Holiday, Billie 1915-1959
Billie Holiday 1915-1959
Jazz singer
Artistry Prevailed Over Inferior Material
Billie Holiday is considered by many to be the greatest of all jazz singers. In a tragically abbreviated singing career that lasted less than three decades, her evocative phrasing and poignant delivery profoundly influenced vocalists who followed her. Although her warm, feathery voice inhabited a limited range, she used it like an accomplished jazz instrumentalist, stretching and condensing phrases in an ever-shifting dialogue with accompanying musicians. Famous for delivering lyrics a bit behind the beat, she alternately endowed them with sadness, sensuality, languor, and irony. Rarely singing blues, Holiday performed mostly popular material, communicating deep emotion by stripping down rather than dressing up words and lines. “If you find a tune that’s got something to do with you, you just feel it, and when you sing it, other people feel it, too,” Holiday once explained. According to the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, “She was the first and is perhaps still the greatest of jazz singers, if the essence of jazz singing is to make the familiar sound fresh, and to make any lyric come alive with personal meaning for the listener.”
Holiday’s life was a study in hardship. Her parents married when she was three, but her musician father was seldom present and the couple soon divorced. Receiving little schooling as a child, Holiday scrubbed floors and ran errands for a nearby brothel so she could listen to idols Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the Victrola in its parlor. Brutally raped at ten, she was sent to a reformatory for “seducing” her adult attacker; at fourteen she was jailed for prostitution. Determined to find work as a dancer or singer in Harlem, Holiday moved to New York City in 1928 and landed her first job at Jerry Preston’s Log Cabin, where her vocals moved customers to tears. Discovered in another Harlem club by jazz record producer John Hammond in 1932, she made her first recording a year later with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. She began to record regularly for Columbia, usually under the direction of Teddy Wilson, backed by small studio bands comprised of the day’s best jazz sidemen. These included saxophonist and soulmate Lester Young, whose style approximated Holiday’s own; it was he who gave the pretty, dignified young singer the nickname “Lady Day.”
Intended largely for a black jukebox audience, the Wilson discs—mostly silly and second-rate love songs that
At a Glance…
Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, MD; died of cardiac arrest July 1 7, 1959, in New York City; daughter of Clarence Holiday (a jazz guitarist) and Sadie Fagan (a domestic); married James Monroe (marriage ended); married Louis McKay (separated).
Jazz singer. Began career in Harlem clubs, 1930; made recording debut with Benny Goodman ensemble, 1933; performed and recorded with various jazz bands, including those of Teddy Wilson, 1935-39, Count Basie, 1937, and Artie Shaw, 1938; solo recording artist and performer in theaters and nightclubs, 1940s and 1950s. Appeared in short film Rhapsody in Black, 1935, and feature film New Orleans, 1946, and on television program Sound of Jazz, 1957.
Awards: Esquire silver award, 1945 and 1946, gold award, 1944 and 1947; Metronome poll winner, 1945-46.
white singers had declined to record—were quickly and cheaply made. But Holiday and company transformed them into jazz treasures, immediately appreciated by musicians, critics, and jazz afficionados, if not the public at large. These hundred-odd songs—delivered in a light, buoyant style—are today considered among Holiday’s most significant work. Forgoing club engagements in 1937 to tour with Count Basie’s orchestra, Holiday went on to become one of the first black vocalists to be featured with a white band when she fronted for Artie Shaw a year later. Life on the road proved bitter for the singer, though; racial segregation made simple things like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom logistically difficult. Fed up when she could not enter one hotel through the front door with the rest of the Shaw orchestra, Holiday abandoned touring, returning to New York clubs and cabarets as a solo artist.
With Columbia’s permission Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” a controversial song about southern lynchings, for Commodore in 1939. It became a favorite of the interracial crowd for whom she performed at the Cafe Society, a Greenwich Village haunt of intellectuals and the political left. Holiday began to attract a popular following and indulged her taste for slow, melancholy songs about love gone bad, which communicated the hunger and despair that were starting to pervade her own life. Introduced to opium and heroin in the early forties by first husband James Monroe, she began her lifelong struggle with narcotics and alcohol addiction—Monroe the first in a succession of men who would feed that addiction, squander her earnings, and physically abuse her. Jailed for a year on drug charges after a sensational trial in 1947, Holiday had her cabaret license revoked and was thus prohibited from performing in the clubs and nightspots that suited her best. Unable to stay drug-free as long as she remained involved with the music scene, she would face other arrests.
