Billie Holiday

Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915 to two unmarried teenagers. Her mother Sadie had been thrown out of her parents' house in the Sandtown-Winchester section of Baltimore for being pregnant and had come to Philadelphia at 19. The baby went back to Baltimore to be raised by a married half-aunt. Even the paternity is contested: a Baltimore birth certificate names a different man than the musician Clarence Halliday she claimed. She was in juvenile court at nine for truancy and sent to a Catholic reform school. She ran errands in a brothel and scrubbed marble steps and kitchen floors, and in that neighborhood she first heard Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on records. By 1929 she was in Harlem with her mother, singing in clubs.

John Hammond heard her in 1933 and put her in a studio with Benny Goodman. From 1935 the Teddy Wilson sessions produced the hits, "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" among them. Lester Young named her Lady Day and she named him Prez. She sang with Count Basie from late 1937, then Artie Shaw, one of the first Black women employed full time by a white bandleader. In 1939 the owner of Café Society handed her Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching song. Columbia refused it, so Milt Gabler cut it for Commodore on April 20, 1939. "Strange Fruit" became, by her account, her biggest-selling record: a million copies, and 20 years in her act. "God Bless the Child" came out of a line she threw at her mother in a fight about money. Her last album, Lady in Satin, appeared in 1958.

In November 1938 the Lincoln Hotel told her to use the service elevator because white guests had complained, and barred her from the bar and dining room. She left Shaw's band. On May 16, 1947 federal agents arrested her for narcotics, and the case went on the docket as The United States of America versus Billie Holiday. "And that's just the way it felt," she said. Her lawyer never appeared. She pleaded guilty and went to Alderson. The conviction cost her the cabaret card, which shut her out of every New York room that sold liquor. Her records fell out of print, and in 1958 she was paid 11 dollars in royalties. Whether Harry Anslinger's narcotics bureau hunted her for singing "Strange Fruit" is disputed. Johann Hari argues it. Lewis Porter says it appears nowhere before Hari's 2015 book.

She entered Metropolitan Hospital in New York on May 31, 1959 with liver and heart disease. Narcotics agents came to the room, arrested her, handcuffed her to the bed and posted a guard, which a court order lifted hours before she died at 3:10 in the morning on July 17, of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis. She was 44. There were 70 cents in her bank account and an estate of 1,000 dollars, and the New York Times ran her on page 15 without a byline. Then the estimate moved: the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1961, Columbia reissuing nearly a hundred early sides, 23 posthumous Grammy nominations, a statue in Baltimore's Upton in 1985.

Billie Holiday's life against the full span of the corpus.

• What a Little Moonlight Can Do song
  From the Teddy Wilson sessions. It became a standard. 1935
• Strange Fruit song
  Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching song, cut for Commodore after Columbia refused 1939
• Fine and Mellow song
  The B side, and the jukebox hit that carried the record 1939
• God Bless the Child song
  Written with Arthur Herzog Jr. and her most covered record 1941
• Lady Sings the Blues book
  Ghostwritten by William Dufty and unreliable on her early life 1956
• Lady in Satin album
  Her last album, recorded with strings and a wrecked voice 1958

• October 3, 1925 aged 10 Released from the House of the Good Shepherd at ten She had been sent there by a juvenile court for truancy.
• November 1933 aged 18 First recording session, with Benny Goodman, after John Hammond hears her
• 1937 aged ~22 Joins Count Basie's band
• November 1938 aged 23 Ordered to use the service elevator at the Lincoln Hotel and leaves Artie Shaw
• April 20, 1939 aged 24 Records Strange Fruit for Commodore Columbia had refused it. She said it became her biggest seller.
• May 16, 1947 aged 32 Arrested for narcotics possession in her New York apartment The conviction cost her the cabaret card she needed to work city clubs.
• March 27, 1948 aged 32 Sells out Carnegie Hall eleven days after leaving prison
• 1958 aged ~43 Records Lady in Satin and is paid 11 dollars in royalties for the year
• July 17, 1959 aged 44 Dies at Metropolitan Hospital, under arrest until hours before the end

• Bessie Smith 1892–1937
  Leading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues. heard on records in Baltimore
• Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
  Trumpeter and singer whose innovations and worldwide fame made jazz a central American art form. the phrasing she took from a trumpet
• Frank Sinatra 1915–1998
  Crooner and actor whose voice and charisma made him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. called her his greatest musical influence
• Nina Simone 1933–2003
  Singer and pianist who joined classical training to jazz and civil rights protest songs. carried the protest song forward
• Angela Davis b. 1944
  Political activist and academic whose scholarship on race, class, and prisons became globally influential. read her as a political artist
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. documented the lynchings the song names