Repost: Black History Month: Billie Holiday

The facts of Billie Holiday's early life are uncertain. The facts of her life, however, are not. Billie was an icon, a prostitute, a drug addict, a nightclub singer, a desperate figure; she was also one of the first African American singers to appeal to both Black and white audiences.

She was born Eleanora Fagan, maybe in Baltimore; maybe not. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, may have been just thirteen, and her father Clarence Holiday, may have been just fifteen. And they may or may not have ever married.

But Clarence Holiday, did play guitar and banjo professionally, and he joined jazz-band leader Fletcher Henderson in the early 1930s. So Clarence was on the road much of the time and was not conceivably a family man.

Eleanora, as Billie was known, had a delinquent adolescence,. She was sent to a reformatory at the ten, raped at eleven, and a prostitute by age twelve. In Baltimore, hoping for a new career as a singer, she assumed the first name of her favorite movie star, Billie Dove, and the last name of her father, and Billie Holiday was born.

Soon after, in 1928 or 1929, she moved to New York City with her mother, and together they struggled to make a living during the Depression. Sadie and Billie worked as domestics when they could get no other work, and whenever her father came to town, Billie would confront him, threatening to call him daddy in front of his girlfriends unless he gave her money.

In her mid-to-late teens, Billie began singing in New York clubs, and by the time she was old enough to drink legally she had established a reputation as a stirring jazz singer. Hers was a natural talent with excellent musical instincts and an earthy voice that matched the honesty of her songs.

Lover Man Oh Where Can You Be

God Bless The Child

Don't Explain

Fine and Mellow

By the age of eighteen her fans included, among many others, Benny Goodman, with whom she recorded in 1933, and record producer-promoter John Hammond, who observed that "she sang popular songs in a manner that made them completely her own." Her nickname in Harlem was "Lady," and saxophonist Lester Young, an admirer, added the appellation "Day."

She was "Lady Day," the hottest singer in Harlem before she was twenty.

Her best recordings were organized by Hammond, with pianist Teddy Wilson, and after those sessions, Hammond was devoted to promoting Holiday's career. He arranged for her to appear with the best musicians of the era, and by the end of the 30s, Billie Holiday had sung with Count Basie and his orchestra, and with the Artie Shaw Band.

But life as a big band singer was too restrictive for Billie, and in 1938 she became a solo act. In January 1939 she opened at the new Greenwich Village club Cafe Society, where she sang for nine months and introduced her classic protest against lynching, "Strange Fruit." The Cafe Society audiences were mostly white, and Billie found a whole new group of fans who hung on her every song.

Holiday was a success, but she was also living her music with disastrous effects. In August 1941 she married Jimmy Monroe, and by the time of their breakup soon afterward, she was an opium user and a heroin addict. She made over $1,000 a week in the early 40s and spent most of it on her habit; she was also at the peak of her career.

In 1943 she was voted the best jazz vocalist in the Esquire magazine readers' poll, and with that acknowledgement, Decca Records began making a series of thirty-six recordings that are regarded among the finest jazz vocals of the time.

Lover Man

Porgy

Now or Never

My Sweet Hunk of Trash, sung with Louis Armstrong.

But those Decca recordings also seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Billie's career. In 1945, she married trumpet player Joe Guy, and together they formed a band, losing much of Billie's money along the way. Business woes, her drug dependency, and chronic depression brought her career to an abrupt halt.

In 1947, Billie Holiday was arrested on a drug charge and voluntarily accepted placement in a federal drug-rehabilitation center for a year and a day. Ten days after her release she appeared before a packed house at Carnegie Hall—one of the first Black artists, and the first Black female artist to do so. But because of her drug arrest, her cabaret license had been suspended, and Billie was not allowed to play in Manhattan establishments that served alcohol.

The years of drinking and the ravages of drug addiction took their toll on her talent as well. Her voice lost its resilience, and oftentimes she would appear on stage unable to perform. She toured Europe in 1954 and appeared triumphantly at Royal Albert Hall before an audience of six thousand. But increasingly the power of her performances was attributable to the pity the audience felt for a once extraordinary talent that had destroyed itself; it was as if her music described a life too terrible to endure.

Billie’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues reinforced that image and did not hide the embarrassments of her life, her drug addiction, the rapes, the bad marriages, the prostitution. In the mid-1950s her last marriage, to Louis McKay , fell apart and she was unable to drag herself from the world of drug abuse. By 1958 she was on her last slide downward.

Billie Holiday died on 15 July 1959 in a hospital bed where she had been under house arrest for over a month for possession of narcotics. She had $750 taped to her leg.

But before you feel sad for Billie Holiday, remember all that she did for women, and Black women; all she did to pave the way for every single female singer that came after her. And don't forget that she opened doors to a world of music and nightclubs that had once been closed to Black performers.

Hers was a remarkable talent, and a horrendous personal life, but it was all Billie Holiday and because I have loved her voice for years and years, here are some of her songs …