Artistry Prevailed Over Inferior Material
Holiday recorded for Decca from 1944 to 1950. Because the company sought to make her over into a popular singer, much of her material for that label was overarranged, dominated by strings, and largely ordinary. Still, Holiday’s artistry prevailed in songs like “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “Lover Man.” Recording for Verve from 1952 to 1957, the singer frequently returned to the small group format that best fit her glimmering voice, but by then her instrument had begun to falter from years of abuse. Her desire and range dwindling, her voice scratchy and tired, Holiday still retained her unique timing and phrasing and—when she wanted—her ability to move listeners. Recording many American standards for Verve by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart, her personal interpretations made them seem new again. While deemed too painful to listen to by some critics, Holiday’s later recordings are esteemed by others, who find the singer’s ability to communicate at its peak. In High Fidelity Steve Putterman, for instance, judged her Verve recordings “devastating,” because “tonal beauty and emotional expressiveness worked inversely for Holiday: The more her pipes gave out, the more penetrating and affecting her delivery became.”
Although industry insiders in the late 1950s—Frank Sinatra for one—acknowledged her as “unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years,” when the singer succumbed in 1959 to cirrhosis of the liver, kidney trouble, and cardiac arrest at the age of forty-four, her passing was noted by the general public as much for her lurid personal life as for her musical contributions. Time has since diminished the glare of Holiday’s frailties and her musical gifts shine brighter than ever. Describing Holiday in a Down Beat review of one Verve collection as “the woman who taught the world that the interaction and feeling of jazz musicians was the ultimate key to interpreting the great American song lyric,” Will Friedwald remarked: “I guess you can’t inject so much real passion into a song without scaring the pants off some people…. Billie Holiday on Verve, 1946-59 is essential music by the most haunting and hypnotic voice—indeed, sound—in all of recorded music.”
Selected writings
(With William Duffy) Lady Sings the Blues (autobiography), Doubleday, 1956.
Compostions
Wrote and co-wrote songs, including “Fine and Mellow,” “God Bless the Child,” and “Don’t Explain.”
Selected discography
Holiday’s recordings can be divided into four segments: From 1933 to 1942 she largely recorded for Columbia (with some discs for Okeh, Vocalion, and Brunswick); from 1944 to 1950 she was on the Decca (now MCA) label; and from 1952 to 1957 she recorded for Verve. She also recorded two important sessions with Commodore in 1939 and 1944.
Singles
“Did I Remember?”/“No Regrets,” Vocalion/Okeh, 1936.
“Billie’s Blues,” Vocalion/Okeh, 1936.
“Strange Fruit”/“Fine and Mellow,” Commodore, 1939.
“Loveless Love,” Okeh, 1941.
“God Bless the Child,” Okeh, 1941.
“Gloomy Sunday,” Okeh, 1941.
“Lover Man,” Decca, 1944.
Reissues and compilations
Billie Holiday: The Golden Years (includes “Riffin’ the Scotch,” “These Foolish Things,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” and “When You’re Smiling”), Columbia.
Lady Day, Columbia.
Billie’s Blues, Columbia.
Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits, Columbia.
Lady in Satin, Columbia.
The Original Recordings, Columbia.
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, five volumes, Columbia.
The Billie Story, volume 1 (includes “Don’t Explain,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” “Lover Man,” and “Solitude”), MCA, volumes 2 and 3, Columbia.
From the Original Decca Masters, RCA.
Lady’s Decca Days, MCA.
The Best of Billie Holiday (includes “Travelin’ Light,” “I Thought of You,” and “Willow Weep for Me”), Verve.
All of Nothing at All, Verve.
The Billie Holiday Songbook, Verve.
Body and Soul, Verve.
The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1946-1959, Verve.
The Essential Billie Holiday, Verve.
The First Verve Sessions, Verve.
Jazz at the Philharmonic, Verve.
Lady Sings the Blues, Verve.
The Last Recordings, Verve.
