Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949

Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), also called Lady Day, was an American singer, generally considered one of the greatest jazz voices of all time, alongside Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Though not commanding an outstanding range or technique, her singing expressed a distinctive phrasing and depth of private feeling that was almost unprecedented and that influence later generations of jazz vocalists.

Discovered by the legendary Columbia Records producer John Hammond, Holiday spent much of the 1930s working with a range of great jazz musicians, including the Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and most importantly, the saxophonist Lester Young. Together, Young and Holiday would create what many consider some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

Holiday recorded two of her best-known songs during this period: her own composition “God Bless the Child” (1939) and “Strange Fruit” (1939), a somber and racially charged song about the lynching of blacks in the South.

While she was becoming more famous and successful in her professional life, Holiday’s personal life began to deteriorate in the 1940s. She had problems with drugs and alcohol and was arrested several times on narcotics-related charges. She even spent a year in a federal rehabilitation center, but she was unable to end her substance abuse. By the end of the decade, her hard living was taking a toll on her voice.

It was not, however, until 1939, with her song "Strange Fruit," that Holiday found her real audience. A deeply powerful song about lynching, "Strange Fruit" was a revelation in its disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism. Holiday’s voice could be both quiet and strong at the same time. Songs such as "God Bless the Child" and "Gloomy Sunday" expressed not only her undeniable talent, but her incredible pain as well. Due to constant racial attacks, Holiday had a difficult time touring and spent much of the 1940s working in New York. While her popularity was growing, Holiday’s personal life remained troubled. Though one of the highest paid performers of the time, much of her income went to pay for her serious drug addictions. Though plagued by health problems, bad relationships, and addiction, Holiday remained an unequaled performer.

By the late 1940s, Holiday’s heroin addiction and alcoholism and begin to diminish her once perfect voice. During her lifetime she had fought racism and sexism, and in the face of great personal difficulties triumphed through a deep artistic spirit. It is a tragedy that only after her death could a society, who had so often held her down, realize that in her voice could be heard the true voice of the times.

Life

Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday spent much of her young life in Baltimore, Maryland. Raised primarily by her mother, Holiday had only a tenuous connection with her father, who was a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson’s band. Living in extreme poverty, Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel. When she was twelve, Holiday moved with her mother to Harlem, where she was eventually arrested for prostitution.

Desperate for money, Holiday looked for work as a dancer at a Harlem speakeasy. When there wasn’t an opening for a dancer, she auditioned as a singer. Long interested in both jazz and blues, Holiday wowed the owner and found herself singing at the popular Pod and Jerry’s Log Cabin. This led to a number of other jobs in Harlem jazz clubs, and by 1933 she had her first major breakthrough. She was only twenty when the well-connected jazz writer and producer John Hammond heard her fill in for a better-known performer. Soon after, he reported that she was the greatest singer he had ever heard. Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.

Holiday's career was influenced by the problem of race relations in America. Her life and artistic career was cut short by her dependence upon drugs and alcohol. She confronted racism and sexism throughout her career, helping to pave the way for the greater openness contemporary artists enjoy.

Early life

Born Eleanora Fagan, Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood which greatly affected her life and career. Much of her childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by herself in her autobiography, published in 1956, and known to contain many fallacies and inaccuracies.

Holiday was born in Philadelphia but grew up in the Fells Point section of Baltimore, Maryland. According to her autobiography, her house was the first on their street to have electricity. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was allegedly only thirteen at the time of her birth (although this has been disputed); her father Clarence Holiday, a jazz guitarist who would play for the band leader Fletcher Henderson, was reportedly just fifteen. There is some controversy regarding Holiday's paternity, but Clarence Holiday accepted paternity, but was hardly a responsible father. In the rare times she did see him, she would shake him down for money by threatening to tell his then-girlfriend that he had a daughter.

According to her autobiography, her parents married when she was three, but they soon divorced, leaving her to be raised largely by her mother and other relatives. At the age of ten, she reported having been raped, which resulted in her being sent to a Catholic reform school. It was only through the assistance of a family friend that she was released two years later . Clarence Holiday died in World War I. According to conventional wisdom, he was wounded by poisonous gas, but was refused treatment by doctors due to his race and left to die in a hospital overseas.

