Nationality: American
Occupation: Jazz vocalist
Billie Holiday (1915-1959) was a jazz vocalist with perhaps the most emotional depth of any singer in jazz history.
Billie Holiday's life was tragic. Born into out-of-wedlock poverty, she became the most influential female jazz vocalist of her time, but, she battled--with drug addiction, with narcotics agents' harassment, with racism, with self-serving lovers, and with people that would hang around with her just to get what she had. Many serious listeners consider her the greatest jazz vocalist ever.
She was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. (The name "Billie" she later borrowed from one of her favorite movie actresses, Billie Dove.) At the time of Billie's birth, her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 years old, and her father, Clarence Holiday (later a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson's band), was 15; they married each other three years later. As a child Billie ran errands for prostitutes in a nearby brothel (house of prostitution), and as a reward they allowed her to listen to their Louis Armstrong.
When she was thirteen, she went to New York City with her mother, who worked as a housemaid, but the 1929 depression soon left her mother unemployed. In 1932 Billie, who was 17 years old, tried out for a job as a nightclub dancer, and when she was rejected, she spontaneously auditioned for a singing job and was hired. For the next few years she sang in a succession of Harlem clubs. until her career received a boost from impresario John Hammond, who induced Benny Goodman to use her on a record in 1933. But it was through a series of superb recordings made between 1935 and 1939 that her international reputation was established; those performances are jazz classics not only for Billie's singing but also for the outstanding group and solo work of the accompanying all-star groups. During the late 1930s she was also a big band vocalist, first with Count Basie (1937) and then with Artie Shaw (1938).
Her relationship with Basie's star tenor saxophonist Lester Young is the stuff of legend: they worked well together and became great friends for life (Young had the same type of problems Holiday did). He named her "Lady Day," and that title became her jazz world nick-name from the mid-1930s on; she in turn labeled him "Pres" (the "President of Tenor Saxophonists"). Their musical interaction is one of the miracles of jazz. On many recordings the tenor saxophone and voice interweave so well that they sound as if they're poured from the same bottle. After the late 1930s they rarely recorded together, but to the end remained soulmates. (They died the same year.) Billie's career reached its height in the very late 1930s. In 1938 she worked a long engagement at Cafe Society; the following year she joined Benny Goodman on a radio broadcast; she was regularly working the big New York theaters and the famous 52nd Street clubs. Two songs of the period are noteworthy: the first, "Strange Fruit," with a haunting lyric by Lewis Allan to which Billie contributed the music, is a depiction of a lynching; her record company, Columbia, considered it too inflammatory and refused to issue it, but it was finally released by a small record company (Commodore) in 1939 and, ironically, became a big money-maker because of the tune on the record's other side, "Fine and Mellow," a blues written by Billie. Another tune always associated with her was "Gloomy Sunday," which was expressive of such deep despair that it was for a time barred from the airwaves (it hinted at suicide).
By the mid-1940s Billie had been arrested many times for narcotics violations, and after one arrest in 1947, at her own request, was placed for a year and a day in a federal rehabilitation center at Alderson, West Virginia. Just ten days after being released she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall, but then was barred by New York City police licensing laws from working in any place that served liquor, which meant that she could never again appear in a New York nightclub.
Neither of her husbands--trumpeter Joe Guy (whom she divorced in the 1940s) nor Louis McKay (who survived her)--seemed able or inclined to save Billie from herself. By the 1950s alcohol and marijuana had taken a toll; her voice grew unnaturally deep and grainy and occasionally cracked during performance. Nevertheless, her singing was sustained by her highly individual style, the intimacy she projected, and her special way with a lyric. In 1954 she toured Europe and was very popular there, and in 1958 she made a memorable appearance in the television special "The Sound of Jazz," surrounded by an all-star ensemble which included the three top tenor saxophonists of the time, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and her beloved "Pres."
Billie made her final public appearance in a concert at the Phoenix Theatre, New York City, on May 25, 1959. She died in Metropolitan Hospital, New York City, on July 17, 1959, of "congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure"; she had at the time of her death been under arrest in her hospital bed for more than a month for illegal possession of drugs.
An elegiac poem written by Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" (1964), ends " ... she whispered a song along the keyboard ... and everyone and I stopped breathing"--lines that are evocative of the pindrop silence this extraordinary singer was able to command. Tall, sensually exotic, with a swatch of gardenias in her hair, she sang with her head tilted jauntily back and her fingers snapping to the beat; audiences unfailingly responded with hushed reverence.
Her early small-group recordings have been reissued in several boxed sets under the general title of "Billie Holiday: The Golden Years"; her best later work is to be found in "The First Verve Sessions" recorded in 1952 and 1954 with a Jazz at the Philharmonic group of all-stars that included trumpeter Charlie Shavers, tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips, pianist Oscar Peterson, and guitarist Barney Kessel.
On March 6, 2000, Holiday was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influences category. That category includes artists whose music predates rock and roll, but who inspired and had a profound effect on rock and roll music.
Answer the following:
Name three things Holiday struggled with in her personal life.
Which artist did Holiday get to listen to as a reward for running errands?
What saxophonist was Holiday's friend, what did she call him?
What was Holiday's nickname?