Songs for Distingue Lovers, Verve.
Stormy Blues, Verve.
Fine and Mellow/I’ll Be Seeing You (includes “Come Back to Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “My Old Flame”), Commodore.
Sources
Books
Chilton, John, Billie’s Blues, Stein & Day, 1975.
Feather, Leonard, The New Edition of the Ecyclopedia of Jazz, Horizon Press, 1960.
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, Macmillan, 1988.
Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke, Viking, 1989.
Simon, George T., and others, The Best of the Music Makers, Doubleday, 1979.
Tudor, Dean, Popular Music: An Annotated Guide to Recordings, Libraries Unlimited, 1983.
Periodicals
Down Beat, February 1986; July 1989.
Esquire, October 1989.
High Fidelity, January 1986; May 1987.
New York Herald Tribune Book Review, August 5, 1956.
People, June 1, 1987.
Stereo Review, March 1981.
—Nancy Pear
Holiday, Billie
Billie Holiday
Singer
Segregation Made Touring Difficult
Artistry Prevailed Over Inferior Production
Billie Holiday is considered by many to be the greatest of all jazz singers. In a tragically abbreviated singing career that lasted less than three decades, her evocative phrasing and poignant delivery profoundly influenced vocalists who followed her. Although her warm, feathery voice inhabited a limited range, she used it like an accomplished jazz instrumentalist, stretching and condensing phrases in an ever-shifting dialogue with accompanying musicians. Famous for delivering lyrics a bit behind the beat, she alternately endowed them with sadness, sensuality, languor, and irony. Rarely singing blues, Holiday performed mostly popular material, communicating deep emotion by stripping down rather than dressing up words and lines.”If you find a tune that’s got something to do with you, you just feel it, and when you sing it, other people feel it, too,” Holiday once explained. According to the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music,”She was the first and is perhaps still the greatest of jazz singers, if the essence of jazz singing is to make the familiar sound fresh, and to make any lyric come alive with personal meaning for the listener.”
Holiday’s life was a study in hardship. Her parents married when she was three, but her musician father was seldom present and the couple soon divorced. Receiving little schooling as a child, Holiday scrubbed floors and ran errands for a nearby brothel so she could listen to idols Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the Victrola in its parlor. Brutally raped at ten, she was sent to a reformatory for “seducing” her adult attacker; at fourteen she was jailed for prostitution. Determined to find work as a dancer or singer in Harlem, Holiday moved to New York City in 1928 and landed her first job at Jerry Preston’s Log Cabin, where her vocals moved customers to tears. Discovered in another Harlem club by jazz record producer John Hammond in 1932, she made her first recording a year later with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. She began to record regularly for Columbia, usually under the direction of Teddy Wilson, backed by small studio bands comprised of the day’s best jazz sidemen. These included saxophonist and soulmate Lester Young, whose style approximated Holiday’s own; it was he who gave the pretty, dignified young singer the nickname “Lady Day.”
Segregation Made Touring Difficult
Intended largely for a black jukebox audience, the Wilson discs—mostly silly and second-rate love songs that white singers had declined to record—were quickly and cheaply made. But Holiday and company transformed them into jazz treasures, immediately appreciated by musicians, critics, and jazz afficianados, if not
For the Record…
Born Eleanora Fagan, April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, MD; died of cardiac arrest, July 17, 1959, in New York City; daughter of Clarence Holiday (a jazz guitarist) and Sadie Fagan (a domestic); married James Monroe (marriage ended); married Louis McKay (separated).
Jazz singer. Began career in Harlem clubs, 1930; made recording debut with Benny Goodman ensemble, 1933; performed and recorded with various jazz bands, including those of Teddy Wilson, 1935-39, Count Basie, 1937, and Artie Shaw, 1938; solo recording artist and performer in theaters and nightclubs, 1940s and 1950s. Appeared in short film Rhapsody in Black, 1935, feature film New Orleans, 1946, and on television program Sound of Jazz, 1957.
