Billie Holiday Singing the Blues

Robinson's drawings of the jazz scene during the 1940s show him not as an illustrator but as a master draftsman. He made a study for this work, too, which captures the moment and preserved his memory of the scene so that he could later make a painting from it. He likely made the drawing on Fifty-Second Street in New York, possibly in the Downbeat or the Three Deuces, two popular nightclubs of the era.