Billie Holiday

Singer

• Born: April 7, 1915
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: July 17, 1959
• Place of death: New York, New York

American jazz singer

One of the most influential jazz singers ever recorded, Holiday created the standards by which jazz singers continue to be judged. Her life reflected the racism of a White entertainment industry and the sexism within a male-dominated jazz world.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Although she is known as a hometown celebrity in Baltimore, Billie Holiday was actually born in Philadelphia. Much about her early life is unknown. Much of what is said about her comes from her autobiography, which is known to be inaccurate in many respects. Her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (1956), written with the help of author William Dufty, represented Holiday’s early years as pitiful and worthy of sympathy. This account has Holiday starting life as Eleanora Fagan, born to thirteen-year-old Sadie Fagan and eighteen-year-old Clarence Holiday. A second, more accurate account by Robert O’Meally, Lady Day (1991), has established the ages of her mother and father as nineteen and seventeen, respectively. Holiday said that she took on the Holiday name when her parents married three years later and moved to a home on Durham Street in East Baltimore, but O’Meally could never establish that this marriage took place or that her parents had ever lived together. He concluded that the move from Philadelphia to Baltimore was her mother’s attempt to start over. In Baltimore, Holiday’s mother worked as a maid to support the two of them. The autobiography explained that Eleanora became “Billie,” a name she took from her screen idol, Billie Dove. This source also noted that her father was drafted during World War I, was sent to Europe, and suffered lung damage from inhaling poisonous gas. While recovering in Paris, he learned how to play the guitar, and he played professionally when he returned home to the United States, a career that required much traveling and family separation. He toured as a musician with the jazz band of Fletcher Henderson and soon abandoned his family, leaving Sadie struggling to make a living. Eventually, the couple divorced. Whatever the reason, young Holiday lived a solitary life as a child.

Holiday’s mother left her with relatives in Baltimore while she went to New York seeking better wages. Holiday stayed with a physically abusive cousin, Ida, her maternal grandparents, her great-grandmother, and Ida’s two children, with whom Holiday had to share a bed. The great-grandmother told stories about her life as a slave on the plantation of Charles Fagan, the father of her sixteen children. Holiday was traumatized when her great-grandmother died after lying down with her for a story and a nap. According to the autobiography, Holiday awoke and could not loosen the dead arms, which had to be broken to remove them from her small body.

According to Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday spent her early years in extreme poverty, working at six as a babysitter and a step scrubber. She finished the fifth grade in the Baltimore schools. She performed household chores for Alice Dean, a brothel owner, ran errands for the prostitutes, and listened to the jazz that was played on the record player in the parlor of the brothel. As the records played, she sang along. By 1925, mother and daughter had saved enough money to move to a house on Pennsylvania Avenue in northern Baltimore, where the mother met a dockworker named Philip Gough, who became her husband. Within a short time, his sudden death brought the family to poverty again. An attempted rape of young Holiday by a forty-year-old neighbor led to more terror when she was put in jail to ensure her testimony and then was placed in a home for wayward girls until she reached twenty-one years of age. The judge assumed that her mature appearance had brought on the rape. Robert O’Meally found that Holiday was sent at age ten to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Roman Catholic home for African American girls. Their records indicated that she had no guardian and was on the streets at this time. Her mother, unable to help young Holiday, again went North seeking better wages.

Holiday wanted to be with her mother, who managed to reverse the judge’s ruling and bring her daughter to New York to work as a maid in 1927. From that time, Holiday and her mother remained close throughout her lifetime. Holiday boarded in a Harlem apartment owned by Florence Williams, a well-known madam. Billie became a twenty-dollar call girl to earn money. The profession led to arrests and a four-month prison term when her mother testified that her daughter was eighteen (she was thirteen) years old so that she could avoid another term in a home for wayward girls. Holiday returned to prostitution after her release, and both mother and daughter could afford to move to an apartment on 139th Street in 1929. It was not long before the effects of the Great Depression touched the Holiday women.

Life’s Work

Not until she received an eviction notice in 1930 did Holiday launch her career as a singer. To avert her forthcoming eviction, she sought work as a dancer at Pod’s and Jerry’s, a Harlem speakeasy. Since she was no dancer, she asked to sing. Jerry Preston, the owner, was so impressed with her presentation that he offered her the job. From that point on, Holiday enjoyed recognition as part of a floor show featuring tap dancer Charles “Honi” Coles and bassist George “Pops” Foster. In 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, the speakeasies became legitimate jazz clubs, and jazz enthusiast John Hammond heard Holiday perform at Monette’s, a jazz club on 133rd Street. He noticed her exquisite phrasing and manipulation of lyrics, which led him to give her a rave review in the magazine Melody Maker. He brought influential musicians and managers to hear her sing, and he soon organized her first recording session, which launched her public career. A few days after her twentieth birthday, Billie Holiday appeared for her first performance at the Apollo Theater. That same year, she recorded with some of the finest jazz musicians of the time under the direction of Teddy Wilson. These recordings built Holiday’s reputation as a jazz singer. She toured with the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw.

During the 1930s, she continued to record and perform. She played a small part in a radio soap opera. She appeared briefly in a musical film, Symphony in Black, in which she played a prostitute. When she appeared outside Harlem, she was criticized for not being “jazzy” enough or for singing too slowly. She had a bad temper, and stories about her throwing an inkwell at a club manager and similar tantrums spread throughout the business. She used the money she earned to buy a restaurant for her mother, and the two of them lived in the upstairs apartment. She sang and waited on tables. She refused to accept tips unless they were handed to her, a practice that led the other women to call her “a lady.” When jazzman Lester Young found a rat in his hotel room, he moved in temporarily with Holiday and her mother. During this time, the tenor saxophonist and the women gave nicknames to each other. He called Billie Lady Day, a title that remained with her, and her mother Duchess, the mother of a lady. In turn, they called him the President, or Pres, because he was the commander in chief of the saxophone players. Together, the two performers produced some of the finest music of Holiday’s career.

Holiday was essentially a jazz singer who put the blues feeling into every word she sang. During her entire career, however, she included only one dozen blues songs in her repertoire, preferring instead to use popular songs as the vehicles of her art. She learned her art from blues queen Bessie Smith. One of her best-known songs, “Billie’s Blues,” was a distinctive, original blues number that demonstrated her total control of her music, a control she never had in her life. Holiday strung her songs together in ways characteristic of African speech, and she invested her music with a blues feeling that contained not only sadness but also honesty and directness of expression. Like the best blues artists, she created music that transcended trouble and pain.

She took subtle liberties with melodies, improvising in the same way that jazz musicians improvised with their instruments. Moreover, Holiday could sing mundane lyrics and make them sound significant and urgent. Her sophisticated approach to singing yielded a novel effect. Whereas popular singers only entertained audiences, Holiday both entertained and communicated with her listeners. She conveyed to them in song what she knew about a life of pain and disillusion. The songs she sang lent themselves to improvisation and metaphorical protest. With the release of her song “Strange Fruit” in 1939, Holiday became a celebrity. Her record was based on Lewis Allen’s poem, which recounted lynchings in the American South. The “strange fruit” was the bodies of the lynched Black people hanging from the branches of the trees. “Strange Fruit” as sung by Holiday became a powerful condemnation of racism and her signature song. Perhaps the pain expressed in the song replicated her sense of the injustice of her father’s death in March of 1937. Her father’s weak lungs, inability to find a Black hospital to treat his pneumonia, and rejection by White Jim Crow hospitals in the South led to his death in a Dallas veterans’ hospital.

As the bands with which Holiday sang toured the South, they experienced Jim Crow segregation at hotels, theaters, restaurants, and public restrooms. Band members survived through mutual support and accommodation to segregation. When she was told that her skin was too light to play with the band, Holiday put on special makeup to darken her face so that the audience would not think she was White under the lights. Her song “God Bless the Child” captured the response of the Black community to segregation. When she joined the Artie Shaw Orchestra, an all-White band, the touring problems were worse. To avoid finding her a segregated hotel room, Artie Shaw painted a red dot on her forehead, making the hotel management think she was an East Indian. This technique succeeded occasionally. In the North, her performances at Cafe Society, the only unsegregated nightclub outside Harlem, made her a star and broke down racial barriers. By the early 1940s, she was the highest-paid performer in jazz. The versatile Holiday was at home in both the swing and the bebop eras of jazz, a rare feat among jazz musicians. Her subtle phrasing and imagination enabled her to approximate what jazz instrumentalists did with their instruments.

