Billie Holiday is one of the most famous female vocalists of all time and was influential in both jazz and pop singing. Although she was among the most prominent jazz musicians, she leads a very troubled life t plagued by poverty, drugs, and abuse.
Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, she took the stage name Billie Holiday after an actress by the name of Billie Dove and her father Clarence Holiday. Clarence was a jazz guitarist who never married Billie's mother and hated to admit that he was her father prior to her fame. Billie's mom, Sadie Fagan, was thrown out of her parent's home and moved to Philadelphia, Billie's birthplace. Billie and her mother later settled in an impoverished neighborhood in Baltimore. Sadie married Philip Gough in 1920 when Billie was three but divorced three years later. As a result, Billie was raised only by her mother and several relatives. At age 10 Billie was molested and, as a consequence, along with a lengthy truancy record, she was sent to a Catholic reform school called The House of the Good Shepherd in 1925. Two years later, she was released with the assistance of a family friend. In 1928, Billie and her mother moved to New York City. A year later Billie's mom discovered a neighbor by the name of Wilbert Rich in the act of raping her daughter. As a result, Rich was sentenced to three months in jail.
In 1930, Billie was recruited by a brothel, worked as a prostitute and was imprisoned for a short time for solicitation. By the early 1930s, she started her singing career in various nightclubs in Harlem for tips. Penniless and facing eviction, she reduced the audience to tears when she sang "Travelin All Alone" in a local club. She continued to sing at various clubs and ended up at a very well known Harlem jazz club called Pod's and Jerry's. In 1933, she was discovered by a talent scout by the name of John Hammond while singing at another club called Monette's. In that same year, Hammond got her to record with Benny Goodman.
Throughout the 1930s, Billie worked with such jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Teddy Wilson, Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Lester Young. Young and Holiday were close friends and created some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time. Young also created the nickname "Lady Day" for Billie while she created the name "Prez" for him.
When Billie was on the Columbia label in 1939, she was introduced to a very powerful and haunting song about lynching called "Strange Fruit." Reminding her of her father's death, she performed the song. However, she was disappointed with many people's misunderstanding of it. Talking about the song, Billie would state that the people will ask her to "sing that sexy song about the people swinging." Although Columbia did not record the song, Commodore Records did, and she continued to sing the song for twenty years.
As Billie's use of hard drugs started in the 1940s, she not only married Jimmy Monroe, a trombonist in 1941, she also hooked up with trumpeter Joe Guy. Joe was her drug dealer and common law husband. In 1947, she divorced Monroe, broke up with Guy and was jailed on drug charges. She served time at the Alderson Federal Correctional Institution for Women in West Virginia. Due to her jail time, her New York City Cabaret Card was subsequently revoked, and she was unable to perform any clubs there for the rest of her life. However, she did sing at the Ebony club in 1948 with the permission of John Levy.
Despite her arrest and jail time, she continued to be addicted to drugs into the 1950s as well as having relationships with abusive men and a drinking problem. These destructive behaviors contributed to her declining health. In 1952, she married a mafia enforcer by the name of Louis McKay. Even though he was abusive, McKay did try to get Billie off of drugs. On November 10, 1956, she performed at Carnegie Hall before a packed audience. Her final performance was on May 25, 1959 when she sang at the Phoenix Theater in New York's Greenwich Village. Due to her failing health, she was only able to perform two songs. Six days later, she was admitted to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. She was then placed under house arrest in the hospital due to drug possession on July 12 and later died of cirrhosis of the liver on July 17,1959. The only money she had left was $0.70 in the bank plus a tabloid fee of $750. She was progressively swindled out of her earnings in her final years. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
Despite her tragic life, she influenced many artists in the pop and jazz genres. There are also many references and tributes to her. Among those include the 1972 movie that was loosely based on her life named after her autobiography called Lady Sings the Blues. In 1987, she was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She later graced a postage stamp in 1994 thanks to the United States Postal Service as well as ranking number 6 on VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n' Roll in 1999. Billie Holiday was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Other memorable tributes also include a 1959 poem by Frank O'Hara called "The Day Lady Died", and a song by the group U2 called "Angel Of Harlem" in 1988.
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