Awards: Esquire silver award, 1945 and 1946, gold award, 1944 and 1947; Metronome poll winner, 1945-46.
the public at large. These hundred-odd songs—delivered in a light, bouyant style—are today considered among Holiday’s most significant work. Forgoing club engagements in 1937 to tour with Count Basie’s orchestra, Holiday went on to become one of the first black vocalists to be featured with a white band when she fronted for Artie Shaw a year later. Life on the road proved bitter for the singer, though; racial segregation made simple things like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom logistically difficult. Fed up when she could not enter one hotel through the front door with the rest of the Shaw orchestra, Holiday abandoned touring, returning to New York clubs and cabarets as a solo artist.
With Columbia’s permission Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” a controversial song about southern lynchings, for Commodore in 1939. It became a favorite of the interracial crowd for whom she performed at the Cafe Society, a Greenwich Village haunt of intellectuals and the political left. Holiday began to attract a popular following and indulged her taste for slow, melancholy songs about love gone bad, which communicated the hunger and despair that were starting to pervade her own life. Introduced to opium and heroin in the early forties by first husband James Monroe, she began her lifelong struggle with narcotics and alcohol addiction—Monroe the first in a succession of men who would feed that addiction, squander her earnings, and physically abuse her. Jailed for a year on drug charges after a sensational trial in 1947, Holiday had her cabaret license revoked and was thus prohibited from performing in the clubs and nightspots that suited her best. Unable to stay drug-free as long as she remained involved with the music scene, she would face other arrests.
Artistry Prevailed Over Inferior Production
Holiday recorded for Decca from 1944 to 1950. Because the company sought to make her over into a popular singer, much of her material for that label was overarranged, dominated by strings, and largely ordinary. Still, Holiday’s artistry prevailed in songs like “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “Lover Man.” Recording for Verve from 1952 to 1957, the singer frequently returned to the small group format that best fit her glimmering voice, but by then her instrument had begun to falter from years of abuse. Her desire and range dwindling, her voice scratchy and tired, Holiday still retained her unique timing and phrasing and—when she wanted—her ability to move listeners. Recording many American standards for Verve by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart, her personal interpretations made them seem new again. While deemed too painful to listen to by some critics, Holiday’s later recordings are esteemed by others, who find the singer’s ability to communicate at its peak. In High Fidelity Steve Putterman, for instance, judged her Verve recordings “devastating,” because “tonal beauty and emotional expressiveness worked inversely for Holiday: The more her pipes gave out, the more penetrating and affecting her delivery became.”
Although industry insiders in the late 1950s—Frank Sinatra for one—acknowledged her as “unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years,” when the singer succumbed in 1959 to cirrhosis of the liver, kidney trouble, and cardiac arrest at the age of forty-four, her passing was noted by the general public as much for her lurid personal life as for her musical contributions. Time has since diminished the glare of Holiday’s frailties and her musical gifts shine brighter than ever. Describing Holiday in a Down Beat review of one Verve collection as “the woman who taught the world that the interaction and feeling of jazz musicians was the ultimate key to interpreting the great American song lyric,” Will Friedwald remarked: “I guess you can’t inject so much real passion into a song without scaring the pants off some people…. Billie Holiday on Verve, 1946-59 is essential music by the most haunting and hypnotic voice—indeed, sound—in all of recorded music.”
Selected writings
(With William Duffy) Lady Sings the Blues (autobiography), Doubleday, 1956.
Selected compositions
Wrote and co-wrote songs, including “Fine and Mellow,” “God Bless the Child,” and “Don’t Explain.”
Selected discography
Holiday’s recordings can be divided into four segments: From 1933 to 1942 she largely recorded for Columbia (with some discs for Okeh, Vocalion, and Brunswick); from 1944 to 1950 she was on the Decca (now MCA) label; and from 1952 to 1957 she recorded for Verve. She also recorded two important sessions with Commodore in 1939 and 1944.
Singles
“Did I Remember?“/”No Regrets,” Vocalion/Okeh, 1936.
“Billie’s Blues,” Vocalion/Okeh, 1936.
“Strange Fruit’/’Fine and Mellow,” Commodore, 1939.
“Loveless Love,” Okeh, 1941.
“God Bless the Child,” Okeh, 1941.
“Gloomy Sunday,” Okeh, 1941.
“Lover Man,” Decca, 1944.
Reissues and compilations
Billie Holiday: The Golden Years (includes “Riffin the Scotch,” “These Foolish Things,” “Pennies Prom Heaven,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” and “When You’re Smiling”), Columbia.
