Lady Sings the Blues

Lady Sings the Blues was her sixth studio album and her last for Clef Records, which Verve absorbed the following year. It was released with her autobiography of the same name and drew on sessions taped between 1954 and 1956. Paul Quinichette on tenor saxophone, Charlie Shavers on trumpet, Wynton Kelly on piano and Kenny Burrell on guitar backed her. Tracks one to eight come from sessions on 6 and 7 June 1956 at Fine Sound Studios in New York, and other material came from a Capitol Studios session on 3 September 1954.

The record had four new songs, "Lady Sings the Blues", "Too Marvelous for Words", "Willow Weep for Me" and "I Thought About You", and eight new recordings of her best-known songs, among them "Trav'lin' Light", "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child". Billboard reviewed it on 22 December 1956 and wrote that she was in good voice and that her following would appreciate the new readings. DownBeat gave it five stars out of five.