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Billie Holiday
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Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. (She borrowed the name "Billie" from one of her favorite movie actresses, Billie Dove.) Born to an unwed teenage mother, Sadie Fagan, Holiday's childhood was one of poverty. Her father, Clarence Holiday (later a jazz guitarist) married Sadie three years later. He never lived with the family, choosing his musical career over them. As a child Billie started working very young, running errands and cleaning a house of prostitution's (a place where sexual acts are traded for money) marble stoop. It was here that she first heard Louis Armstrong (1900–1971) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937) records through the open windows.
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On January 22, 1949, jazz great Billie Holiday, who fifty years later would be recognized among artists who defined the 20th Century, was busted in a raid on Room 203 at the Mark Twain Hotel, 345 Taylor Street. Holiday had previously spent ten months in a federal slammer in West Virginia on a heroin charge in 1947. Holiday, 29 and already known around the world for her great singing talent as well as for her drug addiction, came to San Francisco with her manager-boyfriend, John Levy, 41, to perform at Cafe Society Uptown on Fillmore Street on the week of the bust at the Mark Twain. In a raid led by federal narcotics agent George H. White, the cops said they found the singer in posession of opium and a pipe. White testified that Holiday ran into the bathroom and tried to flush the evidence, which he retrieved. Fifty dollars worth of opium and part of a pipe were introduced into evidence.
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Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood, which greatly affected her life and career. Much of her childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, published in 1956. This account is known to contain many inaccuracies.[1]
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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 ... 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.
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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 ... 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.
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Billie Holiday was born on Wednesday, April 7, 1915 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was born Eleanora Fagan to her unwed parents. Her mother, 13-year-old Sadie Fagan, and her father, 15-year-old Clarence Holiday, married when Billie was three. As a child, she ran errands and scrubbed floors at Alice Dean's, a "house of ill repute." That was where she first heard the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, her two biggest influences.
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Billie Holiday