Billie Holiday

Harlem and the first records

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on 7 April 1915 and grew up in Baltimore. She was in Harlem by early 1929. Her stage name came from the actress Billie Dove and from her father, who performed as Clarence Holiday. She never had technical training and never learned to read music.

In late 1932 she replaced Monette Moore at Covan's, a club on West 132nd Street, and the producer John Hammond first heard her there in early 1933. He arranged her recording debut for November 1933, when she was 18, with Benny Goodman: "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the Scotch". From 1935 Hammond had her record for Brunswick with the pianist Teddy Wilson. They made 95 recordings together, and Wilson accompanied her more than any other musician. The tenor saxophonist Lester Young, a frequent partner, gave her the nickname Lady Day, and she called him Prez. In 1937 and 1938 she sang with Count Basie and then Artie Shaw.

Strange Fruit and the Decca years

In 1939 she began singing Strange Fruit at Cafe Society, the integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village. Columbia worried about the reaction of record retailers in the South, so Milt Gabler recorded it for his Commodore label on 20 April 1939. The Library of Congress essay on the record says it became the best selling record of her career. The same session produced Fine and Mellow, a blues she wrote herself.

With the pianist Arthur Herzog Jr. she wrote God Bless the Child, first recorded on 9 May 1941. Gabler later became an A&R man at Decca and signed her there on 7 August 1944. Her first Decca recording was Lover Man, which reached number 5 on the R&B chart and number 16 on the pop chart. On 27 March 1948 she played a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert, with 2,700 tickets sold in advance, a record for the hall at the time.

Clef, Verve and the autobiography

From 1952 she recorded for Norman Granz on Clef and then Verve, mostly with small groups. Her first European tour began in Stockholm in January 1954. Her autobiography, written with William Dufty, appeared in 1956 together with the album Lady Sings the Blues, which gathered new versions of her best-known songs. On 10 November 1956 she gave two concerts at Carnegie Hall, and in 1957 she sang Fine and Mellow on the CBS television program The Sound of Jazz beside Lester Young. Body and Soul appeared on Verve the same year.

Lady in Satin and the last sessions

By 1957 she had made twelve albums for Granz and was unhappy, so she decided not to renew her contract. In October 1957 she contacted the Columbia producer Irving Townsend and asked to record with the bandleader Ray Ellis. The result was Lady in Satin in 1958, recorded with a 40-piece orchestra that included a three-piece choir. It opens with I'm a Fool to Want You. Ellis said the most emotional moment of the sessions was her listening to the playback of that song, with tears in her eyes. Reaction to the album has been mixed, and the Grammy Hall of Fame inducted it in 2000.

In March 1959 she made her final studio recordings for MGM, again with Ellis. Those sessions became Last Recording. She died in New York on 17 July 1959, aged 44.

Legacy

In 1961 she was voted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame, and Columbia reissued nearly one hundred of her early records. Frank Sinatra told Ebony in 1958 that she was "the greatest single musical influence on me". She entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, where Diana Ross inducted her and the Hall wrote that she changed jazz forever. Grammy Hall of Fame entries include God Bless the Child in 1976, Strange Fruit in 1978 and Lover Man in 1989.

Diana Ross played her in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues, and Andra Day played her in The United States vs. Billie Holiday in 2021. U2 wrote "Angel of Harlem" as a homage in 1988. A statue was erected in Baltimore in 1985, and in 1994 the United States Postal Service issued stamps bearing her image. The 2019 documentary Billie is built from interviews recorded in the 1970s by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who was researching a biography. One song she made her own without writing it, Good Morning Heartache, she recorded in January 1946.