timeline

born 1915

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.

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her quotes

all quotes by Billie Holiday (17)

"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

"Love is just like the faucet: it turns off and on."

Fine and Mellow | april 1939

"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

"I’ve been down so long that down don’t worry me."

Stormy Blues | september 1954

"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

"Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you—and kill you the long slow hard way."

Lady Sings the Blues | january 1956

quoteurs we recommend...

Ella Fitzgerald
the queen of jazz
Mae West
the queen of camp

for further reading about Billie Holiday:

  • Quotabelle profile
  • 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 | Strange Fruit

Hear Billie sing one of her signature songs.

Philip Nsajja | Vimeo

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