Early Singing Career

Scarred by these experiences, Holiday moved to New York City with her mother in 1928. According to her accounts, she was recruited by a brothel, working as a prostitute, and even imprisoned for a short time. It was in Harlem in the early 1930's that she started singing for tips in various night clubs. According to legend, penniless and facing eviction, she sang "Body and Soul" in a local nightclub, reducing the audience to tears. She later worked at various clubs for tips, including Pod's and Jerry's, a well known Harlem jazz club. Not a lot is known about her early singing career, but it is known that she was working at a club named Covan's in 1933 when she was discovered by talent scout John Hammond.

Hammond managed to get Holiday recording sessions with Benny Goodman, booking her for live performances in various New York clubs. In 1935 her career got a big push when she recorded four sides that became hits, including "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "Miss Brown To You." This landed her a recording contract of her own, and from 1935 to 1942 she laid down masters that would ultimately become an important segment of early American jazz. Sometimes referred to as her "Columbia period" (after her recording label), these recordings represent a large portion of her total body of recording work.

During this period, the American music industry was still moderately segregated, and many of the songs Holiday were given to record were intended for the black jukebox audience. She was often not considered for the "best" songs of the day, which were often reserved for white singers. However, Holiday's style and fresh sound soon caught the attention of musicians across the nation, and her popularity began to climb. Peggy Lee, who began recording with Benny Goodman in the early 1940's, is often said to have emulated Holiday's light, sensual style.

In 1936 she was working with Lester Young, who gave her the now-famous nickname of "Lady Day." Holiday joined Count Basie in 1937 and Artie Shaw in 1938. She was one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra, an impressive accomplishment during that period.

The Commodore Years and "Strange Fruit"

Holiday was working for Columbia in the late 1930s when she was introduced to a song entitled "Strange Fruit," which began as a poem about the lynching of a black man written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Meeropol used the pseudonym "Lewis Allen" for the work. The poem was set to music and performed at teachers union meetings, where it was eventually heard by the manager of Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, who introduced it to Holiday. Holiday performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939, a move that by her own admission left her fearful of retaliation. Holiday later said that the imagery in "Strange Fruit" reminded her of her father's death, and that this played a role in her determination to perform it.

She approached Columbia about recording the song, but was refused due to the song's subject matter. She arranged to record it with an alternate label, Commodore, Milt Gabler's alternative jazz label in 1939. She would record two major sessions at Commodore, one in 1939 and one in 1944. Although there were far fewer songs recorded with Commodore, some of her biggest hits were under this label, including "Fine and Mellow," "I Cover the Waterfront" and "Embraceable You." "Strange Fruit" was highly regarded and admired by intellectuals, and is in a large part responsible for her widespread popularity. "Strange Fruit's" popularity also prompted Holiday to record the type of songs that would become her signature, namely slow, moving, love ballads.

It is widely conjectured that this is the period where Holiday first began what would become a long, and ultimately fatal, history of substance abuse. Holiday stated that she began using hard drugs in the early 1940s.

Her personal life was as turbulent as the songs she sang. She married trombonist Jimmy Monroe (a small-time drug dealer) on August 25, 1941. While still married to Monroe, she took up with trumpeter Joe Guy as his common law wife. She finally divorced Monroe in 1947, and also split with Guy. In 1947 she was jailed on drug charges and served eight months at the Alderson Federal Correctional Institution for Women in West Virginia. Her New York City Cabaret Card was subsequently revoked, which kept her from working in clubs there for the remaining 12 years of her life.

Later life and the Verve sessions

By the 1950's Holiday's drug abuse, drinking, unfortunate taste in abusive men, and deteriorating health set her life on a slow and steady decline. Her voice coarsened and did not project the vibrancy it once did. However, she seemed to stand as a prime example of the struggling artist, and projected a certain bittersweet dignity.

On March 28, 1952, Holiday married Louis McKay, a Mafia "enforcer." McKay, like most of the men in her life, was abusive, but did try to get her off drugs. They were separated at the time of her death. Holiday was also rather openly bisexual and was rumored to have had several affairs with notable stage and film actresses, including Tallulah Bankhead. She sometimes had friends call her "Bill." Holiday also had a relationship with Orson Welles.

