
Billie Holiday
groundbreaking jazz vocalist
Billie Holiday always knew she could sing. But, she didn't know she could make a living from it until she had to. The Harlem teen was looking for any way to put food on the table when her fresh take on an old standard caught a club owner's attention. Soon, Lady Day's signature blues style transformed the music industry as she swung and improvised her way through classic + self-penned tunes.
Billie was famous for bending melodies to express feelings...giving songs an emotional depth that hinted at real-life hardships. In spite of overcoming a hardscrabble youth to become a jazz superstar, her career was no cakewalk. She faced discrimination + exploitation, struggled with abuse + addiction. Billie's swan song came too soon, but she remains one of music's most original + influential voices.
being a jazz taste-maker | a signature style + sound with phrasing + improvisation inspired by brass instruments
beating segregation | one of the few black artists to succeed in the white-dominated mainstream music scene
strange fruit | a famous civil rights ballad
blues | heartbreaking singing informed by a life of hardship + tragedy
1933 | recorded her first songs ~ "Your Mother's Son-in-Law" and the hit single "Riffin' the Scotch" ~ with Benny Goodman at age 18
1941 | released her biggest hit ~ "God Bless the Child" ~ a song co-written with Arthur Herzog, Jr following a conflict with her mother about money
1947 | arrested + tried for possession of narcotics
~ she plead guilty and was sent to federal prison for a year ~
from | to
poverty-stricken girl who turned to prostitution | jazz legend
born on
April 7, 1915
born in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
birth name
Eleanora Fagan
nickname | also known as
Lady Day
~ so dubbed by her long-time collaborator, saxophonist Lester Young ~
Billie Holiday
~ the stage name she took, inspired by her favorite actress Billie Dove + her absentee father's surname ~
citizen of
The United States of America
daughter of
Sadie Fagan
~ young, single mother who worked on passenger railroads ~
Clarence Holiday
~ jazz musician who left Billie's mom soon after she was born ~
grew up in
Baltimore, Maryland + Harlem, New York
educated at
dropped out at age 11
~ sent to a Catholic reform school for truancy at age 9 ~
divorced from
Jimmy Monroe
~ trombonist | married 1941 - 1947 ~
romantically linked to
Orson Welles
Joe Guy
~ her drug dealer ~
influenced by | worked alongside
Louis Armstrong
Lester Young
Benny Goodman
Artie Shaw
Count Basie
Ella Fitzgerald
~ a rival + friend ~
died on
July 17, 1959
~ at age 44 ~
~ in a New York City hospital while under police guard for drug possession | from cirrhosis of the liver caused by years of addiction ~
"I ain’t good-looking and my hair ain’t curled, but my mother, she gave me something that’s gonna tear me through this world."
Billie's Blues {aka I Love My Man} | july 1936
"I love my man—I’m a liar if I say I don’t. But I’ll quit my man—I’m a liar if I say I won’t."
Billie's Blues {aka I Love My Man} | july 1936
"I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I am playing a horn. I try to improvise like Les Young, like Louie Armstrong, or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel."
I'll Never Sing with a Dance Band Again | november 1939
"I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know."
I'll Never Sing with a Dance Band Again | november 1939
"I always knew I could sing because I always did sing. But I never knew I could make any money out of it until I just had to."
radio interview | january 1940
"Money, you’ve got lots of friends crowding round the door. When you’re gone, spending ends. They don’t come no more."
God Bless the Child | may 1941
"Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible said and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own."
God Bless the Child | may 1941
"The strong gets more while the weak ones fade. Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade."
God Bless the Child | may 1941
"You know that I love you and that love endures. All my thoughts are of you, for I’m so completely yours."
Don't Explain | november 1944
"To dream my dream could be my mistake, but I’d rather be wrong and sleep right along than wake."
Somebody's On My Mind | january 1950
"The things that I sing have to have something to do with me and my life and my friends’s lives . . . The things they write today—nothing’s happening. I can’t feel it!"
Billie Holiday | january 1952
"There’s really nothing happening with the tunes today—you just can’t get into them, you can’t feel them."
Billie Holiday | january 1952
"You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation."
Lady Sings the Blues | january 1956
"I've been told that nobody sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love.'"
Lady Sings the Blues | january 1956
for further reading about Billie Holiday:
curated with care by Alicia Williamson & Angela Willard {april 2015}
Billie gets her start at the Log Cabin Club
This detail from a Manhattan Magazine map of the fun to be had in Prohibition-era Harlem shows the "intimate spot" {and even the old piano} where Billie scored the first impromptu gig that put her on the map. The year was 1929. Billie was just 14 and fresh from the workhouse. Here's the story as she told it in a 1939 interview ~ "Mother and I were starving. One day we were so hungry we could barely breathe. I started out the door. It was cold as all-hell, and I walked from 145th to 133rd down Seventh Avenue, going in every joint trying to find work. Finally, I got so desperate I stopped in the Log Cabin Club, run by Jerry Preston. I asked Preston for a job…told him I was a dancer. He said to dance. I tried it. He said I stunk. I told him I could sing. He said sing. Over in the corner was an old guy playing a piano. He struck ‘Travelin’’ and I sang. The customers stopped drinking. They turned around and watched. The pianist, Dick Wilson, swung into ‘Body and Soul.’ Jeez, you should have seen those people—all of them started crying. Preston came over, shook his head and said ‘Kid, you win.’ That’s how I got my start."
Elmer Simms Campbell via BigThink
Strange Fruit
Billie became famous for singing a heartbreaking ballad about lynching ~ black men's bodies were the "strange fruit" hanging from poplar trees. The stirring lyrics were based on a protest poem written by a Jewish civil rights advocate in New York. When the poet Lewis Allan {Abel Meeropol} met her at the hip NYC Cafe Society {the only integrated club outside Harlem}, his work struck a personal note. Billie recalled ~ "I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop." Her 1939 recording of the tune also struck a chord with the nation at large, quickly becoming a bestselling record. But, singing it in the South could be dangerous, and singing it anywhere affected the jazz great so much it often left her sick or in tears.
Billie Holiday and Mister | Downbeat, New York, N.Y.
A photo of Billie and her beloved pet from a photo-shoot by William Gottlieb during Lady Day's 1947 stint at the Downbeat club. 1947 marked Lady Day's commercial peak as a top-earning performer...before a conviction for possessing narcotics landed her in Alderson Federal Prison Camp that May. Billie sang for a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall upon her 1948 release, but her bad rep led to her being banned from the high-paying Cabaret circuit for the rest of her life.
William Gottlieb | Library of Congress | public domain