Billie Holiday
Eleanora Fagan was born on the 7th of April 1915, in Philadelphia to an unwed teenage couple named Clarence Halliday and Sarah Julia "Sadie" Fagan. Her mother moved to Philadelphia at age 19 after being evicted from her parents' home in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore for becoming pregnant. With no support from her own parents, Sadie made arrangements for Eleanora to stay with her older married half-sister Eva Miller. Shortly after the child was born, her father abandoned his family to pursue a career as a jazz banjo player and guitarist. Some historians dispute this paternity because a copy of her birth certificate lists her father as Frank DeViese. Other historians consider this an anomaly inserted by hospital or government workers.
Holiday grew up in Baltimore during a very difficult childhood. Her mother often took what were then known as transportation jobs serving on passenger railroads. Holiday was raised largely by Martha Miller and suffered from her mother's absences while she worked long hours. At age nine, Holiday attended Saint Frances Academy but frequently skipped classes. This resulted in her being brought before the juvenile court at age nine. She was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school for girls where nuns locked her in a room with a dead girl overnight as punishment for misbehavior. The experience traumatized her so much that for years she would dream about it and wake up hollering and screaming.
After nine months she was released on the 3rd of October 1925, back to her mother. Sadie had opened a restaurant called the East Side Grill and they worked long hours there. Holiday dropped out of school at age 11. On the 24th of December 1926, Harris came home to discover a neighbor attempting to rape Holiday. She successfully fought back and he was arrested. Officials sent Holiday back to the House of the Good Shepherd under protective custody as a state witness in the rape case. She was released in February 1927 when she was nearly 12. She found a job running errands in a brothel and scrubbed marble steps and kitchen floors of neighborhood homes.
By the end of 1928, Holiday's mother moved to Harlem again leaving Holiday with Martha Miller. By early 1929, Holiday joined her mother in Harlem. As a young teenager, Holiday started singing in nightclubs in Harlem. She took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove an actress she admired and Clarence Halliday her father. At the outset of her career she spelled her last name Halliday but eventually changed it to Holiday his performing name.
The young singer teamed up with a neighbor tenor saxophone player Kenneth Hollan. They were a team from 1929 to 1931 performing at clubs such as the Grey Dawn Pod's and Jerry's on 133rd Street and the Brooklyn Elks Club. Benny Goodman recalled hearing Holiday in 1931 at the Bright Spot. As her reputation grew she played in many clubs including the Mexico's and the Alhambra Bar and Grill where she met Charles Linton a vocalist who later worked with Chick Webb. It was also during this period that she connected with her father who was playing in Fletcher Henderson's band.
Late in 1932 seventeen-year-old Holiday replaced the singer Monette Moore at Covan's a club on West 132nd Street. Producer John Hammond loved Moore's singing and had come to hear her there. Hammond first heard Holiday in early 1933. He arranged for Holiday to make her recording debut at age 18 in November 1933 with Benny Goodman. She recorded two songs: Your Mother's Son-In-Law and Riffin' the Scotch. The latter being her first hit. Son-in-Law sold 300 copies while Riffin' the Scotch released on November 11 sold 5,000 copies.
In 1935 Holiday was signed to Brunswick by John Hammond to record pop tunes with pianist Teddy Wilson in the swing style for the growing jukebox trade. They were allowed to improvise on the material. Holiday's improvisation of melody to fit the emotion was highly skillful. Their first collaboration included What a Little Moonlight Can Do and Miss Brown to You. What a Little Moonlight Can Do has been deemed her claim to fame.
Brunswick did not favor the recording session because producers wanted Holiday to sound more like Cleo Brown. However after What a Little Moonlight Can Do was successful the company began considering Holiday an artist in her own right. She began recording under her own name a year later for Vocalion in sessions produced by Hammond and Bernie Hanighen. Hammond said the Wilson-Holiday records from 1935 to 1938 were a great asset to Brunswick. According to Hammond Brunswick was broke and unable to record many jazz tunes.
Wilson Holiday Young and other musicians came into the studio without written arrangements reducing the recording cost. Brunswick paid Holiday a flat fee rather than royalties which saved the company money. I Cried for You sold 15,000 copies which Hammond called a giant hit for Brunswick. Most records that made money sold around three to four thousand. Another frequent accompanist was tenor saxophonist Lester Young who had been a boarder at her mother's house in 1934. Young said you can hear that on some of the old records it sounds like two of the same voices or the same mind.
Holiday was in the middle of recording for Columbia in the late 1930s when she was introduced to Strange Fruit a song by Abel Meeropol based on his poem about lynching. Meeropol a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx used the pseudonym Lewis Allan for the poem set to music and performed at teachers' union meetings. It was eventually heard by Barney Josephson proprietor of Café Society an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village who introduced it to Holiday.
She performed it at the club in 1939 with some trepidation fearing possible retaliation. She later said that the imagery of the song reminded her of her father's death and that this played a role in her resistance to performing it. For her performance of Strange Fruit at the Café Society she had waiters silence the crowd when the song began. During the song's long introduction lights dimmed and all movement had to cease. As Holiday began singing only a small spotlight illuminated her face.
On the final note all lights went out and when they came back on Holiday was gone. Holiday said her father Clarence Holiday was denied medical treatment for a fatal lung disorder because of racial prejudice. When Holiday's producers at Columbia found the subject matter too sensitive Milt Gabler agreed to record it for his Commodore Records label on the 20th of April 1939. The version I recorded for Commodore became my biggest-selling record according to Holiday. Strange Fruit was the equivalent of a top-twenty hit in the 1930s selling a million records.
