Billie Holiday
Eleanora Fagan Gough
BORN: April 7, 1915, Philadelphia, PA
DIED: July 17, 1959, New York, NY
The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal
feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop
vocals forever. Almost fifty years after her death, it's difficult to believe
that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan
Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like
Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through
what they were singing. Billie Holiday's highly stylized reading of this
blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long
tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry
for either the song or the band. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith
and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted
Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling"), but in truth her style was virtually
her own, quite a shock in an age of interchangeable crooners and band singers.
With her spirit shining through on every recording, Holiday's technical expertise
also excelled in comparison to the great majority of her contemporaries.
Often bored by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record
early in her career, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody,
phrasing behind the beat and often rejuvenating the standard melody with
harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young.
(She often said she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life
-- a series of abusive relationships, substance addictions, and periods of
depression -- undoubtedly assisted her legendary status, but Holiday's best
performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Strange Fruit," her own composition
"God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and accomplished vocal
performances ever recorded. More than technical ability, more than purity
of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of the best vocalists of the century
-- easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra -- was her relentlessly
individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly
nuanced performances.
Billie Holiday's chaotic life reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915
(a few reports say 1912) when she was born Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father,
Clarence Holiday, was a teenaged jazz guitarist and banjo player later to
play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. He never married her mother, Sadie
Fagan, and left while his daughter was still a baby. (She would later run
into him in New York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her sessions
before his death in 1937, she always avoided using him.) Holiday's mother
was also a young teenager at the time, and whether because of inexperience
or neglect, often left her daughter with uncaring relatives. Holiday was
sentenced to Catholic reform school at the age of ten, reportedly after she
admitted being raped. Though sentenced to stay until she became an adult,
a family friend helped get her released after just two years. With her mother,
she moved in 1927, first to New Jersey and soon after to Brooklyn.
In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domestic work, but soon began
moonlighting as a prostitute for the additional income. According to the
weighty Billie Holiday legend (which gained additional credence after her
notoriously apocryphal autobiography Lady Sings the Blues), her big singing
break came in 1933 when a laughable dancing audition at a speakeasy prompted
her accompanist to ask her if she could sing. In fact, Holiday was most likely
singing at clubs all over New York City as early as 1930-31. Whatever the
true story, she first gained some publicity in early 1933, when record producer
John Hammond -- only three years older than Holiday herself, and just at
the beginning of a legendary career -- wrote her up in a column for Melody
Maker and brought Benny Goodman to one of her performances. After recording
a demo at Columbia Studios, Holiday joined a small group led by Goodman to
make her commercial debut on November 27, 1933 with "Your Mother's Son-In-Law."
Though she didn't return to the studio for over a year, Billie Holiday spent
1934 moving up the rungs of the competitive New York bar scene. By early
1935, she made her debut at the Apollo Theater and appeared in a one-reeler
film with Duke Ellington. During the last half of 1935, Holiday finally entered
the studio again and recorded a total of four sessions. With a pick-up band
supervised by pianist Teddy Wilson, she recorded a series of obscure, forgettable
songs straight from the gutters of Tin Pan Alley -- in other words, the only
songs available to an obscure black band during the mid-'30s. (During the
swing era, music publishers kept the best songs strictly in the hands of
society orchestras and popular white singers.) Despite the poor song quality,
Holiday and various groups (including trumpeter Roy Eldridge, alto Johnny
Hodges, and tenors Ben Webster and Chu Berry) energized flat songs like "What
a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Twenty-Four Hours a Day" and "If You Were Mine"
(to say nothing of "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo" and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to
Town"). The great combo playing and Holiday's increasingly assured vocals
made them quite popular on Columbia's discount subsidiaries Brunswick and
Vocalion.
During 1936, Holiday toured with groups led by Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher
Henderson, then returned to New York for several more sessions. In late January
1937, she recorded several numbers with a small group culled from one of
Hammond's new discoveries, Count Basie's Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, who'd
briefly known Billie several years earlier, and trumpeter Buck Clayton were
to become especially attached to Holiday. The three did much of their best
recorded work together during the late '30s, and Holiday herself bestowed
the nickname Pres on Young, while he dubbed her Lady Day for her elegance.
By the spring of 1937, she began touring with Basie as the female complement
to his male singer, Jimmy Rushing. The association lasted less than a year,
however. Though officially she was fired from the band for being temperamental
and unreliable, shadowy influences higher up in the publishing world reportedly
commanded the action after she refused to begin singing '20s female blues
standards.
