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 …

Repost: Black History Month: Strange Fruit

One of the first political songs ever written. It's been called a declaration of war. The beginning of the Civil Rights movement. One of the ten songs that changed the world.

Billie Holiday Strange Fruit

This One Is For Carlos ... Just Because

Charlottesville ... One Week Out

Words and Musics: An Award From Mistress Maddie

So … Mistress Maddie, over there to A Day With The MistressBorghese, has seen fit to honor me with an award. It seems I am the “Queen of the Blogiverse”! I am the “Master Of The Internet”! I am the “Most Important Person Who Ever Liv—“

What? The Music and Words Award? Not The Queen of Something or Other??

Well … this is … nice … too.

So, let’s rip … when I’m asked if I play a musical instrument I always say “the radio” because, sadly, that’s the extent of my musical abilities, though I love music. I do, however, sing almost constantly — ask Carlos how I drive him crazy with my tunes. And, as I have said here on this blog thing before, I wake up singing, literally, every single day. And sometimes it’s a song I heard the day before, and other times it’s a song I haven’t heard since I was a child.

For example, this morning I woke up singing The Mills Brothers rendition of “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” I probably first heard this tune at my grandmother’s house when I was a child and stored it way in my head until this morning when it came out. I don’t know how it works, or why, but the idea of waking up singing is a good thing.

I listen to everything, even some country — though I am not a fan of rap — so there isn’t much I don’t like, and not much I haven’t bought, and not much I haven’t sung in the shower; showtunes, blues, jazz, pop, rock, folk, reggae, classical, opera … I love Billie Holiday, Sting, Adele, Sammy Davis Jr., Idina Menzel, Vivaldi, Betty Buckley, The BoDeans, REM, U2, UB40, Wynonna Judd, Kelly Clarkson, James Taylor, Judy Garland, Puccini, The Gershwin’s, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Sarah Vaughan, Aaron Tveit — whom I just recently discovered, kd lang and on and on I could go.

What does music mean to you? 

It means almost everything because music reminds me of where I was when … when anything happened. I can listen to music when I am sad or angry or depressed or happy or tired or just need a little something in the background.

And while I like the music, I am especially drawn to interesting lyrics that can tell a story or take me somewhere or make me think something I had never thought before.

A singer, and a song, that always gets to me … Lady Day.

What is your first music related memory? My father had reel-to-reel tapes of music he’d recorded, and boxes upon boxes of tapes filled with songs; the Boston Pops; Nancy Wilson; Sammy Davis Jr.; John Denver—side note, he went to high school with one of my aunts. My father played those tapes all the time; we had music at dinner almost every night and it was always something new; we good go from Arthur Fiedler to the soundtrack from Roots over a dinner, with everything in between. I remember a few years back I was in a store and there was that elevator-type music playing in the background and a lady in line ahead was squinting and thinking and wondering, and she finally said, aloud to no one in particular, “What song is this? Who used to sing this song?”

And I replied, “Vicki Carr. ‘It Must Be Him.’”

The lady told me I was too young to know that and asked how I knew. I said, because I’m a smart-ass, “I used to do my long program to this one.” Then I spread my arms and lifted a leg behind me as though ice-skating.

But I was right, because I’d heard that song when I was just a wee queerling.

What was the first album you ever purchased yourself?  To be honest — and why not? — I think it was a Diana Ross and the Supremes album. I am a huge Miss Ross fan.to.this.day. But then there was The Who; the Beatles; Simon and Garfunkel … and others to follow.

 What is the latest music you purchased? Adele’s latest was my last purchase. I don’t do “internet” music so I always buy an actual CD because, like a book, I like to hold it in my hand; I like the lyrics so I need to be able to read the songs as well as bust out singing ‘em.

What is the very last song you listened to before writing this post? Be honest!  Idina Menzel — you might know her as Adele Dazeem — singing a live version of “No Day But Today.”

Now, I am supposed to bestow this ward on some folks, but I’ve seen it all around the blog-dom, so I will just say that if you wanna share your music with us, take the questions and sing to us …

Now, before I go, this little award got me trolling YouTube and stumbling across some stuff … so I’m’a leave y’all with a little Sammy.

Davis Jr., that is.

#BillieAt100: Happy Birthday Lady Day

There isn’t another singer, alive or dead, who moves me as much as Lady Day, Billie Holiday. I have been a fan since, well, probably forever. The first time I heard that voice, that soul, that pain, that life, in song, I was hooked. And so, while today we’ll celebrate Carlos’ birthday, we are also celebrating #BillieAt100, because this is her 100th birthday.

She was born Eleanora Fagan, and grew up in Baltimore in the 1920s. As a teenager, she would sing-along with Bessie Smith or Louis Armstrong records in the neighborhood after-hours jazz clubs. When Eleanora’s mother, Sadie, moved to New York in search of a better job, Billie soon followed, and made her debut in nightclubs in Harlem, changing her name to Billie Holiday.

Billie had no training; she couldn’t even read music. But man what she could do with a song. She worked all the clubs in Harlem, sometimes signing with the accompaniment of the house piano player or working as part of a group of performers.

At just 18, Billie was spotted by John Hammond and recorded her first record as part of a studio group led by Benny Goodman. In 1935, at age 20, Billie’s career rocketed when she recorded four sides that went on to become hits, including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown to You,” and landed her a recording contract of her own.

Billie began working with Lester Young in 1936 — he nicknamed her Lady Day — and she then went on to work with Count Basie in 1937 and then Artie Shaw in 1938, where she became one of the very first black women to work with a white orchestra.

In the 1930s, while recording for Columbia Records, Billie heard the poem “Strange Fruit,” an emotional piece about the lynching of a black man. Though Columbia would not allow her to record the piece due to subject matter, Holiday went on to record the song with an alternate label, Commodore, and “Strange Fruit” became one of her classics.

In the 1950s Billie recorded about 100 new songs for Verve Records, her voice more rugged and vulnerable, but still so powerful.  Despite her lack of technical training, Billie’s unique diction, phrasing and intensity made her the outstanding jazz singer of her day.

“Singing songs like the ‘The Man I Love’ or ‘Porgy’ is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. I’ve lived songs like that.” — Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday died far too young and far too soon, in 1959 at the age of 44. True, her life was filled with bad men, bad choices, drugs, drug arrests, and heartbreak, but none of that matters when you just listen to her sing … like this …

  

photo credits:

Fashion Bomb
Downbeat
BET
see also:
Billie Holiday on YouTube
BillieHoliday.com

It's Hot But This Is Cool

P.S. I Love You Billie Holiday

You seriously cannot beat Billie Holiday.
Seriously.

Fifty Years Ago Today...

Billie Holiday passed away at age 44. One of my favorite singers; I could listen to her all day, every day. For more on Lady Day, you can read my post from Black History month HERE.

Otherwise, enjoy.

A Sultry Day In Smallville

It's gonna be scorchin' today, and what better way to start off a hot, sultry day than with Lady Day herself.

Billie Holiday Summertime

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. 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 middle 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 was making over $1,000 a week in the early 40s and spending most of her money 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 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 rand 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 resiliency, 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 great talent that had destroyed itself; it was as if her music described a life too terrible to endure.

That image was reinforced by her candid autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, which 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 , soured, 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.

Strange Fruit

One of the first political songs ever written.
It's been called a declaration of war.
The beginning of the Civil Rights movement.
One of the ten songs that changed the world.

Billie Holiday Strange Fruit