Billie Holiday was confined to a Roman Catholic convent.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1936
A studio promotional photo of blues singer Billie Holiday.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1940
Billie Holiday, with jazz tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and pianist, singer, and songwriter Antoine Dominique 'Fats' Domino Jr, standing, second from right.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1946
New York City, New York, United States
Holiday and her dog Mister.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1946
Los Angeles, California, united States
Jazz singer Billie Holiday chats with attorney Walter L. Gordon Jr.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1947
New York City, New York, United States
Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister, Downbeat.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1947
New York, United States
Holiday at the Downbeat Jazz Club.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1947
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Jazz singer Billie Holiday (R) is read the charge for heroin possession at the U.S. Commissioners Office, seated next to her are her pianist Bobby Tucker (C) and road manager James Asendio (R).
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1949
Holiday in court over a contract dispute.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1956
Billie Holiday with husband, Louis McKay.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1957
Newport, Rhode Island, United States
Jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday performs at the Newport Jazz.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1957
New York City, New York, United States
Singer Billie Holliday (left), with musicians Lester Young (rear left), Coleman Hawkins and Gerry Mulligan, performs on the CBS television program "THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS" segment titled: "The Sound of Jazz".
Gallery of Billie Holliday
1970
Billie Holiday
Gallery of Billie Holliday
New York City, New York, United States
Billie Holiday at the Downbeat club, a jazz club.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Washington, D.C., United States
Holiday at the Club Bali, with Al Dunn (drums), and Bobby Tucker (piano).
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Billie Holiday pays close attention to Louis Armstrong. They are both appearing in the film, 'New Orleans' directed by Arthur Lubin.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
American jazz singer Billie Holiday in the spotlight during a performance.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Singer Billie Holiday
Gallery of Billie Holliday
American jazz singer Billie Holiday singing into a microphone at a Decca recording session.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
The jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday also known as Lady Day.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Closeup of Billie Holiday singing Fine & Mellow accompanied by James P. Johnson at the piano and other musicians during a jam session in the studio of LIFE photographer Gjon Mili.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Billie Holiday
Gallery of Billie Holliday
American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, American jazz singer and composer Billie Holiday, and American jazz critic Leonard Feather review a piece of music.
Gallery of Billie Holliday
Manhattan, New York City 10036, New York, United States
Wax replicas of jazz greats Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington are on display at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum on Times Square.
Billie Holiday, with jazz tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and pianist, singer, and songwriter Antoine Dominique 'Fats' Domino Jr, standing, second from right.
Jazz singer Billie Holiday (R) is read the charge for heroin possession at the U.S. Commissioners Office, seated next to her are her pianist Bobby Tucker (C) and road manager James Asendio (R).
Singer Billie Holliday (left), with musicians Lester Young (rear left), Coleman Hawkins and Gerry Mulligan, performs on the CBS television program "THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS" segment titled: "The Sound of Jazz".
Closeup of Billie Holiday singing Fine & Mellow accompanied by James P. Johnson at the piano and other musicians during a jam session in the studio of LIFE photographer Gjon Mili.
American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, American jazz singer and composer Billie Holiday, and American jazz critic Leonard Feather review a piece of music.
(Lady Sings the Blues is an autobiography by jazz singer B...)
Lady Sings the Blues is an autobiography by jazz singer Billie Holiday, which was co-authored by William Dufty. The book formed the basis of the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues starring Diana Ross.
(Jones leaves home to work in the trains as a porter and s...)
Jones leaves home to work in the trains as a porter and steals a friend's girlfriend. He is a gambler and a liar and stabs his friend over a pair of loaded dice.
(Cohen Film Collection introduces this classic short stari...)
Cohen Film Collection introduces this classic short staring Duke Ellington, featuing a brief vocal by a 19-year-old Billie Holiday, and a performance of Ellington's jazz composition along symphonic lines. Ellington plays his symphonic jazz piece, "A Rhapsody of Negro Life, " with his orchestra against slice-of-life background scenes.
(New Orleans is a 1947 American musical romance film featu...)
New Orleans is a 1947 American musical romance film featuring Billie Holiday as a singing maid and Louis Armstrong as a bandleader; supporting players Holiday and Armstrong perform together and portray a couple becoming romantically involved.
Billie Holiday, birth name Elinore Harris, byname Lady Day, was an American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the ’50s. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
Background
Eleanora Fagan was born on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia. She was the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a professional musician who for a time played guitar with the Fletcher Henderson band. She and her mother used her maternal grandfather’s surname, Fagan, for a time; then in 1920 her mother married a man surnamed Gough, and both she and Eleanora adopted his name. It is probable that in neither case did her mother have Eleanora’s name legally changed. The singer later adopted her natural father’s last name and took the name Billie from a favourite movie actress, Billie Dove.
In 1928, she moved with her mother from Baltimore, Maryland (where she had spent her childhood), to New York City, and after three years of subsisting by various means, she found a job singing in a Harlem nightclub.