At least temporarily, the move actually benefited Holiday -- less than a
month after leaving Basie, she was hired by Artie Shaw's popular band. She
began singing with the group in 1938, one of the first instances of a black
female appearing with a white group. Despite the continuing support of the
entire band, however, show promoters and radio sponsors soon began objecting
to Holiday -- based on her unorthodox singing style almost as much as her
race. After a series of escalating indignities, Holiday quit the band in
disgust. Yet again, her judgment proved valuable; the added freedom allowed
her to take a gig at a hip new club named Café Society, the first
popular nightspot with an inter-racial audience. There, Billie Holiday learned
the song that would catapult her career to a new level: "Strange Fruit."
The standard, written by Café Society regular Lewis Allen and forever
tied to Holiday, is an anguished reprisal of the intense racism still persistent
in the South. Though Holiday initially expressed doubts about adding such
a bald, uncompromising song to her repertoire, she pulled it off thanks largely
to her powers of nuance and subtlety. "Strange Fruit" soon became the highlight
of her performances. Though John Hammond refused to record it (not for its
politics but for its overly pungent imagery), he allowed Holiday a bit of
leverage to record for Commodore, the label owned by jazz record-store owner
Milt Gabler. Once released, "Strange Fruit" was banned by many radio outlets,
though the growing jukebox industry (and the inclusion of the excellent "Fine
and Mellow" on the flip) made it a rather large, though controversial, hit.
She continued recording for Columbia labels until 1942, and hit big again
with her most famous composition, 1941's "God Bless the Child." Gabler, who
also worked A&R for Decca, signed her to the label in 1944 to record
"Lover Man," a song written especially for her and her third big hit. Neatly
side-stepping the musician's union ban that afflicted her former label, Holiday
soon became a priority at Decca, earning the right to top-quality material
and lavish string sections for her sessions. She continued recording scattered
sessions for Decca during the rest of the '40s, and recorded several of her
best-loved songs including Bessie Smith's "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I
Do," "Them There Eyes," and "Crazy He Calls Me."
Though her artistry was at its peak, Billie Holiday's emotional life began
a turbulent period during the mid-'40s. Already heavily into alcohol and
marijuana, she began smoking opium early in the decade with her first husband,
Johnnie Monroe. The marriage didn't last, but hot on its heels came a second
marriage to trumpeter Joe Guy and a move to heroin. Despite her triumphant
concert at New York's Town Hall and a small film role -- as a maid (!) --
with Louis Armstrong in 1947's New Orleans, she lost a good deal of money
running her own orchestra with Joe Guy. Her mother's death soon after affected
her deeply, and in 1947 she was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced
to eight months in prison.
Unfortunately, Holiday's troubles only continued after her release. The drug
charge made it impossible for her to get a cabaret card, so nightclub performances
were out of the question. Plagued by various celebrity hawks from all portions
of the underworld (jazz, drugs, song publishing, etc.), she soldiered on
for Decca until 1950. Two years later, she began recording for jazz entrepreneur
Norman Granz, owner of the excellent labels Clef, Norgran, and by 1956, Verve.
The recordings returned her to the small-group intimacy of her Columbia work,
and reunited her with Ben Webster as well as other top-flight musicians such
as Oscar Peterson, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Charlie Shavers. Though the
ravages of a hard life were beginning to take their toll on her voice, many
of Holiday's mid-'50s recordings are just as intense and beautiful as her
classic work.
During 1954, Holiday toured Europe to great acclaim, and her 1956 autobiography
brought her even more fame (or notoriety). She made her last great appearance
in 1957, on the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz with Webster, Lester
Young, and Coleman Hawkins providing a close backing. One year later, the
Lady in Satin LP clothed her naked, increasingly hoarse voice with the overwrought
strings of Ray Ellis. During her final year, she made two more appearances
in Europe before collapsing in May 1959 of heart and liver disease. Still
procuring heroin while on her death bed, Holiday was arrested for possession
in her private room and died on July 17, her system completely unable to
fight both withdrawal and heart disease at the same time. Her cult of influence
spread quickly after her death and gave her more fame than she'd enjoyed
in life. The 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross struggling
to overcome the conflicting myths of Holiday's life, but the film also illuminated
her tragic life and introduced many future fans. By the digital age, virtually
all of Holiday's recorded material had been reissued: by Columbia (nine volumes
of The Quintessential Billie Holiday), Decca (The Complete Decca Recordings),
and Verve (The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959). ~ John Bush,
All Music Guide
One of the most famous female jazz/blues singers, Billie Holiday only appeared
in one feature film, New Orleans, but her enduring music has been heard on
many soundtracks. Her tragic life was recounted in 1972 in Lady Sings the
Blues. Holiday was played by Diana Ross. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide