Billie Holiday

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan on the 7th of April, 1915, died with seventy cents in the bank. She had made a quarter of a million dollars in the three years leading up to her arrest in 1947. She had sold a million copies of a song so dangerous that her own record label refused to touch it. She had sung at Carnegie Hall to a sold-out crowd of 2,700 people without a single record on the charts. What does it mean that someone capable of all that died nearly penniless, handcuffed to a hospital bed, under arrest for narcotics possession? The life of Billie Holiday is a story about genius and racial terror, about a voice that sounded like an instrument and a country that treated her like a criminal. How did a girl from Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood become the person Frank Sinatra called the most important influence on American popular singing in twenty years? And what drove the same nation that adored her to pursue her until there was almost nothing left?

  214795566

• 2. Baltimore and Harlem

  ›

  Eleanora Fagan's father, Clarence Halliday, abandoned his family shortly after she was born to pursue a career as a jazz banjo player and guitarist. Some historians have disputed his paternity; a copy of her birth certificate in the Baltimore archives lists her father as "Frank DeViese". Her mother, Sarah Fagan, was nineteen when she moved to Philadelphia after being evicted from her parents' home for becoming pregnant. With no support from her own parents, Sarah arranged for her daughter to stay with her older half-sister, Eva Miller, and Eva's mother-in-law, Martha Miller, in Baltimore.

  Holiday's early years in Baltimore were shaped largely by absence. Her mother often took what were then called "transportation jobs" on passenger railroads, leaving Holiday in the care of the Millers for much of her first decade of life. At nine, she was brought before juvenile court for skipping school and sent to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school for girls, where the nuns locked her in a room with a dead girl overnight as punishment. The experience traumatized her, and for years she would, as she later said, "dream about it and wake up hollering and screaming." She was released on the 3rd of October, 1925, after nine months. She dropped out of school at eleven.

  On the 24th of December, 1926, her mother came home to find a neighbor attempting to rape Holiday. She fought him off. Officials sent Holiday back to the House of the Good Shepherd as a state witness in the rape case. She was released in February 1927, when she was nearly twelve. Running errands in a brothel and scrubbing floors for neighborhood homes, she heard the records of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith for the first time. She cited Armstrong's "West End Blues" as an early influence, pointing specifically to the scat section duet with the clarinet. By early 1929, she had joined her mother in Harlem.

  25555487

• 3. The Voice John Hammond Found

  ›

  Late in 1932, seventeen-year-old Holiday replaced a singer named Monette Moore at Covan's, a club on West 132nd Street. Producer John Hammond had come to hear Moore. Instead, he heard Holiday. Hammond arranged for her to make her recording debut at eighteen, in November 1933, with Benny Goodman. Her first release, "Your Mother's Son-In-Law", sold 300 copies. The second, "Riffin' the Scotch", sold 5,000. Hammond said of her, "Her singing almost changed my music tastes and my musical life, because she was the first girl singer I'd come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius."

  In 1935, Hammond signed Holiday to Brunswick to record pop tunes with pianist Teddy Wilson for the growing jukebox trade. Brunswick's producers initially resisted; they wanted Holiday to sound more like Cleo Brown. Their first session produced "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which eventually became her "claim to fame". Once that recording proved successful, the label began treating her as an artist in her own right. Hammond noted that those Wilson-Holiday sessions from 1935 to 1938 were recorded cheaply, without written arrangements, because Brunswick was broke. The label paid Holiday a flat fee rather than royalties. "I Cried for You" from those sessions sold 15,000 copies, which Hammond called "a giant hit for Brunswick... Most records that made money sold around three to four thousand."

  Tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had boarded at Holiday's mother's house in 1934, became one of her most frequent accompanists. Young described their musical rapport by saying, "I think you can hear that on some of the old records... Some time I'd sit down and listen to 'em myself, and it sound like two of the same voices... or the same mind, or something like that." Young gave her the name "Lady Day". She called him "Prez".

  25455795

• 4. Race, Bandstands, and the South

  ›

  In late 1937, Holiday joined Count Basie's band as a big-band vocalist. The conditions were often poor, with many one-nighters moving from city to city. Basie said of her, "When she rehearsed with the band, it was really just a matter of getting her tunes like she wanted them, because she knew how she wanted to sound and you couldn't tell her what to do." On the 16th of January, 1938, the same night Benny Goodman performed his legendary Carnegie Hall jazz concert, the Basie band and Chick Webb's band, featuring Ella Fitzgerald, held a battle at the Savoy Ballroom. Metronome declared Basie and Holiday the winners; DownBeat sided with Webb and Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald won a straw poll of the audience by a three-to-one margin.

  By February 1938, Holiday was no longer with Basie. She was hired by Artie Shaw a month later, making her among the first Black women to work full-time with a white orchestra on a tour of the segregated American South. Shaw would often defend her against racist policies. In her autobiography, Holiday describes an incident in which racist rules barred her from sitting on the bandstand with other vocalists. Shaw told her, "I want you on the band stand like Helen Forrest, Tony Pastor and everyone else." In Louisville, Kentucky, a man called her a slur and demanded she sing another song. Holiday lost her temper and had to be escorted off the stage.

  By November 1938, Holiday was asked to use the service elevator at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City rather than the one used by hotel guests. She left Shaw's band shortly after, later describing her situation: "I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room as did other members of the band... and I was made to leave and enter through the kitchen." Because she was under contract to a different record label, she was able to make only one record with Shaw, "Any Old Time". There are no surviving live recordings of Holiday with his band.