Lady Day, Columbia.
Billie’s Blues, Columbia.
Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits, Columbia.
Lady in Satin, Columbia.
The Original Recordings, Columbia.
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, five volumes, Columbia.
The Billie Story, volume 1 (includes “Don’t Explain,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” “Lover Man,” and “Solitude”), MCA, volumes 2 and 3, Columbia.
From the Original Decca Masters, RCA.
Lady’s Decca Days, MCA.
The Best of Billie Holiday (includes “Travelin’ Light,” “I Thought of You,” and “Willow Weep for Me”), Verve.
All or Nothing at All, Verve.
The Billie Holiday Songbook, Verve.
Body and Soul, Verve.
The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1946-1959, Verve.
The Essential Billie Holiday, Verve.
The First Verve Sessions, Verve.
Jazz at the Philharmonic, Verve.
Lady Sings the Blues, Verve.
The Last Recordings, Verve.
Songs for Distingue Lovers, Verve.
Stormy Blues, Verve.
Fine and Mellowll’ll Be Seeing You (includes “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “My Old Flame”), Commodore.
Sources
Books
Chilton, John, Billie’s Blues, Stein & Day, 1975.
Feather, Leonard, The New Edition of the Ecyclopedia of Jazz, Horizon Press, 1960.
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, Macmillan, 1988.
Penquin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke, Viking, 1989.
Simon, George T., and others, The Best of the Music Makers, Doubleday, 1979.
Tudor, Dean, Popular Music: An Annotated Guide to Recordings, Libraries Unlimited, 1983.
Periodicals
Down Beat, February 1986; July 1989.
Esquire, October 1989.
High Fidelity, January 1986; May 1987.
New York Herald Tribune Book Review, August 5, 1956.
People, June 1, 1987.
Stereo Review, March 1981.
—Nancy Pear
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday
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 rose to a position of artistic pre-eminence in the world of jazz, but her personal life was one of constant turmoil and struggle. She fought seemingly endless wars—with drug addiction, with narcotics agents' harassment, with racism, with self-serving lovers, and with human parasites in and out of the music business. Withal, her vocal artistry was joyously, bittersweetly transcendant. 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, and as a reward they allowed her to listen to their Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records.
In 1928 she went to New York City with her mother, who secured work as a housemaid, but the 1929 depression soon left her mother unemployed. In 1932 Billie 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 ensemble and solo work of the accompanying all-star groups led by pianist Teddy Wilson. 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 were great musical collaborators and great friends for life (their lives, incidentally, followed a parallel disastrous course). He named her "Lady Day, " and that title (or simply "Lady") became her jazz world sobriquet from the mid-1930s on; she in turn labeled him "Pres" (the "President of Tenor Saxophonists"). Their musical symbiosis, especially on the 1935-1939 small-group recordings, is one of the miracles of jazz; on "This Year's Kisses, " "He's Funny That Way, " "A Sailboat in the Moonlight, " "Me, Myself and I, " "Mean to Me, " and a raft of other tunes tenor saxophone and voice interweave so sympathetically 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 zenith 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, including Kelly's Stables and the Onyx Club—all in addition to her recording successes. 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 graphic 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 (the contention was that it was inducive to 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 thenceforth was barred by New York City police licensing laws from working in any place that served liquor. The absence of a cabaret card in effect 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 to wide acclaim, 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 reigning tenor saxophone kings, 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 over 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.
Further Reading
Her autobiography, written in collaboration with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), is the most revealing work on her, but the 1973 movie version, bearing the same title, is sadly inaccurate. John Chilton's Billie's Blues (1975) is an excellent survey of her life and work in the recording years (that is, from 1933 to 1959). □
Holiday, Billie
Billie Holiday
Born: April 7, 1915
Baltimore, Maryland
Died: July 17, 1959
New York, New York
African American jazz singer
Billie Holiday was an African American jazz vocalist who perhaps showed the most expression of feeling of any singer in jazz history.