Education
Eleanora frequently skipped school, and her truancy resulted in her being brought before the juvenile court on January 5, 1925, when she was nine years old. She was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school, where she was baptized on March 19, 1925. After nine months in care, she was "paroled" on October 3, 1925, to her mother. By the age of 11, Holiday had dropped out of school.
Holiday had no formal musical training, but, with an instinctive sense of musical structure and with a wealth of experience gathered at the root level of jazz and blues, she developed a singing style that was deeply moving and individual.
In 1933 Holiday made her first recordings, with Benny Goodman and others. Two years later a series of recordings with Teddy Wilson and members of Count Basie’s band brought her wider recognition and launched her career as the leading jazz singer of her time. She toured with Basie and with Artie Shaw in 1937 and 1938 and in the latter year opened at the plush Café Society in New York City. About 1940 she began to perform exclusively in cabarets and in concert. Her recordings between 1936 and 1942 marked her peak years. During that period she was often associated with saxophonist Lester Young, who gave her the nickname “Lady Day.”
In 1947 Holiday was arrested for a narcotics violation and spent a year in a rehabilitation centre. No longer able to obtain a cabaret license to work in New York City, Holiday nonetheless packed New York’s Carnegie Hall 10 days after her release. She continued to perform in concert and in clubs outside of New York City, and she made several tours during her later years. Her constant struggle with heroin addiction ravaged her voice, although not her technique.
Holiday’s dramatic intensity rendered the most banal lyric profound. Among the songs identified with her were “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. In 1956 she wrote an autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (with William Dufty), that was made into a motion picture starring Diana Ross in 1972. Holiday’s health began to fail because of drug and alcohol abuse, and she died in 1959.
Holiday wanted to pay attention to the problem racial prejudice in America by singing her song "Strange Fruit".
Views
Quotations:
"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."
"Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."
"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."
"You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation."
"I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own."
"Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on."
"I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been."
"There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up."
"You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave."
"Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three."
Personality
Billie Holiday had a golden-brown, almost Polynesian skin, a ripe figure and a single gardenia in her hair. She had a way of owning the room, but she was not flashy. Her voice was plump and pleasure-seeking, prodding and caressing a song until it yields more delights than its author had intended, bringing a spark of vivacity and a measure of cool to even the hokier material.
The trademark gardenias came about by accident. One evening, as Holiday prepared to go onstage, she accidentally burnt her hair with curling tongs. A fellow performer gave her a garland of gardenias, which Holiday then pinned over the burn. She liked the look so much that she made a practice of performing with the white flowers in her hair.
Physical Characteristics:
Eye color: dark brown
Hair color: black
Height - 5 feet 5 inches tall
Weight: 76.2 kg.
Measurement: 38D-30-40 in inches
Quotes from others about the person
Frank Sinatra was influenced by her performances on 52nd Street as a young man. He told Ebony magazine in 1958 about her impact: "With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years."
Interests
Music & Bands
Louis Armstrong
Connections
On August 25, 1941, Billie married Jimmy Monroe, a trombonist but divorced him in 1947. She married Louis McKay on March 28, 1957, who was a Mafia enforcer but separated later. Though issueless, Bevan Dufty and singer Billie Lorraine Feather were her two godchildren.
Best Historical Album - 2002 - Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday
Best Historical Album - 1994 - The Complete Billie Holiday
Best Historical Album - 1992 - Billie Holiday - The Complete Decca Recordings
Best Historical Album - 1980 - Billie Holiday - Giants of Jazz
Best Historical Album - 2002 - Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday
Best Historical Album - 1994 - The Complete Billie Holiday
Best Historical Album - 1992 - Billie Holiday - The Complete Decca Recordings
Best Historical Album - 1980 - Billie Holiday - Giants of Jazz
1937 - "My Man" Jazz (single) - Brunswick (Columbia) - 2018
1956 - Lady Sings the Blues - Jazz (album) - Clef (Verve) - 2017
1949 - "Crazy He Calls Me" - Jazz (single) - Decca - 2010
1944 - "Embraceable You" - Jazz (single) - Commodore - 2005
1958 - Lady in Satin - Jazz (album) - Columbia - 2000
1945 - "Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)" - Jazz (single) - Decca - 1989
1939 - "Strange Fruit" - Jazz (single) - Commodore - 1978 - Listed also in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002
1941 - God Bless the Child" - Jazz (single) - Okeh (Columbia) - 1976
1937 - "My Man" Jazz (single) - Brunswick (Columbia) - 2018
1956 - Lady Sings the Blues - Jazz (album) - Clef (Verve) - 2017
1949 - "Crazy He Calls Me" - Jazz (single) - Decca - 2010
1944 - "Embraceable You" - Jazz (single) - Commodore - 2005
1958 - Lady in Satin - Jazz (album) - Columbia - 2000
1945 - "Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)" - Jazz (single) - Decca - 1989
1939 - "Strange Fruit" - Jazz (single) - Commodore - 1978 - Listed also in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002
1941 - God Bless the Child" - Jazz (single) - Okeh (Columbia) - 1976