Billie Holiday was one of the most important and admired singers in early jazz, a former prostitute who used her tragic personal life to give depth to some of the genre's most celebrated performances.
Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her birth certificate lists her father as Frank DeViese but her father is actually thought to have been the guitarist and banjo Clarence Holiday, who abandoned her mother, Sadie, when she was young and went on to play for the Fletcher Henderson orchestra. Sadie was only thirteen when Billie was born and she had an impoverished childhood. At the age of eleven she told her family that she had been raped. This resulted in her being sent to Catholic reform school the House of the Good Shepherd, where she was a virtual prisoner for two years. Upon her release she took refuge in a brothel and began working as a prostitute. Re-naming herself Billie after her favorite film star, Billie Dove, she found further work as a singer in after-hours jazz clubs where her remarkable voice attracted a crowd of admirers. It was in 1933, in Monette's in New York City, that she was spotted by talent scout John Hammond.
With Hammond's help, Holiday began to get proper paying gigs in clubs, rather than just working for tips. She also began recording music with Benny Goodman and within two years she had enjoyed four hits. She became friends with the saxophonist Lester Young, who gave her the enduring nickname Lady Day, and then with the pianist Teddy Wilson, who worked with her after she got her own recording contract. Though the music industry at the time was racially segregated and she was not allowed the "best" songs, she became one of the most celebrated and influential artists in jazz. In 1937 she joined Count Basie and Artie Shaw and became one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra, changing the face of modern music, but soon she became frustrated with the limitations of working with an orchestra and began to concentrate on solo performances. This included writing her own material and recording a highly controversial adaptation of the Abel Meeropol poem Strange Fruit, which dealt with the lynching of a black man, an incident which reminded her of her father's death. Despite the reluctance of her record company to release it, it was ultimately this song which cemented her popularity.
Despite her success, however, Holiday never really escaped from her roots. She drank heavily and with the money from her records, gradually descended into opium addiction. A string of messy relationships with abusive men included brief marriages to the trombonist Jimmy Monroe and Mafia man Louis McKay as well as a live-in relationship with trumpeter Joe Guy. All three men tried unsuccessfully to get her off drugs, yet even the eight months she spent in prison didn't help with this. She had an affair with Orson Welles and briefly flirted with a career in Hollywood, yet in her one film New Orleans, starring Arturo de Córdova and Dorothy Patrick, she was cast as a maid, which she bitterly resented.
As Holiday's health declined, so did her voice, yet this gave it a rugged quality which complemented much of her later work. She worked with acclaimed artists such as Charlie Shavers, Buddy DeFranco, Ben Webster and Gerry Mulligan but increasingly she struggled to make it through a whole set. In May of 1959 she was taken into hospital suffering from liver and heart disease. She died of cirrhosis of the liver on July 17 of that year, aged just forty-four, with only seventy cents in the bank.
Holiday's records continue to be best sellers and her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, was adapted into a hit film starring Diana Ross. She has been the subject of numerous tributes and has even appeared on a postage stamp. She is buried in St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.
YUDDY
