Holiday, Billie (c. 1915–1959)

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Holiday, Billie (c. 1915–1959)

African-American jazz and blues singer, one of the great American female vocalists of all time, who was plagued by poverty, racism, and drugs, and whose recordings are considered classics. Name variations: Lady Day. Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915(?) in Baltimore, Maryland; died of addiction-related illness on July 17, 1959, in New York; illegitimate daughter of Sarah Fagan and a father variously reported as Clarence Holiday or Frank DeVeazy; educated through fifth grade; married Jimmy Monroe (a jazz trumpeter), on August 25, 1941 (divorced); married Louis McKay, in 1951.

Educated through fifth grade before moving to New York City and supporting her mother by singing for tips in Harlem night clubs; made her professional debut when she was 20 and remained a respected and popular jazz and blues vocalist with both white and black audiences for the rest of her life, despite drug and alcohol addiction that resulted in several arrests and convictions; published her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (1956).

Billie Holiday always maintained that the biggest thrill of her life was playing the Royal Albert Hall in London. On that night in 1954, she was astonished at the awed silence that greeted her stage entrance, as if her title "Lady Day" had been bestowed at Buckingham Palace. Equally astounding to her was the careful attention focused on her every lyric, the tumultuous applause that filled the cavernous hall, and the throngs of fans waiting outside with flowers and kisses. It was so unlike anything she had been used to back home in the States, especially during her early career, marked by claustrophobic nightclubs, audiences that talked, drank, and ate through her sets, and whites who would pay good money to hear her but would be horrified at sharing an elevator with her.

She had nearly given up the European tour that brought her to London, unable at first to get a passport because she couldn't produce a birth certificate. Billie never knew her exact birth date but estimated it as April 7, 1915. She was born out of wedlock to Sarah ("Sadie") Fagan , who cleaned and kept house for wealthy white families in Baltimore. "It's a wonder my mother didn't end up in the workhouse and me as a foundling," said Holiday:

But Sadie Fagan loved me from the time I was just a swift kick in the ribs while she scrubbed floors. She went to the hospital and made a deal with the head woman there. She told them she'd scrub floors … so she could pay her way and mine. And she did. Mom was thirteen that Wednesday, April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, when I was born.

Billie claimed her father was Clarence Holiday, an itinerant musician who left Sadie soon after their child was born, although work papers filled out by Sadie when she applied for a job in Philadelphia indicate that Billie may actually have been born in that city earlier. At the time, Sadie listed a Philadelphia waiter, Frank DeVeazy, as the father. Whatever the truth, Billie always considered Baltimore her hometown and, throughout her life, never forgot the poverty and squalor of the African-American ghetto called "Pigtown," down by the harbor, near which she and Sadie lived. A few years after her birth, Clarence returned to legalize his union with Sadie. "Mom and Pop were just kids when they got married," Billie remembered. "He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three."

Sadie named her daughter Eleanora, but Billie thought it was "too damn long for anyone to say" and may have taken her name from the one Clarence gave to his roughneck daughter, "Bill." In other accounts, Billie claimed she took the name from a popular silent-film actress of her childhood, Billie Dove . When Sadie found work outside Baltimore, she left Billie in the care of relatives, including a great-grandmother who had been a slave on Charles Fagan's Virginia plantation before the Civil War and who claimed she was one of 16 children Fagan had sired among his workers. From her great-grand-mother, Billie heard the family history of discrimination and abuse, no doubt underscored by what was taking place just outside the door. Baltimore in the early 1920s had the largest African-American population of any American city outside of the nation's capital, along with some of the worst discriminatory practices and living conditions of institutionalized racism. Billie Holiday had the misfortune to be born at a time when America's race relations were more troubled than they had ever been since the War Between the States. Lynchings and beatings of blacks remained all too common in the South, and the Federal government would not come to grips with civil rights for another 30 years. Although Holiday was one of the few black women of her generation to enjoy a degree of artistic and economic success, the racial prejudice she experienced as a child followed her into adult life even as her career was being guided and shaped by white men.

By age six, Billie was working "minding babies, running errands, and scrubbing those damn white steps [of brick row houses] all over Baltimore," as she later recalled. One of the businesses for which she ran errands was a brothel around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore's red-light district. In lieu of cash, Billie was allowed to listen to recordings of Bessie Smith and Louis "Pops" Armstrong on the Victrola in the parlor. She would claim throughout her career that Smith and Armstrong had been the chief influences on her style. "I always wanted Bessie's sound and Pop's feeling," she said.