By 1947 Holiday was at her commercial peak having made $250,000 in the three previous years. She was ranked second in the DownBeat poll for 1946 and 1947 her highest ranking in that poll. On the 16th of May 1947 Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics in her New York apartment. On May 27 she was in court. It was called The United States of America versus Billie Holiday and that's just the way it felt she recalled.
During the trial she heard that her lawyer would not come to the trial to represent her. In plain English that meant no one in the world was interested in looking out for me she said. Dehydrated and unable to hold down food she pleaded guilty and asked to be sent to the hospital. The district attorney spoke in her defense saying this is a case of a drug addict but more serious however than most of our cases Miss Holiday is a professional entertainer and among the higher rank as far as income was concerned. She was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia.
The drug possession conviction caused her to lose her New York City Cabaret Card preventing her from working anywhere that sold alcohol. Thereafter she performed in concert venues and theaters. According to writer Johann Hari the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry J. Anslinger had been targeting Holiday since at least 1939 when she started to perform Strange Fruit. However according to author Lewis Porter there was no federal campaign to stop Holiday from singing the song.
Ed Fishman who had competed with Joe Glaser to be Holiday's manager thought of a comeback concert at Carnegie Hall. Holiday hesitated unsure audiences would accept her after the arrest. She gave in and agreed to appear. On the 27th of March 1948 Holiday played Carnegie Hall to a sold-out crowd. Two thousand seven hundred tickets were sold in advance a record at the time for the venue. Her popularity was unusual because she did not have a current hit record. Her last record to reach the charts was Lover Man in 1945.
Holiday sang 32 songs at the Carnegie concert by her count including Cole Porter's Night and Day and her 1930s hit Strange Fruit. During the show someone sent her a box of gardenias. My old trademark Holiday said. I took them out of box and fastened them smack to the side of my head without even looking twice. There was a hatpin in the gardenias and Holiday unknowingly stuck it into the side of her head. I didn't feel anything until the blood started rushing down in my eyes and ears she said.
Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues was ghostwritten by William Dufty and published in 1956. Dufty a New York Post writer and editor then married to Holiday's close friend Maely Dufty wrote the book quickly from a series of conversations with the singer in the Duftys' 93rd Street apartment. He also drew on the work of earlier interviewers and intended to let Holiday tell her story in her own way. In
his 2015 study Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth John Szwed argued that Lady Sings the Blues is a generally accurate account of her life but that co-writer Dufty was forced to water down or suppress material by the threat of legal action.
On the 28th of March 1957 Holiday married Louis McKay a mob enforcer. McKay like most of the men in her life was abusive. They were separated at the time of her death but McKay had plans to start a chain of Billie Holiday vocal studios on the model of the Arthur Murray dance schools. By early 1959 Holiday was diagnosed with cirrhosis. Although she had initially stopped drinking on her doctor's orders it was not long before Holiday relapsed. By May 1959 she had lost weight.
Her manager Joe Glaser jazz critic Leonard Feather photojournalist Allan Morrison and the singer's own friends all tried in vain to persuade her to go to a hospital. On the 31st of May 1959 Holiday was finally taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of both liver and heart disease. While in the hospital special agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics came to her room and placed her under house arrest handcuffing her to the bed for narcotics possession. Two days later she died at age 44 at 3:10 a.m. of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis.
Holiday's public stature grew in the following years. In 1961 she was voted to the Down Beat Hall Of Fame and soon after Columbia reissued nearly one hundred of her early records. In 1972 Diana Ross's portrayal of Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe. Holiday was posthumously nominated for 23 Grammy awards.
Billie Holiday received several Esquire Magazine awards during her
lifetime. Her posthumous awards also include being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame. In 1985 a statue of Billie Holiday was erected in Baltimore. The statue was completed in 1993 with additional panels of images inspired by her seminal song Strange Fruit. The Billie Holiday Monument is located at Pennsylvania and West Lafayette avenues in Baltimore's Upton neighborhood.
In 2019 Chirlane McCray announced that New York City would build a statue honoring Holiday near Queens Borough Hall. Frank O'Hara's poem from 1959 The Day Lady Died concludes with an impression of Holiday performing at the Five Spot Café at the end of her career. The song Angel of Harlem by Irish rock band U2 released as a single in December 1988 was written as a homage to Holiday. In 1994 as part of the Legends of American Music series the United States Postal Service issued commemorative stamps bearing Holiday's image.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When was Billie Holiday born and where did she grow up?
Eleanora Fagan, known professionally as Billie Holiday, was born on the 7th of April 1915 in Philadelphia. She grew up in Baltimore during a difficult childhood marked by her mother's absences while working transportation jobs.
How did Billie Holiday get her stage name and when did she start performing professionally?
Billie Holiday took her professional pseudonym from actress Billie Dove and her father Clarence Halliday. She began singing professionally in Harlem nightclubs around 1929 after joining her mother there in early 1929.
What song made Billie Holiday famous and when was it recorded for Commodore Records?
Strange Fruit became Billie Holiday's biggest-selling record and is considered her claim to fame. Her producers at Columbia found the subject matter too sensitive so Milt Gabler agreed to record it for his Commodore Records label on the 20th of April 1939.
Why was Billie Holiday arrested in 1947 and what were the consequences of that conviction?
Billie Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics in her New York apartment on the 16th of May 1947. The conviction caused her to lose her New York City Cabaret Card which prevented her from working anywhere that sold alcohol.
When did Billie Holiday die and what medical conditions contributed to her death?
Billie Holiday died two days after being taken to Metropolitan Hospital on the 31st of May 1959 at age 44. She suffered from pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis.