Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is widely regarded as one of the greatest jazz vocalists in American history.^[5] Raised largely in Baltimore by her mother Sadie Fagan after her father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, left the family, she endured a childhood marked by poverty, abuse, and institutional neglect. She was sent to a reform school as a young girl and by her early teens had moved to New York, where she and her mother survived in Harlem.

Holiday began singing in Harlem clubs in the early 1930s, developing a style utterly unlike the jazz vocalists of her era. Where others ornamented and decorated melodies, she bent and delayed them, treating the voice like a horn and drawing on blues phrasing to create a quality of intimacy and vulnerability that felt almost conversational.^[1] Producer John Hammond heard her at a Harlem club in 1933 and arranged her first recording sessions. Through the late 1930s, she recorded prolifically for Columbia, often backed by the era's greatest jazz musicians including Lester Young and Teddy Wilson.

The defining moment of her career came in 1939, when she first performed "Strange Fruit" at Cafe Society, New York's first racially integrated nightclub.^[2] The song, a brutal indictment of lynching in America written by schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, was refused by Columbia Records, which feared commercial backlash from Southern markets. Holiday recorded it independently for Commodore Records in April 1939. It became the best-selling record of her career, selling one million copies, though Southern radio stations largely refused to air it.

Her connection to the song was personal as well as political. Her father, Clarence Holiday, died at age 39 after being turned away from a segregated hospital. Holiday wrote in her autobiography that the song reminded her of how her father died, and that she kept singing it because the things that killed him were still happening.^[4]

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, under commissioner Harry Anslinger, targeted Holiday specifically because of her political associations and her performance of "Strange Fruit."^[4] She was convicted on drug charges in 1947 and imprisoned for over a year. Upon release, New York City revoked her cabaret performer's license, crippling her career. Federal agents arrested her in her hospital bed in the final weeks of her life. She died on July 17, 1959, at age 44.

Holiday's artistic legacy spans the full breadth of mid-century American music. Albums including Lady in Satin (1958) and her Commodore recordings, compiled posthumously on the album Strange Fruit (Atlantic, 1972), document her range as an interpreter. Time magazine named "Strange Fruit" the Song of the Century in 1999.^[1] She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and her recordings are preserved in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Her influence extends to virtually every jazz and pop vocalist who followed her.