in fact, is to find a sound that’s unique. In her realm of jazz, R&B, pop, and hip hop, Andra Day must sound like Andra Day, or, more precisely, like Cassandra Batie.
Musical talent probably runs in the Batie family, but that’s a hard fact to verify outside of the First United Methodist Church in Chula Vista. That’s where the family worshipped and where Day’s mother, Delia—a.k.a. Missy—worked for many years as a janitor, then facilities manager. “My mom actually has a beautiful voice, but you’ll never hear it because she’s too shy,” says Day, adding that her father, Joseph, sings compellingly as well. Her parents separated when she was 17 and later divorced. Day’s youngest brother, Jaxon, left early from the same performing arts high school that Day attended, but remains a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “He’s always worried about not being good enough,” she says, recognizing the same doubts that dogged her own career. “Put that Jaxon will be releasing his debut album next year,” she says, referring to this interview. “So I can put the pressure on his ass!”
It bears repeating that Day is mouthy. And the more she talks about family, the funnier she gets. She calls her older sister, Nadea Guillory, a “gangster” in high school: fierce, loyal, and willing to throw a punch. Jaxon was the tattletale. Joshua, another younger brother who now restores antique furniture, seemed like the good child growing up, but maybe he was just more discreet. Her mother, now retired, writes children’s books under the name D. A. Batie. “She actually just did one,” says Day. “It’s called I Hear the Wind Blow and Wonder. It’s really cool to see the tenderness of the children in them. Growing up I ain’t hear no shit like this!”
So what did the young Cassandra hear at home? “My whole family calls me Sange, Sange-y,” she explains, noting that her childhood nicknames were Bees and Beetlejuice. And why was that? “Because they were a bunch of assholes!” she says, her voice rising. “Who in the hell nicknames their daughter Beetlejuice unless you want them to hate themselves?” When asked the first word that comes to mind when she thinks of her family, “love” is what Day says—“Just love.” Her second? “Assholes!” she answers, with perfect comedic timing. There’s something in the way Day talks about herself and the people she’s closest to that makes her not just funny, but fun. She’s chatty and friendly, like the girl under the dryer in the hair salon who keeps the whole place laughing.
Day’s plain-spokenness makes her appear transparent— people in the entertainment business say “honest”—and her emotional accessibility translates easily from the bandstand to the screen. It’s a kind of X-factor that wildly different performers have had, people like Doris Day, Abbey Lincoln, and even Lucille Ball, whose fashion sense Day emulates. These are women who might wear evening gowns and talk about roller skates. Or pickles. Or grand theft auto. “I was always trying to get away with everything,” says Day, recalling her teenage years. “I had this period in my life when I would steal my mother’s car and joyride around. It was a burgundy Toyota Camry. I remember one time I didn’t drive far enough when I stole it. I just went to the neighbor’s house around the corner.” It’s easy to guess what happened when Day saw her mother next. The Baties rarely spared the rod, or the child. “I thought about running away,” she says. “But I just couldn’t see it.”
Flash forward 20 years and Day’s mother now lives with her in the San Fernando Valley, three, maybe four hours north of San Diego, depending on traffic. Day has been in the Los Angeles area for nearly a decade. That’s not only where her career lit up, but also where she says she “got clean” from behaviors that dominated most of her 20s. “My first album [Cheers to the Fall] was really about this,” she says. “I just didn’t have a very healthy sexual appetite. I won’t sugarcoat it. It felt like an addiction at the time…I was in really messed up relationships to break other people’s hearts.” She’s since gone public about abstaining from sex the past seven years, a commitment reinforced by her Christian faith. In an industry that thrives on sexual magnetism, celibacy may be Day’s boldest move yet, and she appears to be in no rush to change. “I would like to wait until I’m married,” says Day. “And if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t ruin my life. I have a lot of love, and love comes from a lot of different places.”
“It ain’t the diamond district, it’s the Southeast,” Day raps in Ryan Anthony’s video for “Southeast Summers.” In all that California sunshine, she looks like she’s having a ball: “Ain’t no other place I’d rather be/When it’s summertime in Southeast...” Day says she may return to San Diego in future. After more than 15 years in show business, maybe the world won’t mind if she goes home for a while. There’s a niece and nephew she’d like to see grow up. And as for her career, she says, “You can actually kind of do this from wherever.”
Even if she does go home, chances are that the next generation of Baties will seem as unaffected by her fame as the rest. “In some ways, it hasn’t touched them at all,” says Day. “I’m like, ‘I got nominated for a Golden Globe, and nominated for an Oscar!’ And they’re like, ‘What the hell! You’re late picking up the Chinese food! Oh yeah, and by the way, Congrats.’ They’re a very grounding presence for me. I don’t feel like anything has changed in our relationships.”
Then again, Day may not be the only creative in her clan. Regardless of what her family says, something is galvanizing them to try new things. In the years since that Tiny Desk concert in 2015, Day’s mother committed to her writing career, her father started a backyard grill-building business in Las Vegas, and her older sister launched three businesses working with children in Seattle—achievements that may have been influenced by Day’s example. “I should ask them,” she says. “I never did because they’ll just be like, ‘Nah.’ It’s a Southeast San Diego thing. [They’re] just not impressed.”
And yet, when Day won her Golden Globe in February for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, she was sitting between two divorced parents who held her hands and teared up when the announcement was made. “They’ve seen me working at this for so long and seen me go through changes and come to a point of peace,” she says. “And, ultimately, I think that’s what they want for me. So, regardless of what I’m doing, if I have peace, that means the world to them.”
The thing about families is that they’re not like the movies. Their scripts are often extemporaneous, if not completely improvised. But there is a truth somewhere in what gets said, or unsaid, and in what gets done or undone. For Day, family gives her a feeling of being “blessed.” That’s what makes it okay to be Cassandra right now. Or Sange. But never Beetlejuice. Never again.
HAIR Tony Medina
MAKEUP Porsche Cooper using LA MER
NAILS Jolene
PRODUCER Dana Brockman
DIGITAL TECH Diego Bendezu
PROPS STYLIST Jack Flanagan
PHOTO ASSISTANTS Gregory Brouillette, Justin Loy, and Ricky Steel
STYLIST ASSISTANTS Jade Study and Amer Macarambon
SPECIAL THANKS Villa Carlotta
