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| This one feels right. |
“Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.”
- PBS.org, American Masters Series (June 2006)
If your first experience of a piece of music or a particular performer happens decades after they impacted music, the fuss doesn’t always translate. Billie Holiday broke molds, minds and ran headlong into barriers her entire life. It’s a minor miracle she made it to adulthood, never mind an iconic place in pop culture. Because most of the fuss happened before the internet, I expect I’ll struggle to do her justice, but this feels like a good place to start.
“If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
- Billie Holiday (Biography, 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday)
While minor questions exist, most sources agree Holiday was born to two unwed teenagers in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent more of her childhood with her mother, Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan – her father, Clarence Halliday, left to pursue a career in music was she was very young - but, even given those circumstances, her home life veered between unstable and outright dangerous, as well as various cities (mostly Baltimore). Sources also generally agree spent her tween-to-teen years in a reform school (sometimes for her own protection) and doing chores and running errands at a brothel (and even getting arrested for prostitution, though that could be a wrong place, wrong time thing). The Biography piece claims she worked for a chance to listen to the madam’s Victrola instead of getting paid. Holiday recalled Bessie Smith’s “West End Blues” as a favorite, but she loved Louis Armstrong too.
After moving to Harlem to live with her mother again, Holiday, then 17, found work as a dancer-for-hire. When the dancing work slowed down, she asked the manager to let her sing. Though lacking in musical education of any kind, Holiday’s talent immediately came through. Over the next couple of year, she partnered with a tenor sax player named Kenneth Holan, working small venue and building a reputation. She took her stage-name from two sources: “Billie” from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and “Holiday” from her long-estranged father, who performed under that name. (She met him as an adult when he played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.) With the Harlem Renaissance in full-swing, people in a position to help her took notice – including John Hammond, the famous impresario/Svengali who played a major role in pushing black jazz and blues into mainstream musical culture. Hammond wasted no time in getting her into a recording studio; Holiday was still 17 years old when she recorded her first songs – “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch” – both with a then-unknown Benny Goodman.
- PBS.org, American Masters Series (June 2006)
If your first experience of a piece of music or a particular performer happens decades after they impacted music, the fuss doesn’t always translate. Billie Holiday broke molds, minds and ran headlong into barriers her entire life. It’s a minor miracle she made it to adulthood, never mind an iconic place in pop culture. Because most of the fuss happened before the internet, I expect I’ll struggle to do her justice, but this feels like a good place to start.
“If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
- Billie Holiday (Biography, 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday)
While minor questions exist, most sources agree Holiday was born to two unwed teenagers in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent more of her childhood with her mother, Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan – her father, Clarence Halliday, left to pursue a career in music was she was very young - but, even given those circumstances, her home life veered between unstable and outright dangerous, as well as various cities (mostly Baltimore). Sources also generally agree spent her tween-to-teen years in a reform school (sometimes for her own protection) and doing chores and running errands at a brothel (and even getting arrested for prostitution, though that could be a wrong place, wrong time thing). The Biography piece claims she worked for a chance to listen to the madam’s Victrola instead of getting paid. Holiday recalled Bessie Smith’s “West End Blues” as a favorite, but she loved Louis Armstrong too.
After moving to Harlem to live with her mother again, Holiday, then 17, found work as a dancer-for-hire. When the dancing work slowed down, she asked the manager to let her sing. Though lacking in musical education of any kind, Holiday’s talent immediately came through. Over the next couple of year, she partnered with a tenor sax player named Kenneth Holan, working small venue and building a reputation. She took her stage-name from two sources: “Billie” from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and “Holiday” from her long-estranged father, who performed under that name. (She met him as an adult when he played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.) With the Harlem Renaissance in full-swing, people in a position to help her took notice – including John Hammond, the famous impresario/Svengali who played a major role in pushing black jazz and blues into mainstream musical culture. Hammond wasted no time in getting her into a recording studio; Holiday was still 17 years old when she recorded her first songs – “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch” – both with a then-unknown Benny Goodman.
