Born: April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Died: July 17, 1959, in New York, New York

Known For: Jazz Singer

With her luminous voice, Billie Holiday took the pain of her life and passionately sang jazz. Born Eleanora Fagan to two young teenagers, Billie faced difficulties from her unstable household but found solace in music. Holiday’s first arrest came when she was still a teenager and faced multiple arrests in her short life. Billie and her mother moved to New York City, where she found work singing in local jazz clubs. Holiday was discovered by producer John Hammond while performing in a Harlem jazz club at eighteen years old. Saxophonist Lester Young befriended Billie and nicknamed her “Lady Day,” and toured together in the Count Basie Orchestra in 1937. Following this tour, she worked in Artie Shaw and his orchestra, becoming one of the first female African American vocalists to work with a white orchestra. Unfortunately, she faced racial discrimination as club promoters did not was integrated orchestras performing.

Notable Works:

"Strange Fruit"

“Strange Fruit,” first performed in the racially integrated Greenwich Village club, Cafe Society, became Billie Holiday's most famous song. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Jewish-American songwriter Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, published in 1937. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans and compares the victims to the fruit of trees, “Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Commodore Records 78 label for "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra (526A), published by Commodore Music Shop

Lady Sings the Blues

Publisher: New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Holiday penned her autobiography that candidly tells the stories of her bruised life of sexual abuse, heroin addiction, racial discrimination, and other tragedies she suffered through. Ghostwritten with William Dufty, Holiday told her story through a series of interviews at Duftys' 93rd Street apartment. She needed some form of income as she was barred from performing at nightclubs that serve alcohol after her 1947 arrest in Philadelphia.

Impact:

Left to right: Jimmy Ascendio (Road manager), Bobby Tucker, and Billie Holiday, at Philadelphia District Court in 1947.

Getty Images

Billie Holiday was targeted by the government, specifically the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), under commissioner Harry Anslinger. Right before her performance in a haughty midtown hotel, she received a warning from the FBN to never perform her famed song, “Strange Fruit,” again. Commissioner Harry Anslinger grew furious with Billie as she suffered from heroin addiction and bluntly spoke out against white supremacy. Commissioner Anslinger was a known racist and believed that Jazz clubs were the root of the growing drug problem in New York City. The Commissioner planted an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to befriend Billie and worked with her abusive husband, Louie McKay, to arrest her for drug use and put her on trial called The United States of America versus Billie Holiday. She was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison and, upon her release, lost any opportunity to perform at lively jazz clubs.

Billie continued to sing “Strange Fruit” because she felt it was her duty to spread awareness of the brutal lynchings in the American South. Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun called the song “a declaration of war… the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

Billie Holiday Performing at a jazz club

Dickie Wells, Billie Holiday, and Tallulah Bankhead at Club Ebony

Jet Magazine, December 27, 1951

Billie Holliday was openly bisexual when many members of the LGBTQ+ community feared arrest and violence if their sexuality became public. Although she did marry men in the past, Billie dated American philanthropist and socialite Louise Crane and Broadway actress Tallulah Bankhead. When Billie was arrested on opium possession, Tallulah Bankhead wrote a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, pleading for Billie’s release.

"With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years."

Frank Sinatra on Billie Holiday

Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday

Courtesy of New York Times