The Short Biography Of Billie Holiday

General

Eleanora Fagan, or popularly known as Billie Holiday, was born on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and passed away on July 17, 1959, in New York. She is one of the most influential jazz vocalists of all time with such a prominent career until we lost her due to substance abuse. In 1972, her autobiography was made into the film Lady Sings the Blues, and later on, in 2000, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Unique voice

Billie Holiday was significantly influenced by Louis Amstrong in phrasing and rhythm. Phil Schaap, a curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, once took Armstrong's and Holiday's versions of the same song, then sped up Amstrong’s and slowed down Holiday’s to make their voices closer in pitch. He then found out that Holiday literally learned how to swing and sing at the same time from Amstrong. Her way of singing the melody made up her such powerful emotional power. Schaap commented on Holiday’s style as 'speaks to your heart. She catches your ear. She reaches your mind, and she does this with an emotional power that, of course, is genius and is beyond words.', while Oscar Peterson said she had “a voice of pure velvet”. Despite her lack of technical training, Holiday still sets herself off for uncanny syncopation, inimitable phrasing, and dramatic intensity.

Childhood

Billie spent her childhood mostly in Baltimore, Maryland. She was born in poverty, her mother, Sadie Fagan, was only a teenager when she had her and her father is widely believed to be Clarence Holiday, who eventually became a successful jazz musician but played almost no role in his daughter’s childhood. In January 1925, she was sent to House of Good Shepherd, a facility for troubled African American girls, for her truancy, and only returned to her mother’s hand in August. It was a tough time for her when she was punished for misbehaving by spending a night with a corpse in a coffin. She then came back there in 1926, after being sexually assaulted by a neighbor. Later, she went on to earn a living with humble jobs. In 1929, Holiday and her mother moved to New York where she took her first step in her singer career. Although she had failed as a dancer at Jerry Preston’s Log Cabin, her music talent brought her a $2 job per night there, with a fine cover of “Body and soul”. The name of Billie Holiday was used as her stage name as her biased actress Billie Dove.

Career

She was responsible for many masterpieces contemporarily.

At the age of 18, Holiday’s talent was discovered by John Hammond while she was on stage in a Harlem jazz club. Hammond was instrumental in getting Holiday recording songs with a clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman. With Goodman, she acted as the main vocal for several tracks, including her first commercial releases 'Your Mother's Son-In-Law' and the 1934 top ten hit 'Riffin' the Scotch.'

In 1935, Holiday went on to record with jazz pianist Teddy Wilson with whom she made several singles, including 'What a Little Moonlight Can Do' and 'Miss Brown to You.'

Around this time, Holiday met her soulmate, Lester Young, who gave her the nickname 'Lady Day' in 1937 she joined Basie's band. In return, she called him 'Pres' standing for “President of Tenor Saxophonist”. However, the promoters showed objection to Holiday for her unique vocal style and race, so she ended up leaving the orchestra out of frustration.

One of the most prominent songs associated with her name was “Strange Fruit”, a song that depicted a picture of the lynching and horrors of racism, and which became an anthem of the early civil rights activities. The song was a poem, written in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, who worked as a teacher under the name of Lewis Allen. She started singing this in 1939 to end her Café Society shows, with no encores. Her recording company, Columbia Records, considered it to be inflammatory but, fortunately, still let Holiday record it for her friend Milt Gabler at Commodore. The recording made in April 1939 turned into a landmark protest song. The same year, with Arthur Herzog Jr., she wrote “God Bless The Child”, a composition that transcends the ages and gains its position in the great American songbook and jazz lexicon. In 1941, Billie Holiday published another signature song, “Gloomy Sunday”, which was originally composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933, “Vége a Világnak” (“End of the world”), and later was translated into English. This song is which spoke of such deep despair (misery) that it raised the airwaves for a time. It made up an urban legend that people committed suicide after listening to the song.

In 1944 she signed with prestigious Decca Records, having the chance to make some duets with her long-loved idol, Louis Amstrong, starting with 'You Can't Lose a Broken Heart.”

In 1952, Billie came back with a five year run with Norman Granz’ Clef. He put Billie back into a small group from which her prodigy had originally grown and together, they made roughly 100 recordings. She put this new signature sound on scores of stirring ballads such as her self-reflecting composition “Lady Sings The Blues”. During this period, she expanded her repertoire while also turning many of her 1930’s classics into her new style. Wearing a new appearance as the “Torch Singer”, she was twice on TV’s “Tonight Show with Steve Allen”, on CBS’s historic “The Sound Of Jazz” program and made a tour around Europe. Many albums were born during this time, such as “Billie Holiday Sings”, “Music For Torching”, etc...

In 1958, she signed to Columbia Records with John Hammond, who had been instrumental in her early career. For Columbia, she created her swan song masterpiece album “Lady In Satin” and “Last Recording”.

Drugs and alcohol

Using drugs and alcohol from a very young age, the singer’s life was gradually dominated by such. By the mid-1940s, Holiday had been arrested many times for illegal drug use. Holiday’s drug habit only got worse after Sadie, her mother’s death in 1945. In 1947, she was arrested by New York Police Department’s Narcotics Squad at Hotel Grampian, when they found 16 capsules of heroin in her possession, causing a conviction that prevented her from performing in New York. After getting out of prison, she attempted to stop using the needle but her solution was to resort to alcohol. By the 1950s alcohol and marijuana had strained her voice so that it was unnaturally deep and grainy and occasionally cracked during performances. The show at Phoenix Theatre in Greenwich Village on 25 May 1959 was her last time in public when she had to be helped off after two songs. She passed away in Metropolitan Hospital in New York City on July 17, 1959, of 'congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure.'

Citation:

• “Billie Holiday Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, www.notablebiographies.com/He-Ho/Holiday-Billie.html.
• “Billie Holiday.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 28 Feb. 2020, www.biography.com/musician/billie-holiday.
• “Bio.” The Official Website of Billie Holiday, 19 Aug. 2019, billieholiday.com/bio/.
• “Remembering Billie Holiday, the Wild Lady of Jazz, 60 Years since Her Death.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 17 July 2019, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/billie-holiday-anniversary-death-jazz-age-cause-a8997656.html.
• Vitale, Tom. “Billie Holiday: Emotional Power Through Song.” NPR, NPR, 22 Nov. 2010, www.npr.org/2010/11/19/131451449/billie-holiday-emotional-power-through-song.