Early life
Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. (She borrowed the name "Billie" from one of her favorite movie actresses, Billie Dove.) Born to an unwed teenage mother, Sadie Fagan, Holiday's childhood was one of poverty. Her father, Clarence Holiday (later a jazz guitarist) married Sadie three years later. He never lived with the family, choosing his musical career over them. As a child Billie started working very young, running errands and cleaning a house of prostitution's (a place where sexual acts are traded for money) marble stoop. It was here that she first heard Louis Armstrong (1900–1971) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937) records through the open windows.
New York City
In 1928 Holiday moved to New York City with her mother, who began work as a housemaid, but the 1929 depression (time of low economic conditions with high rates of unemployment) soon left her mother without work. In 1932 Holiday auditioned for a singing job and was hired. For the next few years she sang in Harlem clubs, then her career took off when Benny Goodman (1901–1986) used her on a record. But it was through a series of recordings made between 1935 and 1939 that her international reputation was established. During the late 1930s she was also a big band vocalist, first with Count Basie (1904–1984) in 1937 and then with Artie Shaw (1910–) in 1938.
Holiday's relationship with Basie's star tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909–1959) is the stuff of legend. They were great musical coworkers and great friends for life. Young named her "Lady Day" (or simply "Lady"), and that title became her jazz world name from the mid-1930s on. She in turn labeled him "Pres" (the "President of Tenor Saxophonists").
Many successful tunes were recorded, interweaving Young's tenor saxophone with Holiday's voice. After the late 1930s they rarely recorded together, but to the end they remained soul mates. Holiday's career reached its peak in the late 1930s. In 1938 she worked a long engagement at Cafe Society. The following year she joined Benny Goodman on a radio broadcast.
Two songs of the period are noteworthy. The first, "Strange Fruit," is a detailed description of a lynching (an unjust killing because of race). Columbia record company considered it too inflammatory (exciting to the senses) and refused to issue it. A small record company, Commodore, finally released it in 1939. It became a big money-maker because of the tune on the record's other side, "Fine and Mellow," a blues song written by Holiday. Another tune always associated with her is "Gloomy Sunday," which spoke of such deep despair (misery) that it was kept off the airwaves for a time.
Personal tragedies
By the mid-1940s Holiday had been arrested many times for illegal drug use. After one arrest, at her own request, she was placed in a federal rehabilitation (having to do with recovery from drug or alcohol abuse) center at Alderson, West Virginia, for a year and a day. Just ten days after being released she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Neither Holiday's first husband, Joe Guy, a jazz guitarist who she divorced, or Louis McKay, who survived her, seemed able to save Holiday from herself. By the 1950s alcohol and marijuana had strained her voice, so that it was unnaturally deep and grainy and occasionally cracked during performances. Nevertheless, her singing was sustained by her highly individual style, the familiarity she projected, and her special way with the words of a song.
Holiday made her final public appearance in a concert at the Phoenix Theatre in New York City on May 25, 1959. She died in Metropolitan Hospital in New York City on July 17, 1959, of "congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure." At the time of her death she had been under arrest in her hospital bed for illegal possession of drugs.
Holiday's early small-group recordings have been rereleased in several boxed sets under the general title Billie Holiday: The Golden Years. Her best later work is to be found in The First Verve Sessions, recorded in 1952 and 1954.
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 strong effect on rock and roll music.
For More Information
Chilton, John. Billie's Blues. New York: Stein and Day, 1975.
Clarke, Donald. Wishing on the Moon. New York: Viking, 1994.
Holiday, Billie, and William Dufty. Lady Sings the Blues. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.
Nicholson, Stuart. Billie Holiday. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995.
O'Meally, Robert G. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. NewYork: Arcade Publishers, 1991.
Holiday, Billie
HOLIDAY, BILLIE
One of the most innovative jazz singers of all time, Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915–July 17, 1959) began her legendary singing career in Harlem nightclubs at the height of the Great Depression, catching the public's attention with her unique diction, phrasing, and emotive vocals.
Born Eleanora Fagan Gough in 1915 to teenage parents, Holiday spent her early years in poverty in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, a jazz guitarist with Fletcher Henderson's band, never supported his family. Young Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade to run errands for a brothel. In 1927, she and her mother moved to New York City. Desperate for money, she auditioned as a dancer in a Harlem speakeasy, Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin, but was hired as a singer instead. Growing up imitating Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, singing came naturally to Holiday.