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| Lady Day and The Prez |
Holiday’s career during the second half of the 1930s was a literal whirlwind. She crossed paths with half the people anyone could name, and in some of the era’s pivotal moments – e.g., she fronted Count Basie’s orchestra for the legendary (still controversial) Battle of the Bands against Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald and the famously cantankerous Artie Shaw hired her to sing lead on his (predictably) ill-fated tour of the Jim Crow South. Through it all, though, she had two regular collaborators and close friends – Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist who gave her the nickname “Lady Day” (she called him “Prez”) and pianist Teddy Wilson. Holiday recorded her first real hits – especially, “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” – with the latter. While this barely comes through on internet sources, but a stray anecdote makes a good case that Holiday’s peers and collaborators saw her as an equal partner – e.g., she sang with Basie’s orchestra for only about six months, but here’s how he talked about their rehearsals: “it was really just a matter of getting her tunes like she wanted them, because she knew how she wanted to sound and you couldn't tell her what to do.”
Her chilling single, “Strange Fruit” was recorded around the same time (1939) but has a fascinating back-story. From the Biography piece (the best, quickest one-stop source I found on Holiday):
“The song's lyrics came from a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a teacher and social activist. He was inspired to write it after seeing a photograph of a lynching. The image so deeply disturbed him that he penned the poem in protest of racial violence. Meeropol later set the poem to music, and the resulting song found its way to Holiday. She started performing it at Café Society, an integrated nightclub in New York.”
Though “Strange Fruit” featured heavily in her live performances for the next 20 years, Holiday resisted singing the song for a while. Though her father didn’t die of lynching, the fact a Southern hospital refused him entrance during the medical emergency that killed him rhymed well enough to remind her of his death when she tried. Professionally, however, the song and venue pushed Holiday to the fringes of a household name. And this feels like a good segue to Holiday’s life in the 1940s and 1950s, aka, the years of peaks and valleys.
Despite her fame, Holiday only started collecting regular royalties after signing with Decca Records (where she finally had an apparent champion in Milt Gabler) in 1944. The same woman who sold out Carnegie Hall at least three times would die with just seventy cents in liquid funds; in her famous autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, she recalled asking the same mother she’d supported for years for some money, only to get turned down (the fight they had inspired Holiday’s, “God Bless the Child”). Running from 1947-52, Holiday’s Decca years were massive: she had a regular income of $250,000 per year (for a few of them) and ranked high in pop culture polls from outlets like Downbeat and Billboard.
Holiday’s problems with drugs and alcohol boiled over during the same period – starting with her arrest and conviction on a narcotics charge in May of 1947; related, remember the name Harry J. Anslinger. Her withdraw symptoms had kicked in hard enough that she pleaded guilty just to get the to hospital. Worse, her conviction meant the loss of her cabaret card, which meant she couldn’t play in any venue that served alcohol. Two of those sold-out Carnegie Hall shows happened due to her ban. Holiday worried about what her arrest would do to sales, but, in a refreshing change from the misery, both shows saw the fastest pre-sales to date.
From there, the story mixes good, bad, and horrific. Holiday bounced to the Verve label starting in 1952 and, by most accounts, she had some more productive years there. Verve returned her to working in small groups – i.e., “settings from which her genius had originally grown” (from a very brief official bio) – but that same choice could have been a necessary change due to what years of drug abuse had done to her voice. The contrasting light and dark continue from there, sometimes quite immediately – e.g., she landed a role in the movies, only to find herself in a film (New Orleans, 1946) “plagued by racism and McCarthyism” that included, 1) creative pressure “to avoid the impression that black people created jazz,” and 2) ended with the script writer, Herbert Biberman, getting jailed as one of the Hollywood 10; moreover, her bandmate drug-dealer, Joe Guy, helped her blow through a $1,000/week salary by bringing heroin to the set (until they wisely banned him).
Those contrasts only got wider by the end. Lady Sings the Blues, a book she (effectively) co-wrote with New York Post reporter (and actual friend, apparently), Maely Duffy, allowed her another mini-revival when it came out in 1956. If nothing else, it opened up space to release new material – e.g., “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “Willow Weep for Me” – and recording in high fidelity helped her voice recover some of its old subtlety and power.
