One of Billie Holiday's first recordings of the 1940s -- a decade which would show her gaining her greatest popularity as well as the emergence of the personal problems that would lead to her early demise -- "Body and Soul" eerily foreshadowed both of these extremes. A lazy blues backbeat and melody surrounds the song, which finds Holiday singing the lyrics with a sense of isolation and melancholy that has a haunting quality to it. Her devotion to her man despite his absence is a lyrical basis that was certainly utilized many times before and since, but there is something unique here, and Holiday's performance underlines this. When she sings the lines speculating about a grey and cold future on the horizon, it is positively chilling. Adding to the darkness is Roy Eldridge's trumpet solo, which underlines the disconsolate feeling in the song and Holiday's reading. Available on Columbia/Legacy's two-CD set "Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday", as well as the momentous ten-CD box "Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday" on Columbia.
(Matthew Greenwald, www.allmusic.com)