A "Year 2000" Update of Billie's Biography
The text from the Biography on A&E Search Results for "Billie Holiday" :
Holiday (Holliday), Billie ~ 1915-1959
Jazz musician. Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Clarence Holiday — a guitarist who played with Fletcher Henderson’s big band, never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and eventually abandoned the family. Holiday (some sources say Holliday) grew up amidst wrenching poverty, neglect, and loneliness, and began working at the age of six; hearing, for the first time, the sweet sounds of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith while scrubbing the floors of a local brothel. At the age of ten, she was raped by a neighbor, and then sent to a home for “wayward girls.” She was jailed for prostitution at the age of 14.
By 1928, Holiday was living in Harlem, New York City, and had begun to look for work in local nightclubs, aspiring to be a dancer or a singer. She secured a job singing at Jerry Preston’s Log Cabin and soon found she could bring customers to tears with her melancholy singing style; she used her voice like an instrument, singing behind the beat in a feathery voice full of woe and longing. Consistently unreliable as she was appealing, Holiday could not keep a job and moved from one nightclub to another, gaining experience and exposure. In 1932, jazz producer John Hammond heard Holiday and arranged for her to record a few titles with Benny Goodman’s orchestra; from then on she recorded regularly for Columbia and eventually worked in a pickup band led by Teddy Wilson. Her voice and style continued to develop and flourish in the 1930s, and by 1937 she was making some of the finest recordings of her career with Buck Clayton and Lester Young, who gave her the name “Lady Day.” Together, the group turned second-rate love songs into jazz classics.
That same year, Holiday toured with Count Basie’s Orchestra, from which only a few precious recordings remain. She then fronted the all-white Artie Shaw’s Orchestra and experienced so much racial discrimination on the road that she eventually abandoned the tour and returned to New York. She began to perform regularly at Café Society, the interracial Greenwich Village haven for liberal intellectuals, music aficionados, and the political left. Around this time, Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit," a biting, anti-racist song depicting a lynching, which she always performed with a driving, understated intensity. Unfortunately, as Holiday’s following steadily increased, she slowly began to succumb to sadness and self-destructive behavior. By the early 1940s, she had embarked on a turbulent and abusive marriage to James Monroe, who introduced her to heroin and opium.
From 1944 to 1950, Holiday recorded with Decca and her singing further evolved; the way her increasingly limited range and delicately wavering voice rendered the phrases of her finely wrought songs lent them even more emotional weight and became her trademark style. During this period, she recorded “God Bless the Child,” “Don’t Explain,” “Them There Eyes,” and her biggest hit, “Lover Man.” In the meantime, Holiday’s personal life grew stormier and the repercussions of her drug-abuse more devastating. She spent the majority of 1947 in prison for heroin possession and lost her cabaret license. Upon her release, she could no longer sing at the popular clubs in New York City. However, she continued to grow in popularity because of the scandal and her seemingly glamorous, notorious reputation.
By the 1950s, Holiday’s voice had deteriorated tremendously due to years of abuse and she continued even faster down her destructive path of drugs, abusive relationships, and alcohol. In 1952, she began recording for Verve, but the once charming voice on the verge of breaking had now broken. Her 1958 album, Lady in Satin, revealed a tired Holiday, with a voice that barely croaked its lines, although the timing and phrasing were as intelligent as ever, if only not as inspired. In 1959, Holiday collapsed and was hospitalized; while on her deathbed, she was arrested once again for possession of narcotics. She died on July 17, 1959, of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44.
Although many still regard Holiday as a genius victim of horrible circumstances, recent research reveals a woman very much in control of her musical artistry, and very much aware of what she was doing and why. Will Friedwald describes Holiday in a music review as, “the woman who taught the world that the interaction and feeling of jazz musicians was the ultimate key to interpreting the American song lyric.”
© 2000 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.
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Billie Holiday
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posted by amiCreative @ 2/09/2005 01:04:00 PM
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