  54515792

• 5. Strange Fruit

  ›

  "Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who used the pseudonym "Lewis Allan" for a poem about lynching that he set to music and performed at teachers' union meetings. Barney Josephson, the proprietor of Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, heard it and introduced it to Holiday. She performed it there in 1939 with some trepidation, fearing retaliation. She later said the imagery reminded her of her father's death, writing in her autobiography, "It reminds me of how Pop died, but I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South."

  For her performance at Cafe Society, Holiday had waiters silence the crowd before the song began. During its long introduction, the lights dimmed and all movement had to cease. Only a small spotlight illuminated her face. On the final note, the lights went out entirely, and when they came back on, Holiday was gone. When her Columbia producers found the subject too sensitive, Milt Gabler recorded it for Commodore Records on the 20th of April, 1939. The Commodore release got no radio airplay, yet the song sold well enough that Gabler attributed most of the sales to the flip side, "Fine and Mellow". Holiday later said the "Strange Fruit" version she recorded for Commodore "became my biggest-selling record", the equivalent of a top-twenty hit, selling a million records.

  Scholar Angela Y. Davis, in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, described Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit" as one of the earliest and most influential musical statements against racial violence in the United States. Holiday continued to perform the song for twenty years, recording it again for Verve. According to author Lewis Porter, a 2015 book by journalist Johann Hari first advanced the claim that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics deliberately targeted Holiday for singing "Strange Fruit"; Porter writes that this allegation did not appear elsewhere before that.

  797227166

• 6. God Bless the Child

  ›

  Holiday's most popular and most covered record grew out of an argument. When Holiday asked her mother, Sadie, nicknamed "The Duchess", for money one night at the restaurant Sadie ran using funds her daughter had provided, Sadie turned her down. Holiday stormed out shouting, "God bless the child that's got his own." With pianist Arthur Herzog Jr., she wrote a song built on that line. Herzog later claimed she contributed only a few lyrics, saying she came up with the line itself from a dinner conversation the two had. "God Bless the Child" reached number 25 on the charts in 1941 and ranked third in Billboard's year-end songs. It sold over a million copies and was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1976.

  On the 12th of June, 1942, Holiday recorded "Trav'lin' Light" with Paul Whiteman for Capitol Records, using the pseudonym "Lady Day" because she was under contract to Columbia. The song reached number 23 on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, then called the Harlem Hit Parade. A review in Life magazine on the 11th of October, 1943, called her "the most distinctive style of any popular vocalist", noting she was imitated by other vocalists.

  Milt Gabler signed Holiday to Decca on the 7th of August, 1944. Her first Decca recording, "Lover Man", became one of her biggest hits. She had wanted strings behind her on the recording, an arrangement more associated with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. "I went on my knees to him", she said of Gabler. "I didn't want to do it with the ordinary six pieces. I begged Milt and told him I had to have strings behind me." When she entered the studio on the 4th of October, 1944, and saw the string ensemble, she walked out overwhelmed. Gabler said, "I made Billie a real pop singer. That was right in her."

  545477870

• 7. Carnegie Hall and the Law

  ›

  By 1947, Holiday had earned $250,000 in the previous three years and ranked second in the DownBeat poll two years running. On the 16th of May, 1947, she was arrested for narcotics possession in her New York apartment. She recalled the trial: "It was called 'The United States of America versus Billie Holiday'. And that's just the way it felt." She pleaded guilty, dehydrated and unable to hold down food, and asked to be sent to a hospital instead of prison. She was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. The drug conviction cost her New York City Cabaret Card, barring her from any venue that sold alcohol.

  She was released early, on the 16th of March, 1948, for good behavior. Ed Fishman, who had competed to be her manager, proposed a comeback concert at Carnegie Hall. Holiday hesitated. She gave in. On the 27th of March, 1948, she played Carnegie Hall to a sold-out crowd. 2,700 tickets had been sold in advance, a record at the time for the venue. She had no current hit record; "Lover Man" in 1945 was the last to chart. She sang 32 songs, including Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and "Strange Fruit". During the show, someone sent her a box of gardenias. She pinned them to her hair without noticing a hatpin inside, and said she "didn't feel anything until the blood started rushing down in my eyes and ears". After her third curtain call, she passed out.

  On the 10th of November, 1956, Holiday performed two concerts to packed audiences at Carnegie Hall, making it her third sold-out performance there. Critic Nat Hentoff of DownBeat magazine attended and wrote of her that night: "Billie was in superior form to what had sometimes been the case in the last years of her life. Not only was there assurance of phrasing and intonation; but there was also an outgoing warmth, a palpable eagerness to reach and touch the audience." The musicians themselves applauded her.

  6654797181

• 8. Lady in Satin

  ›

  Lady in Satin, released in 1958, was recorded with a forty-piece orchestra conducted and arranged by Ray Ellis. Ellis said of the sessions that the most emotional moment was Holiday listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You", tears in her eyes. He also admitted he was initially unhappy with her performance, listening musically rather than emotionally, and that he only understood how great it was when he heard the final mix weeks later.

  By early 1959, Holiday had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. Although she had initially stopped drinking on doctor's orders, she relapsed. By May 1959, she had lost twenty pounds. On the 31st of May, 1959, she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of both liver and heart disease. Special agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics came to her hospital room and handcuffed her to the bed for narcotics possession. On the 15th of July, she received last rites. Two days later, at 3:10 a.m. on the 17th of July, 1959, she died at age 44 of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis.

  Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had served as narrator at her 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts, described her death in the sleeve notes for The Essential Billie Holiday in 1961: "Billie Holiday died in Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, the 17th of July 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill." She had seventy cents in the bank. Her funeral was held on the 21st of July, 1959, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. A songwriter and theater producer named Michael P. Grace II paid for the funeral. When The New York Times published its obituary, it ran on page 15, without a byline. Her best recordings from the 1930s were mostly out of print.

  54668254