Her late recordings on Verve Records are as well remembered as her Commodore and Decca Records work. From 1952 to 1959 Holiday released a little more than 100 new recordings for this label, which would constitute about a third of her recorded work. Her voice reflects a rugged timber on these tracks, reflecting a vulnerability in the once grand and bold diva. Her performance of "Fine and Mellow" on CBS's The Sound of Jazz program is memorable for her interplay with her long-time friend Lester Young; both were less than two years from death.

Holiday toured Europe in 1954 and again from late 1958 to early 1959. While in London in February 1959, Holiday made a memorable televised appearance on the BBC's Chelsea at Nine, singing, among other songs, "Strange Fruit." Holiday made her final studio recordings (with Ray Ellis and his Orchestra, who had also recorded her Lady in Satin album the previous year) for the MGM label in March 1959 (included in her complete Verve recordings collection.) These final studio recordings were released posthumously on a self-titled album, later re-titled and re-released as Last Recordings. She made her final public appearance at a benefit concert at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village, New York City on May 25, 1959. According to the masters of ceremony at that performance, Leonard Feather (a renowned jazz critic) and Steve Allen, she was only able to make it through two songs, one of which was "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do."

On May 31, 1959, she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York, suffering from liver and heart problems. On July 12, she was placed under house arrest at the hospital for possession, despite evidence suggesting the drugs may have been planted on her. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959, at the age of 44. In the final years of her life she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with only $0.70 in the bank and $750 on her person.

Her impact on other artists was undeniable, however; even after her death she influenced such singers as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone. In 1972, Diana Ross played her in a movie version of Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. To everyone's surprise, the film was a commercial smash and earned an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for Ross. In 1987 U2 released "Angel of Harlem" as a tribute to Billie.

Like many artists, the importance of Holiday's music and her influence were only truly realized after her death. She struggled against racism and sexism her entire career, and achieved fame despite a turbulent life. She is also often cited as an example to the black and gay communities, both of which admire her early efforts to stand up for equal rights, and to speak out against discrimination and racism. She is now considered one of the most important vocalists of the twentieth century.

Billie Holiday is interred in Saint Raymond's Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

Voice

Billie Holiday photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949

While instantly recognizable, Holiday's voice changed over time. Her first recordings in the mid-1930s featured a bouncy, girlish voice. By the early 1940s her singing became informed by her acting skill. It was during this time when she recorded her signature songs "Strange Fruit" and "I Cover the Waterfront." Many called her voice lovingly sweet, weathered and experienced, sad and sophisticated. As she aged, the effects of her drug abuse continued to ravage her range and her voice changed considerably, becoming somewhat rougher. Her last major recording, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958 and revealed a woman with an extremely limited range, but wonderful phrasing and emotion. The recording featured a backing from a 40-piece orchestra conducted and arranged by Ray Ellis, who said of the album in 1997:

I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You." There were tears in her eyes… After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was.

Legacy

Some fifty years after her death, Billie Holiday is among the most recognizable singers of the jazz era. Jazz and pop vocalists of the time usually sang melodramatic ballads and novelty songs associated with the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely explored depths. Holiday's primary influences, the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong and blues singer Bessie Smith were powerful exceptions whose lives mirrored Holiday's, and whose vocal delivery left no doubt they had lived through what they were singing. In her autobiography Holiday admitted, "I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling." Holiday's personal and emotional delivery revolutionized the jazz vocal tradition by personalizing even the most banal material with an inimitable emotion.

Holiday's technical expertise and unconventional aesthetic sensibility led her to refine the beat and the melody, often rejuvenating the standard melody with harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often said she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life — a series of abusive relationships, substance addictions, and periods of depression — undoubtedly assisted her legendary status, but Holiday's best performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Strange Fruit," her own composition "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and accomplished vocal performances ever recorded. More than technical ability, more than purity of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of the best vocalists of the century — easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra — was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.

External links

• Official Site. Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• The Unofficial Billie Holiday Website. Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• Brief biography at Jazz (PBS). Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• Brief biography at American Masters (PBS). Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• The African American Registry - Billie Holiday. Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• Discography of Billie Holiday. Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• Billie Holiday Timeline. Retrieved June 5, 2007.
• Billie Holiday's Gravesite. Retrieved June 5, 2007.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Blackburn, Julie. With Billie. ISBN 0375406107
• Clarke, Donald. Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon. ISBN 0306811367

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