Billie Holiday was a preeminent jazz vocalist, widely appreciated during her heyday in the 1930s through the 1950s. But many fans now insist that she's the greatest of all time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website says that "Billie Holiday changed jazz forever."
Holiday influenced jazz as much as Frank Sinatra touched pop music, says music historian Donald Clarke, editor of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music and a biographer of Holiday. "If you sing one of the songs that they're famous for and you don't sing it like they did, you sound like you're doing it wrong," Clarke told Investor's Business Daily. "That's how important they were as interpreters of songs."
Demand Respect Like Billie Holiday
But Holiday had to fight for her place in history.
At a bar one night, after she was already commercially successful, a mink coat topped her elegant attire. Suddenly smelling something burning, she discovered cigarette burn holes in her coat. She went outside, found sailors who had been standing smoking next to her indoors, and "laid 'em flat" on the street, Clarke says.
Holiday's take-no-guff response reflected her upbringing. Born in 1915, she was an African American who grew up on the tough streets of Baltimore.
"The guys she knew there were tough wannabe gangsters," Clarke said. "They were hustlers, some of them, and she was just as bad as they were. She'd yell at them in the streets, swear at them, take chances of getting beat up because she was one of them."
Yet in a few years, another side of her — the artist communicating her emotions — would emerge. "It's a bit like Sinatra," Clarke said. "Sinatra was sometimes not a very nice man. He certainly didn't treat women very well for the most part. But when he sang a song, he said, 'I'm honest.' It was the same with Holiday. She was singing a song and it had nothing to do with any of this cultural stuff, any of (the Billie Holiday) mythology."
Learn From Your Upbringing
During her childhood, poverty and the mean streets had shaped Holiday.
Her father, a jazz guitarist, abandoned his family to travel with bands. Her mother eked out a living as a cleaning lady. Impoverished, Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and earned money as a housekeeper. Some accounts say she also worked as an errand-runner at a brothel.
At age 10 or 11, she was the victim of a sexual assault by a man in his 40s. Accounts differ, but many agree that she was sent to a Catholic reform school that some describe as using strict discipline. One version says Holiday was locked in her room overnight with a corpse as punishment for misbehavior. After her release from the reformatory, Holiday moved to Harlem, in New York City, to live with her mother, who had relocated.
At age 16, amid the Great Depression, she got entrepreneurial. Rather than scrub local women's house steps for a nickel per set of steps using her customers' supplies, she bought her own cleaning supplies and charged 15 cents for each set of stairs, wrote Lindon Barrett, former director of African studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Barrett quoted Holiday: "All those bitches were lazy. I knew it and that's where I had them. Sometimes I'd bring home as much as 90 cents a day. I even made high as $2.10 — that's 14 kitchen or bathroom floors and as many sets of steps."
Forge Your Own Identity Like Holiday
Holiday's real name was Eleanora Fagan. Her father, according to some accounts, called her "Bill" because she was a tomboy. She changed it to "Billie," after favorite actress, Billie Dove. She adapted her father Clarence Halliday's last name. Why the slight change? "She didn't want to have her estranged father's last name," Matt Glaser, head of Berklee College of Music's American Roots Music Program, told IBD.
Music seduced her soul on the streets of Harlem. Running errands for a brothel madam, she was mesmerized by the music of great African-American blues singer Bessie Smith and trumpeter Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, wafting from seemingly every open door and window as well as in her madam's cat house.
Use Your Wits
Holiday walked into a bar or speakeasy one day looking for ways to make money. She was desperate to pay her mother's rent. She begged the owner for an audition as a dancer. The owner pointed her to the piano. "I started, and it was pitiful," a Howard Center for Investigative Journalism report recounts Holiday saying. "I did my two steps over and over until he barked at me and told me to quit wasting his time."
But the piano player took pity. He asked, "Girl, can you sing?" She asked the pianist to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." When she finished, everyone in the joint was crying into their beer. After splitting tips with the pianist that night, she went home with $57, a small fortune in Depression-ravaged Harlem.
Soon, highly influential jazz producer John Hammond caught one of her performances. He arranged for her to record with the legendary Benny Goodman's band in 1933. Before long, she had recorded with more of the era's major artists, including Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson. Prominent jazz saxophonist Lester Young is widely credited as nicknaming Holiday "Lady Day."
Holiday: Don't Hide Your Emotions
Holiday's popularity stemmed from her ability to convey emotion. She often said that she was not a classical vocalist. Instead, she referred to her voice as a jazz instrument.
She was being too modest, jazz musician-educator-writer Lewis Porter, author of "Playback with Lewis Porter" on Substack, told IBD.
"Early on, she had fine voice quality," Porter said. "Later, she had a knack for allowing her voice to sound like a jazz instrument. She said a lot of times I feel like I'm a horn because jazz people use that word. Her voice is very rich and very moving. If you're interested in just hearing her sing, probably the best example is her recordings for the Commodore record label in 1944. Unfortunately, many people are more familiar with her last recordings, where she has a kind of a crackling voice," probably due to drug and alcohol abuse.
Holiday's life swung up and down. One peak occurred in 1938 when she joined Artie Shaw's Orchestra, helping it remain one of America's first racially integrated bands. Many venues refused to let them perform precisely because they were integrated, according to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.
Other peaks were her performances at New York's famed Carnegie Hall in 1944 and 1956. Likewise, several films have been made about her life.
Make A Statement Like Holiday
Some of Holiday's own notoriety was reflected from the spotlight her music shined on social ills. "Strange Fruit" — with its imagery of Black bodies hanging from trees like bruised fruit — condemns lynching and other forms of racial violence. Yet some radio stations refused to air it. "It is her most famous song today, but in her lifetime she was more known for 'Them There Eyes' and 'Trav'lin' Light,'" Porter said.
Holiday's biggest demons were drugs and alcohol. The Federal Bureau of Investigation pursued her for it, Porter says. She served a year and a day in one prison stretch, ending in May 1948.
Afterward, the New York City police confiscated her cabaret performer's license, blocking her from performing in nightclubs that served liquor. Her income suffered, but she could still perform outside of New York City and in Big Apple theaters that did not have bars, Porter says.
Holiday entered Harlem's Metropolitan Hospital in 1959 after years of drug and alcohol abuse. One or more police were posted outside her hospital room to bar drug dealers, but they left their post when charges were dropped.
"The idea (was) that (charges) would be reinstated when she got out of the hospital," Porter said. But shortly, she died there at 44 years of age.
Her life was short. Her music lives on.
Holiday's Keys:
- Legendary jazz vocalist won four Grammy Awards, all posthumously. Inducted into the Grammy, National Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll halls of fame.
- Overcame: Lifelong poverty and addiction problems.
- Lesson: "If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."
