Billie Holiday, also known as Lady Day, was an American jazz singer. With a career spanning nearly thirty years, she was one of the greatest singers from the 1930s to the '50s.
Background
Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. According to her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, she was three when her sixteen-year-old mother, Sadie Fagan, married her nineteen-year-old father, Clarence Holiday, a guitar player. A short time later he moved to New York City, obtained a divorce, and remarried after joining Fletcher Henderson's dance orchestra. Sadie Fagan, too, married again but was soon widowed and worked as a domestic to support her daughter. Higher wages in the North induced her to leave the child with a cousin.
Childhood proved a traumatic experience for Billie Holiday. She scrubbed doorsteps for nickels when she was six and later ran errands for a whorehouse, where she was able to listen to records by her idols, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Having accumulated a few hundred dollars, her mother returned to Baltimore to invest in a rooming house and resume care of her daughter. When the ten-year-old was raped by a transient boarder, her mother assigned custody of the child to a Catholic institution. In 1928 she regained jurisdiction after her daughter had completed the fifth grade. Hoping that conditions in the North would prove better, Sadie Fagan took her to New York City.
Education
Holiday frequently skipped school, and her truancy resulted in her being brought before the juvenile court on January 5, 1925, when she was only nine years old. She was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school. After nine months in care, she was "paroled" on October 3, 1925 to her mother. Reports also say that she dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel.
Career
When Holiday was fifteen she was charged with prostitution and sent for four months to Welfare Island. Upon her release, finding her mother ill, she began a desperate search for work. "I walked down 7th Ave. , from 139th to 133rd, visiting every after-hours spot, every restaurant and cafe, trying to find a job, " she recalled. "The boss at Gerry's Log Cabin said, 'Girl, can you sing?' 'Sure, I can sing, ' I said. For I'd been singing all my life, only enjoying it too much to suppose I'd ever make money at it. " Overnight she was transformed into what Frank Sinatra would later call "unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years. "
Holiday enchanted artists like alto saxophonist Benny Carter, vibraharpist Kenneth "Red" Norvo, and clarinetist Benny Goodman, who invited her to join a studio band recruited for a record session. Although she later deprecated her performance there, her renditions of "Riffin' the Scotch" and "Your Mother's Son-in-Law" conclusively established her as a great jazz singer. In 1933 John Hammond, subsequently a Columbia recording executive, instigated on her behalf a recording series for Brunswick, under pianist Teddy Wilson's name. But Holiday was not cut out for the exigencies of her profession.
Her candid life story reveals her extreme vulnerability. She experienced difficulty with bookings when agents decided that she was tempermental and obstructive. But successful records continued to enhance her reputation. A short engagement with Count Basie and his orchestra in 1937 was a memorable point in her career, providing a setting ideally suited to her talents. Besides the superb rhythm section, Basie's band included Buck Clayton on trumpet and, on tenor saxophone, the legendary Lester "Pres" Young, who dubbed her "Lady Day. "
Yet ultimately she proved unwilling or unable to submit to commerical disciplines, and the relationship was terminated. That she occasionally met with indifference from the general public was attributed by critic Henry Pleasants not to the fact that she did not sing popular material in a popular vein, but to the fact that she could not. "I have to change a tune to my own way of doing . .. like playing a horn, " she explained. Where Holiday could be likened to Bessie Smith, and what set her apart from her contemporaries, was her ability to improvise. Exciting variances in intonation, expressive of the indefinable in jazz, triumphed over her limited range; while tones of a singularly abrasive quality were contrasted with nuances of the utmost delicacy. But, again like Bessie Smith, superb rhythmic authority was her greatest asset.
As her popularity increased, she became an outstanding attraction in New York City, returning again and again in the 1930s to clubs like the Onyx, the Famous Door, and Café Society Downtown, and to their counterparts in other cities. In 1947 Hollywood offered her a role--as a maid--in the film New Orleans.
Holiday was married, but her husband later confessed after a time to opium addiction, and in May 1947 Holiday herself was arrested for possession and use of drugs. Notoriety from the arrest sparked a morbid interest in her career and brought her the widespread recognition that had formerly been denied her. Hopeful of a cure, she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year and a day in a federal reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia. "But there isn't a soul on earth, " she declared, "who can say their fight with dope is over until they are dead. "
Her release, after nine months, marked the occasion of a triumphal Carnegie Hall concert. "Billie's not a woman, she's a habit, " remarked one of her fans. But the conviction had deprived her of a cabaret performer's license, and she was forced to tour extensively.
Her mother's death in 1945 had affected her deeply. Lena Horne remembered that at this time "her animals were her only trusted friends. " She took comfort in the fidelity of her boxer and a tiny chihuahua that was her constant companion. In California she was again victimized by a scandal and a dubious narcotics charge but was later acquitted.
Performance levels in America fell as her health deteriorated. Nevertheless, she remained a big attraction in concert halls and theaters from coast to coast. Work eventually became an ordeal too exacting to be supported, and McKay left her. Weak and emaciated, she was scarcely able to mount the stage for her last engagement, at the Phoenix Theater in New York City, on May 25, 1959. Three days later, suffering from cardiac and kidney arrest, she lapsed into a coma. She died in New York City. More than 3, 000 people attended her funeral.
Achievements
Holiday remains one of the most famous female jazz singers of the 20th century who released 38 charting singles during her career. The dramatic intensity of hers could make the most banal lyric profound. Among the songs identified with her are “Strange Fruit, ” “Fine and Mellow, ” “The Man I Love, ” “Billie’s Blues, ” “God Bless the Child, ” and “I Wished on the Moon. ” The vintage years of Holiday’s professional and private liaison with Young were marked by some of the best recordings of the interplay between a vocal line and an instrumental obbligato. The bittersweet legend that she bequeathed inspired a film, compounded of half-truths, entitled Lady Sings the Blues (1972).
Over the years, there have been many tributes to Holiday, including "The Day Lady Died", a 1959 poem by Frank O'Hara, and Langston Hughes' poem "Song for Billie Holiday". She received several Esquire Magazine awards during her lifetime. Her posthumous awards also include being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame. In 1987 Holiday was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The Apollo Theater acknowledged Holiday by inducting her into its Walk of Fame on April 6, 2015.
A statue of Holiday was erected in Baltimore at the corner of Lafayette and Pennsylvania Avenues. Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid also created the tall bronze statue of Holiday.
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Religion
On March 19, 1925, Holiday was baptized at the House of the Good Shepherd.
Views
Quotations:
"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all. "
"Singing songs like The Man I Love or Porgy is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. "
"People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it. "
"I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know. "
"Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on. "
Personality
Holiday was known to be quick-tempered, proud, and bitter about racial discrimination. Her relationships were often abusive and her songs reflected the turbulence in her life.
She changed her name to Billie Holiday as an appreciation to film star Billie Dove.
Holiday wore white gardenias in her hair, which would become her trademark. Another trademark of hers was singing with her head tilted back.
It is also known that Holiday never learned how to read music and lacked technical voice training.
Much of her earnings went to her drug addictions.
Quotes from others about the person
"She was the first girl singer I'd come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius. " - John Hammond
"She was hard-nosed, there's no doubt about it. She didn't care who she fought with or how it affected her career. " - music historian Michael Brooks
Connections
Holiday never had children, and her choice of male companions was poor; when she married James N. Monroe, in Elkland, Maryland, on August 25, 1941, her mother was distressed. By 1949 her marriage to Monroe had been dissolved. The outlook brightened in the early 1950s, when she fell in love with Louis McKay. Their marriage was not formalized until 1956, but McKay accompanied her on a long-delayed tour of Europe.