The success of her career was not duplicated in her personal life. In 1941, Holiday married James N. Monroe, whose brother owned the Uptown House, a nightclub. She started to use heroin. Monroe smoked opium, and he soon shared his habit with Holiday. Within a year, their marriage disintegrated, and Holiday began a relationship with a heroin addict, Joe Guy. When her mother died in 1945, Holiday felt alone. She was voted best singer in the Esquire Jazz Critics Poll (1944), was named Metronome Vocalist of the Year (1946), and had a role in the film New Orleans (1946), but these successes did not stem the tide of her drug addiction. The addiction sapped her strength, made her late to performances, and created an unending need for more money. In 1947, she checked herself into drug rehabilitation to beat the habit. When she returned to the stage, however, she started to use heroin again. Arrested several times, she served time in prison rather than undergo rehabilitation. By 1949, she was released but was denied a license to perform in New York; she slowly slipped back into addiction.

Holiday experienced both setbacks and successes during the 1950s. Her contract with Decca records lapsed in 1950. In 1952, she signed with the Verve label and recorded more than one hundred songs. In 1954, she received a special award from Down Beat as “one of the all-time great vocalists in jazz,” and in 1956, she married Louis McKay, her manager, had her autobiography published by Doubleday, and was again arrested for possession of narcotics. Following her rehabilitation, she turned to alcohol. Ultimately, the drug and alcohol addiction took its toll. McKay and Holiday separated in 1957. The following year, she recorded her last album, Lady in Satin, backed by the string arrangements of Ray Ellis. When her longtime friend Young died in 1959, Holiday was hospitalized for cirrhosis of the liver and heart failure. She was arrested in her hospital bed for drug possession. She died on July 17, 1959, of congestion of the lungs and heart failure, leaving a bank account of seventy cents and a small dog as her family. The forty-four-year-old jazz singer was buried in Saint Raymond’s Catholic Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

In 2021, Holiday's legacy was portrayed in a new way with the release of the film The United States vs. Billie Holiday on the streaming platform Hulu. Directed by Lee Daniels, the biopic, which follows Holiday's struggle against both societal and governmental persecution, earned mixed reviews from critics that revolved around its lack of focus and largely unoriginal biographical format; however, it further proved the singer's enduring cultural importance and prompted continued discussions about her life and impact. Andra Day was widely praised for her portrayal of Holiday, for which she took home a Golden Globe Award.

Significance

Holiday commands attention because of the unique blues-inspired jazz singing that she contributed to American music. Her renditions, phrasing, pitch, and timing still move audiences and continue to influence singers and instrumentalists. Her career brought jazz from Harlem into café society, breaking down racial barriers. Holiday expressed the dynamic tradition of Black independence in a unique and powerful voice. In her art, she found the power and control that eluded her in other areas of her life.

Bibliography

Blackburn, Julie. With Billie. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Based on more than 150 interviews with musicians, pimps, junkies, producers, critics, and others who knew Holiday. This book provides a portrait of a complex and volatile woman.

Browne, David. "Lady Sings the Blues Again: The Story behind 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday.'" Rolling Stone, 22 Feb. 2021, www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/united-states-vs-billie-holiday-lee-daniels-interview-1129147/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Burnett, James. Billie Holiday. Spellmount, N.Y.: Hippocrene, 1984. A standard work on Holiday’s career that devotes considerable attention to her personal relationships.

Chilton, John. Billie’s Blues: Billie Holiday’s Story, 1933-1959. New York: Stein & Day, 1975. In this biography, Chilton focuses primarily on Holiday’s musical career. The work contains an extensive bibliography and a discography.

Holiday, Billie, with William Dufty. Lady Sings the Blues. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. Holiday’s autobiography, written with Dufty, provides details but is often chronologically and factually inaccurate.

Kliment, Bud. Billie Holiday. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. This biography, written for juvenile readers, provides an introduction to Holiday’s career as a singer. Unfortunately, the work repeats many of the inaccuracies included in Holiday’s autobiography. It does, however, contain useful appended material, including a selected discography, a chronology, and a bibliography.

Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. New York: HarperPerennial, 2001. Traces the creation and subsequent reception of “Strange Fruit,” considered the first significant song of the Civil Rights movement. Includes information about Holiday and how she introduced the song at Cafe Society.

O’Meally, Robert. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Arcade, 1991. This book corrects many of the errors of previous biographical sources and illuminates the various facets of Holiday’s personality and career.

White, John. Billie Holiday: Her Life and Times. New York: Neal, 1987. White’s book does a fine job of placing Holiday within the historical framework that shaped her life and music.