In 1927, Billie went to join her mother in New York, working for a time alongside Sadie for the white family in whose Long Island home they lived. But after several disputes with the matriarch of the family, who accused Billie of stealing, Sadie sent her daughter to board at what appeared to be a respectable rooming house on Harlem's 114th Street. From her experiences on Pennsylvania Avenue back in Baltimore, Billie knew from the moment she saw the place that it was a well-run, profitable brothel. Barely 14, she was soon earning her keep as a prostitute. When she refused the demands of a particularly important, but threatening, client, she found herself arrested on disorderly conduct charges and sent to a filthy, rat-infested women's prison on Welfare Island in New York's East River. She spent nearly nine months behind bars, although during the last part of her sentence she was allowed to cook for the white prison warden and his family.

On her release, Holiday moved back to Long Island and found a job waitressing, earning extra money by singing for tips at a local Elks Club. But when Sadie was forced to retire from her job because of a stomach ailment, she and Billie moved back to Harlem and took a small apartment on 139th Street, in what had once been America's most lively and prosperous black community. By now, however, the Depression was taking its toll, and the two women were forced to scrape by on the few dollars Billie managed to get from Clarence, who by then had divorced Sadie, remarried, and was playing downtown at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom with Fletcher Henderson's band.

When the money ran out, Billie trudged up and down Harlem's Seventh Avenue looking for work in any of a multitude of clubs that lined the street, ending up at Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin on 133rd Street. There, she sang "Travelin'" and "Body and Soul," collected $18 in tips, and was offered a full-time job. Starting at the Log Cabin, Holiday went from one club to another, building a following along the way at places like the Yeah Man, the Hotcha, and the Alhambra Grill. Among the growing number of fans was John Henry Hammond, the wealthy white scion of an old New York family and a passionate lover of jazz and the blues, to which he said he was attracted for "its simple honesty and convincing lyrics." In coming years, Hammond would promote the talents of such diverse artists as Benny Goodman and Billie's idol, Bessie Smith.

Hammond was fascinated with Billie Holiday from the first time he heard her sing at Monette's Supper Club. "She sang popular songs in a manner that made them completely her own," he said. "She had an uncanny ear, an excellent memory for lyrics, and she sang with an exquisite sense of phrasing." He was especially intrigued by the fact that Billie would sing the same song at five or six different tables, but never sing it the same way twice. To Billie, it was only natural; otherwise, she said, "It ain't music. It's close-order drill, or exercise, or yodeling, or something, not music."

It was Hammond who arranged for Billie's first recording session in 1933 with Goodman, himself still an unknown. Since the clubs she had been playing were usually in the basements of residential brownstones, Holiday had never used any sort of amplification and was frightened of a microphone; but in a few hours she turned out

the first of scores of recordings, "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the Scotch," neither of which sold more than a few copies. That same year, however, Prohibition was repealed. The thousands of now-legal bars that sprang up all had those newfangled machines, called jukeboxes, and Hammond quickly realized that black bar owners weren't being serviced by a record industry geared toward whites. Hammond teamed Billie with a pianist he had long admired, Teddy Wilson, and got them a contract for Columbia Records' Brunswick label. Wilson and Holiday churned out more than 80 jukebox records between 1933 and 1938. As time went on, Wilson added better musicians to back Holiday up, since it was obvious to everyone that a major new talent was in the making. "She could just say 'hello' or 'good morning'," Wilson said, "and it was a musical experience."

It was at one of the Brunswick sessions that Billie first met Lester Young, who played sax for Count Basie's band and who became, in an odd way, the most important man in Billie's life. The two seemed to thoroughly understand each other, musically and emotionally, from the moment they met. "To hear her sing … while he was playing a chorus was something to make your toes curl," remembered Max Kaminsky who played trumpet with Basie. "No words; she just scatted along with his tenor sax as though she were another horn." Over the years, Holiday and Lester Young would join forces on some of the most treasured jazz performances ever recorded—numbers such as "This Year's Kisses," "If Dreams Come True," and "I'll Never Be The Same." It was Young who gave Billie her nickname, "Lady Day," while Billie called him "Prez." Young even moved in with Holiday for a time, but in John Hammond's opinion the relationship was never a physical one. "They thought alike and they felt alike," he said many years later. "I don't think there was any sexual relationship there—I think they just understood each other. It was so subtle and so close that I feel embarrassed even talking about it."

