“She can express more emotion in one chorus than most actresses can in three acts.” - Jeanne Moreau.
July 17 this year marks fifty years since the death of Billie Holiday, also known as ‘Lady Day’. Billie is widely recognised as one of the all-time greatest singers of jazz and blues, if not the best.
But who was this intriguing woman? Half a century on, her sound and her story remain as compelling as ever, regardless of the fickle fashions of the day. To borrow a phrase from hip hop, “respect is burning”.
Acquainting myself with Billie’s story has been a hugely rewarding experience for me, I hope it will be for you too. Here is but a taste: an insight into her distinctive sound, and the tumultuous life experiences that shaped it.
The details of Billie’s early life are sketchy. She was born Eleonora Gough on April 7, 1915. She had a difficult, underprivileged childhood, which would continue to shape the rest of her life.
Billie started life in a poor neighbourhood of Baltimore, Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States. Her father left when she was very young. Her mother took off for New York not long after, leaving Billie in the care of relatives.
By age nine, Billie was going out to work, scrubbing floors and running errands. One establishment that she ran errands for was a bordello down the street. Instead of payment for her errands, she took her compensation in the form of spending time listening to records in the front room. She adored the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, the early blues singer. These would be her main musical influences for life.
At age ten, Billie reported that she had been raped. As a bizarre consequence, she was sent to a Catholic Reform School for wayward girls, with orders to remain there until she reached age twenty-one.
But at thirteen, Billie got out, with the help of a relative, and left for New York, to be with her mother. Despite her tender age, it was 1928, and everyone was living it up – Billie included. She would later admit, “I thought I was a real hip kitty”.
The Depression hit in 1929 and at the same time, Billie’s mother fell gravely ill. Hungry times followed. One winter’s day in 1932, a day when Billie remembered feeling “so hungry I could barely breathe”, she set out to look for work in the night clubs of Harlem.
As legend has it, Billie, barely seventeen, penniless and facing eviction, sang the tune, “Trav’lin’ All Alone” in a local club and brought the crowd to tears. She got the job, and took on the name Billie, after the popular film star, Billie Dove, and coupled it with her father’s surname, Holiday.
Spreadin’ Rhythm Around
It wasn’t long before Billie was working in several popular jazz clubs in Harlem. One night in 1933, the producer John Hammond caught her performance. He introduced her to the musician Benny Goodman, with whom Billie soon made her first record.
A steady stream of recordings followed. In fact, Billie would go on to record steadily throughout the late Thirties, the Fourties and Fifties, despite the ups and downs of her personal life.
First up was a series of recordings organised by the pianist Teddy Wilson, who brought together some of the finest musicians of the Swing era. Playing as “Billie Holiday and her Orchestra”, they reinterpreted pop tunes of the day in the new Swing style.
On these early cuts, Billie pioneered her method of improvising the melody to fit the emotion. These recordings remain a highly regarded part of the jazz library.
Live performances were plentiful. In the late Thirties, Billie appeared with acts including Duke Ellington and Count Basie’s Orchestra. She toured extensively with the Basie Band and the Artie Shaw Orchestra. With the latter, Billie became the first black woman to perform with an all-white band. She would go on to record with all three groups during the 1940’s.
Billie was especially fond of performing with saxophonist Lester Young, who had been a boarder in her mother’s house, and was also in the Basie Band. The two developed a strong musical rapport. Billie later said: “Well, I think you can hear it on some of the old records, you know. Some time I’d sit down and it sound like two of the same voices, if you don’t be careful, you know, or the same mind, or something like that”. Young gave Billie her nickname, “Lady Day”. She in turn dubbed him “Prez”.
The Sound of Lady Day
It wasn’t long before Billie’s vocal style was being recreated throughout America. She popularised a more personal and intimate approach to singing. Although her voice had limited range and was somewhat thin, its emotional impact could not be ignored. She conveyed a potent mix of strength and vulnerability.
Billie was musically untrained, but she had an excellent ear. Her style of shifting the natural position of the beat was strongly inspired by instrumentalists including Louis Armstrong. She said, “I feel like I’m playing a horn…What comes out is what I feel”. Elsewhere, she confided that, “I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it’s not music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodelling or something, not music.”
Aside from her innovations as a vocal stylist, Holiday also co-wrote at least ten well-known tunes. A number of these went on to become jazz standards, notably, “God Bless the Child”, “Fine and Mellow”, “Don’t Explain”, and “Lady Sings the Blues”.
Café Society and “Strange Fruit”
It was during her time performing at Café Society in the late Thirties that Billie’s popularity really took off and she became a celebrity. Café Society was a racially integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, New York, the first of its kind, frequented by film stars and intellectuals.
It was on the stage of Café Society in 1939 that Billie first performed “Strange Fruit”, a song about lynchings of black people in America. Written by Abe Meeropol, a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, the song was introduced to Billie by the owner of Café Society. The lyrics were so forthright that Billie feared reprisals. “The first time I sang it, I thought it was a mistake. There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping and cheering.”
“Strange Fruit” swiftly became one of Lady Day’s signature tunes, and cemented her popularity among left-leaning intellectuals. She approached her record company, Columbia, about recording the song, but they refused, considering it too “sensitive”. So she recorded it for Commodore records, and later for Verve. The song would go on to be her biggest selling record, and an anthem of the later Civil Rights movement.
Lady Day left Café Society for a stint in Hollywood. Bob Hope defended her once when she was being heckled, and Clark Gable fixed her car. She had a good time amidst the glamour. Yet as she later put it, she came home from Hollywood knowing more about clothes and make-up, but just as poor as ever. In 1947, Billie appeared in the film, “New Orleans”, alongside her idol, Louis Armstrong.
Billie’s Blues
Billie’s personal life was always tempestuous. She would marry three times, beginning in 1941, each time proving disastrous. Her first two husbands introduced her in turn to opium and heroin. The third was abusive physically and emotionally. She would continue to battle a heroin addiction for the rest of her life.
In May 1947, Holiday was convicted of drug possession. As she put it in her autobiography, “It was called the United States versus Billie Holiday, and that’s just the way it felt”. Lady Day was sentenced to a prison work camp, and didn’t sing a note during her ten month sentence. She agreed to a comeback concert ten days after her release, and stormed her way through 35 tunes.
By the 50’s, Billie’s way of life was taking its toll on her health. Although she continued to perform and record, her voice grew coarse, as seen in her later recordings. But the emotional impact remained profound.
Lady Day toured Europe in 1954 and 1958, and reportedly appreciated the European attitude to jazz. She released her autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues”, in 1956. Ghostwritten by William Dufty based on his interviews with her, Billie would cast doubt on the accuracy of the book’s contents, saying, “I ain’t never read that book”.
In 1957, she was reunited with Saxophonist, Lester “Prez” Young for an electrifying performance of her song, “Fine and Mellow”, on the Sound of Jazz TV program. Both would die within two years of this fine performance.
In May 1959, Billie entered hospital with liver and heart disease. In a final cruel twist, she was arrested in her hospital bed for earlier narcotics offences. She would remain under police guard at the hospital until her death two months later, of cirrhosis of the liver, on July 17, 1959.
She was just fourty-four. Fortunately, she left an extensive recorded legacy. Lady Day was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, honoured as an “early influence”.
An accomplished and pioneering talent, Lady Day made a profound contribution to the development of 20th Century music, with a style that remains engaging and uniquely moving. I will leave the last word to her. As Lady Day said on that 1957 Sound of Jazz program:
“The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, or chirpy and very happy. There’s two kinds of blues, there’s happy blues and there’s sad blues…I don’t know, the blues is sort of a mixed up thing, you just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life”.