In 1933, jazz writer and producer John Hammond heard Holiday perform. Impressed with her bluesy renditions of jazz standards, he signed her to Columbia Records. The Depression created financial and racial difficulties for many African Americans, but black artists prospered during the 1930s because New Deal legislation established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, providing unemployed artists and writers with work. The WPA contributed to the flourishing cultural scene in Harlem, in which Holiday was an integral figure. She spent much of the 1930s performing and touring with jazz legends Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, but it was her collaboration with saxophonist Lester Young, who nicknamed her "Lady Day," that highlighted her unique vocal talents, jumpstarting her recording career. Between 1935 and 1938, she released approximately eighty songs marketed for the black jukebox audience. In 1935, she made her first of many appearances at Harlem's Apollo Theater, and in 1939 she became the first black performer to integrate Artie Shaw's band.
The same year, she performed her trademark song "Strange Fruit," a powerful condemnation of lynching, to an integrated audience at the Café Society, a New York nightclub. The song came to represent the black artist's experience with racism. Increasing racial hostilities slowed Holiday's touring and hindered her commercial success. She spent the majority of the 1940s in New York performing and recording hit songs for Decca Records to avoid the violence of the South. In 1946, she appeared alongside Louis Armstrong in the film New Orleans, but expressed anger over having to portray a domestic. Her popularity as a singer afforded her little protection from the racial discrimination of the era.
Although a success professionally, addiction and abusive relationships marred her personal life. She died in 1959 of complications from drug addiction. Despite poverty, racism, and sexism, Holiday remains one of the most influential American singers of all time.
See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; ELLINGTON, DUKE; JAZZ; MUSIC.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clarke, Donald. Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday. 1994.
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. "Or Does It Explode?" Black Harlem in the Great Depression. 1991.
Holiday, Billie, with William Duffy. Lady Sings the Blues. 1956.
Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. 2000.
Mary L. Nash
Holiday, Billie
Holiday, Billie
April 7, 1915
July 17, 1959
The singer Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan, the daughter of Sadie Fagan and jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday. She was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Baltimore, where she endured a traumatic childhood of poverty and abuse. As a teenager, she changed her name (after screen star Billie Dove) and came to New York, where she began singing in speakeasies, influenced, she said, by Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) and Bessie Smith (1894?–1937). In 1933 she was spotted performing in Harlem by the critic and producer John Hammond, who brought her to Columbia Records, where she recorded classic sessions with such jazz greats as pianist Teddy Wilson (1912–1986) and tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909–1959), who gave Holiday her nickname, "Lady Day".
Following grueling tours with the big bands of Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday became a solo act in 1938, achieving success with appearances at Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, and with her 1939 recording of the dramatic antilynching song "Strange Fruit." Performing regularly at intimate clubs along New York's Fifty-second Street, she gained a sizable income and a reputation as a peerless singer of torch songs.
A heroin addict, Holiday was arrested for narcotics possession in 1947 and spent ten months in prison. This made it illegal for her to work in New York clubs. Yet despite such hardships and her deteriorating health and voice, she continued to perform and make memorable, and sometimes challenging, recordings on the Decca, Verve, and Columbia labels until her death in 1959.
Although riddled with inaccuracies, Holiday's 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, remains a fascinating account of her mercurial personality. A 1972 film of the same title, starring pop singer Diana Ross, further distorted Holiday's life, though it also introduced her to a new generation of listeners. Holiday was one of America's finest and most influential jazz singers. Though her voice was light and had a limited range, her phrasing, in the manner of a jazz instrumentalist, places her among the most consummate of jazz musicians. She was distinguished by her impeccable timing, her ability to transform song melodies through improvisation, and her ability to render lyrics with absolute conviction. While she was not a blues singer, her performances were infused with the same stark depth of feeling that characterizes the blues.
See also Jazz; Jazz Singers; Smith, Bessie
Bibliography
Blackburn, Julia. With Billie. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
Chilton, John. Billie's Blues: The Billie Holiday Story, 1933–1959. Foreword by Buck Clayton. New York: Da Capo, 1975.
Kliment, Bud. Billie Holiday. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
O'Meally, Robert. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Arcade, 1991.
bud kliment (1996)
Updated bibliography