Has done singing and housecleaning.
—Prison warden's evaluation of inmate Billie Holiday, 1947

While the Brunswick sessions were in full swing, Billie sang for the first time at Harlem's Apollo Theater, appearing with a small jazz combo; she also played a small role in a short film for Paramount, 1935's Symphony In Black, which featured Duke Ellington's band and, most important, played her first club date outside Harlem, at Barney Josephson's Café Society Downtown, in Greenwich Village. Josephson, like Hammond, was a political and social liberal and a strong supporter of the NAACP. His clubs (he ran a second Café Society on Manhattan's 58th Street, plus a third club in Harlem) were among the first with integrated audiences, and he delighted in advertising Café Society as "The Wrong Place for the Right People." He had strict rules for his performers, among which was an absolute ban on illegal drugs inside his clubs, forcing Billie to ride around Central Park in a carriage before a performance so she could indulge the marijuana habit she had developed years earlier. It was Josephson who brought Billie a song she was, at first, reluctant to perform, but for which she eventually developed a passionate attachment—a protest song called "Strange Fruit," about the lynchings of blacks in the South. Josephson claimed he had come across the song while traveling in the South, but it is widely believed that Josephson himself wrote it. Its opening verses described a "pastoral scene" with bitter irony:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Black bodies swaying in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Holiday introduced the song one night at Café Society as the last number of her set, with just a soft pinlight focused on her face. Josephson ordered all table service suspended during the number and told Billie to simply walk off when she finished, with no bows or encores. The club remained perfectly silent for moments afterward. Even more profound was the reaction at the Apollo, where Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" before a mostly African-American audience a few nights later. "A moment of oppressively heavy silence followed," remembered Jack Schiffman, the Apollo's manager at the time, "and then a kind of rustling sound I had never heard before. It was the sound of almost two thousand people sighing."

It was an irony of Holiday's life that the very gift for which whites most admired her also created the setting for the racial conflict that would plague her. On tour with Basie's band for eight months in 1938, Billie and the other black members of the orchestra were frequently forced to stay in the homes of admiring African-Americans, since most hotels, including those in the North, had a whites-only policy. In Detroit, where the band played for a chorus line of all-white dancers, audiences complained to the theater management that the musicians were too close to the bare legs of the chorines, who might be "contaminated." Billie was judged to be "too yellow" by many of the managers on the circuit, and she was forced to artificially darken her skin so that no one would mistake her for a "mixed colored," with one white parent. Basie supported Holiday as best he could. "She fitted in so easily," he said. "It was like having another [instrumental] soloist." But the band's financiers weren't as enthusiastic, citing Billie's growing drug and alcohol problems and a "distinctly wrong attitude toward the work" as reasons for letting her go after the tour was completed. There were rumors that Billie, the only woman member of the band, had slept with one or two of her co-workers on the road, and Billie's persistent pattern of showing up late for rehearsals and stage calls was already taking shape. Holiday, on the other hand, claimed that she'd quit the band of her own accord because she wasn't being paid enough.

When Billie migrated to Artie Shaw's band late in 1938, her problems only worsened. Shaw had recognized her talent several years before, when he heard her sing at Monette's in Harlem, and he took a chance on hiring her as the first black singer to appear with a white band. He was forced to hire a second singer, Helen Forrest , after being told by theater owners that Billie couldn't appear unless there was also a white singer. Holiday was not allowed to share the platform where Forrest sat between numbers, and there were understandably rumors of friction between the two women—although years later, Forrest would claim that Billie had been kind to her and encouraged Shaw to use her for more songs. All this, insulting at it was, proved to be the least of Holiday's problems.

