Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eleanora Fagan was born on the 7th of April 1915 in Philadelphia and spent her first decade moving between relatives and institutions. Her mother Sarah Julia Fagan moved to Philadelphia to give birth after being evicted from her parents' home in Baltimore. The child was raised largely by her grandmother Martha Miller after her father Clarence Halliday abandoned the family.
A young teenager named Eleanora Fagan took her professional name from actress Billie Dove and her father's surname in the early 1930s. Producer John Hammond heard her at Covan's club in 1933 and arranged for her recording debut with Benny Goodman. Her first hit Riffin the Scotch sold 5,000 copies and established her as a unique force in the industry.
Billie Holiday performed Strange Fruit at the integrated nightclub Café Society in 1939 as a direct response to the death of her father who was denied medical treatment due to racial prejudice. The song written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan became a top-twenty hit and sold a million copies. It remained in her repertoire for twenty years as a weapon of protest against racial violence.
On the 16th of May 1947 Billie Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics in her New York apartment and convicted to a prison sentence at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. Her conviction caused her to lose her New York City Cabaret Card which prevented her from working in any venue that sold alcohol. She staged a comeback concert at Carnegie Hall on the 27th of March 1948 selling 2,700 tickets in advance.
Billie Holiday died at 3:10 a.m. on the 31st of May 1959 of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis while under house arrest at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. She died with only 70 cents in the bank having been swindled out of her earnings by her husband Louis McKay. Her funeral was held on the 21st of July 1959 and she was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.