The blues, jazz, and rock are considered to be quintessential American music, but the African-American musicians who created this art form often paid a high price for bringing it to white America. For them there were no restrooms, restaurants, or hotels. They were welcome to perform in front of whites as long as they had no personal needs. Holiday was not allowed to sleep in the same hotel or eat in the same dining room with the other band members, usually being sent to the kitchen to take her meals, and complained that she never "ate, slept, or went to the bathroom without having a major NAACP-type production." Wrote Holiday:

Most of the cats in the band were wonderful to me, but I got so tired of scenes in crummy roadside restaurants over getting served, I used to beg Georgie Auld, Tony Pastor and Chuck Peterson to just let me sit in the bus and rest—and let them bring out something in a sack. Some places they wouldn't even let me eat in the kitchen. Sometimes it was a choice between me eating and the whole band starving. I got tired of having a federal case over breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

When the tour reached the South, a member of the all-white audience stood up after one of Billie's numbers and yelled: "Have the nigger wench sing another song!" Billie mouthed an obscenity at him, pandemonium broke out, and Shaw had to whisk her out of the hall to the safety of the band's bus. But it was back in sophisticated New York that the last straw fell, during a gig at the Lincoln Hotel's Blue Room. Not only was Billie prohibited from entering many of the hotel's public areas, she was not even permitted inside the Blue Room itself except when she was actually singing; when she finished a number, she had to retire to a small room outside the lounge until her next song. Finally, when Southerners staying at the hotel complained of her use of the guest elevators and the management asked her to use the freight elevator instead, Billie quit. By the 1940s, her anger had attached itself to "Strange Fruit"'s grim lyrics. After listening to Billie recite them, poet Maya Angelou 's young son asked Billie what the phrase 'pastoral scene' meant. "It means when the crackers are killing the niggers," Holiday snapped. "That's what they do. That's a goddam pastoral scene."

Despite these indignities, the 1940s saw Billie's career become firmly established, while a degree of security arrived in her personal life with her first marriage, on August 25, 1941, to jazz trumpeter Jimmy Monroe, for whom she had had a long-standing fascination. The two embarked on a tour that took them to Chicago, where Billie sang with Lionel Hampton's band, and then on to Los Angeles, Holiday's first visit to the West Coast. She had accepted an engagement of several weeks at a replica of Barney Josephson's club, called The Café Society, where she was paid $175 a week and was thrilled to meet the film stars who flocked to hear her. Holiday's signature had become a white dress and a white gardenia. But by the end of the gig, Billie and her husband were broke, and friends had to pay her way back to New York while Monroe stayed in California. These same friends noticed that Billie seemed worn out and hazy when she arrived back East, perhaps due to the heroin habit that probably began during her marriage to Monroe, who was a well-known user. The marriage had not been successful, and Billie may have taken up the drug as an attempt to draw closer to her husband.

On her return to New York, Holiday embarked on a series of dates at most of New York's 52nd Street jazz clubs, such as The Onyx, The Famous Door, and The Yacht Club, singing with many of the most respected jazz musicians of the day. In the audience on many of those nights was a rapt Frank Sinatra who, as his own career swept the nation, would frequently list Holiday as his major inspiration. "Billie Holiday was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me," he said years later.

In between her New York shows, Billie—who now had a manager and agent—accepted offers from Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and many felt that her personal problems gave added poignancy to her appearances. The marriage to Jimmy Monroe slowly deteriorated until, in 1945, Billie announced she had divorced him and married trumpeter Joe Guy, although there is no evidence that she and Guy actually did marry, and Monroe was still claiming in 1947 that Billie was his wife. The actual date of their divorce is still uncertain.

Also in 1945, Billie learned while on the road that Sadie, the only other constant in her life beside music, had died. Her mother's absence hit Billie particularly hard, leading her to seek comfort even more in drugs. There were repeated arrests and court dates on possession charges, most of which were settled with hefty fines; and several contracts for tours and club dates had to be canceled when Billie either never showed up or arrived late and in no condition to sing.

But it was because of her singing that most people knew Billie, especially after she appeared with her idol, Louis Armstrong, in United Artists' 1946 feature film New Orleans, an unsuccessful, muddled tale of the origins of jazz which relegated Holiday and Armstrong to the roles of musically inclined servants to the film's white romantic leads. Although Billie swore never to do a film again, the film's score and her own performance brought her an even wider audience. She gave her first solo performance at New York's Town Hall that same year, but by the time she arrived back in New York from Los Angeles, her affair with Joe Guy had ended and even Billie had begun to realize the toll her drug habit was taking. She checked herself into a Manhattan clinic to rid herself of the addiction; but three weeks after her release, she was arrested in Philadelphia on drug possession charges. This time, fines weren't enough for the court; Billie was sentenced to a year's term at the Federal Women's Reformatory in Alderston, West Virginia.

Strangely, these were to be the most peaceful days of Billie Holiday's life. Although living quarters at the prison were racially segregated, all other activities were carried out in integrated groups, in which no one was any better than anyone else, all tasks were shared in common, and everyone more or less got along. Holiday attended church every Sunday, was free of her drug habit, and modestly refused requests to sing. Her supervisor's report deemed her "generous, quiet, lady-like, [and] matter-of-fact." After serving nine-and-a-half months of her sentence, she was released on parole, returning to New York for a triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall which included six encores. But because of her conviction record, the Police Department refused to issue Billie a "cabaret card," preventing her from singing anywhere that had a liquor license and leaving her with a great deal of free time on her hands. Within a few months, Billie was once again using heroin. "There isn't a soul on this earth," she once said, "who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over, until they're dead."

Holiday's career reached its highest plateau under the guidance of producer Norman Granz, whom she had met in Los Angeles. In 1951, Granz added her to the impressive list of artists for his Verve label—a list that included Ella Fitzgerald , Charlie Parker, and Oscar Peterson—and booked her on a round of concerts across the country, followed, in 1954, by her first European tour. Billie played Sweden, Denmark, France, and Switzerland and gave her famous Royal Albert Hall performance. Critic Leonard Feather reported that "Billie was looking and singing better than she has in years. It's a thrill to hear this unique voice back at the pinnacle of its form." Down Beat was equally enthusiastic about her second Carnegie Hall concert on her return from Europe, telling its readers that "It was a night when Billie was on top, the best jazz singer alive." In 1956, Holiday published the frank autobiography she had written with journalist friend William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues. She seemed content, even though her second marriage to Louis McKay in 1951 was in trouble, and the two had separated.

In 1957, Holiday filmed a television special on jazz and was reunited with Lester Young, now ill and frail from years of his own alcohol and drug abuse. He and Billie had fought some years earlier and hadn't seen each other since, so the poignancy of their affection was felt even in the control room of the studio when Lester painfully rose to back Billie on a song she had written especially for the show, Jazz Is. Nat Hentoff, who co-produced the program, remembered that when it was time for Young's solo, "he blew the sparest, purest blues chorus I have ever heard. Billie, smiling, nodded to the beat, looked into Prez's eyes, and he into hers. She was looking back with the gentlest of regrets at their past."

Close friends were now beginning to notice a marked deterioration in Holiday's voice and talked of the recording sessions for which she was always late and of the quantities of scotch or brandy she had to consume before she could sing. She began to forget lyrics and would stand onstage, silent and staring, for minutes at a time; a second European tour, in 1958, during which she sang badly and was often late getting on stage, was poorly received. In March of 1959, Lester Young died, and Holiday said at his funeral that she thought she'd be the next to go. Said Lena Horne :

Her life was so tragic and so corrupted by other people—by white people and by her own people. There was no place for her to go, except, finally, into that little private world of dope. She was just too sensitive to survive. And such a gentle person. We never talked much about singing. The thing I remember talking to her about most was her dogs; her animals were really her only trusted friends.

Her last public appearance was on May 25, 1959, at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village. Leonard Feather, who had seen her only a few weeks before, said she appeared to have lost 20 pounds; and after singing just one number, "T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do," she had to be helped from the stage. Six days later, she collapsed at her apartment in Harlem and was admitted to a hospital as "Eleonora McKay." The diagnosis was cirrhosis of the liver, although she seemed to rally a few days later and even began receiving visitors. But one final indignity awaited. While she was hospitalized, Federal agents raided her apartment, claimed to have found a packet of heroin, and filed charges against her. In July, her condition worsened, and Billie asked for the last rites of the Catholic Church. Two days later, on July 17, 1959, with armed guards stationed out-side her hospital room, Billie Holiday died.

From the day of her passing, the tributes to Billie Holiday have never stopped, although the pain she suffered during her short life sometimes overshadows the extraordinary gift it brought to her music. Many of Billie's friends were dismayed by the bleak portrait of her presented in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues. "The thing I hope kids don't miss, the ones who are discovering Lady," worried Billie's longtime friend Hazel Scott , "is that she took a lot of the tragedy out of her life and made something beautiful out of it. There were many dimensions to her, not just the sad-faced junkie, as so many people picture her." Billie may have had just that concern herself. "The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy," she once said. "It's … just according to how I feel. Anything I do, it's part of my life."