Incredibly – and I mean this in the full “what is this madness?” sense – life visited a final indignity on an already troubled life:
“On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of both liver and heart disease. According to writer and journalist Johann Hari, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry J. Anslinger had been targeting Holiday since at least 1939, when she started to perform ‘Strange Fruit.’ Narcotics police went to her hospital room, claiming they had found heroin in her bedroom. A grand jury was summoned to indict her, and she was arrested, handcuffed to her bed, and placed under police guard.”
No human being deserves an end like that and a legend like Billie Holiday damn sure didn’t. I’ve found at least one unpleasant thing about most people from his era, but I haven’t read one bad thing about her. I fully appreciate this doesn’t make remotely make up for the indignity and suffering of Holiday’s death, but people remember her both well enough and fondly to where a fair chunk of the population can place Billie Holiday in time, place and reputation nearly sixty years after her death. Musicians all over the world cover her songs and honor memory to this day. Meanwhile, without his damning connection to her name, people could google “Harry J. Anslinger” for days and come up with nothing.
About the Sampler
I’m going to come out and admit that I struggled with both getting my arms around Billie Holiday’s catalog and enjoying it; for anyone wondering about that preamble, that’s your sub-text. I don’t know why it didn’t click with me – was it because I didn’t encounter it in real time? do I just find it boring and very, very repetitive? (why not both?) – but getting to a true, personal Top 20 would very likely take me a full month of intensive listening. And, because I’ve got stuff to do, other artists to write about, I wound up framing most of the sampler on the various periods and collaborations of Holiday’s career.
I’ve already linked to a couple above, but, to pass on some associated with a particular period, I included “I Can’t Get Started” from her brief time with Count Basie and “Any Old Time” from her (literal) days with Artie Shaw. Her stuff with Teddy Wilson turned out to be my favorite period (expect to see some in July’s samplers), and those include “Easy Living,” “This Year’s Kisses,” “Mean to Me,” and, another one of Holiday’s early hits, “Miss Brown to You.”
I repped the Decca years with a handful of songs devoted to heartbreak and unlikely love, including “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” “My Sweet Hunk O’ Trash” (with childhood idol, Louis Armstrong), “That Ole Devil Called Love,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” and, one wrote to memorialize the infidelities of her once-husband, Jimmy Monroe, the searingly broken, “Don’t Explain.” (For those with up for it, here's Holiday performing it live in 1958)
It's a melange of mid-to-late career from there (I believe), songs where only she got billing – and these include some of her spins on standards (and there are tons of those in her catalog, but I tried to steer clear, despite the temptation). To round out the sampler, which include some of her more famous tunes: “Fine and Mellow,” “Solitude,” “April in Paris,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (couldn’t help it; love that one by most artists), “No Regrets,” “Billie’s Blues,” “Good Morning Heartache,” and, finally, another hit, “Big Stuff.”
Again, you could spend days on Billie Holiday. And I think it’s well worth the time, even to listeners in the streaming/personal playlist era. Till the next one...in which I’ll take a fairly major turn.
Her chilling single, “Strange Fruit” was recorded around the same time (1939) but has a fascinating back-story. From the Biography piece (the best, quickest one-stop source I found on Holiday):
“The song's lyrics came from a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a teacher and social activist. He was inspired to write it after seeing a photograph of a lynching. The image so deeply disturbed him that he penned the poem in protest of racial violence. Meeropol later set the poem to music, and the resulting song found its way to Holiday. She started performing it at Café Society, an integrated nightclub in New York.”
Though “Strange Fruit” featured heavily in her live performances for the next 20 years, Holiday resisted singing the song for a while. Though her father didn’t die of lynching, the fact a Southern hospital refused him entrance during the medical emergency that killed him rhymed well enough to remind her of his death when she tried. Professionally, however, the song and venue pushed Holiday to the fringes of a household name. And this feels like a good segue to Holiday’s life in the 1940s and 1950s, aka, the years of peaks and valleys.
Despite her fame, Holiday only started collecting regular royalties after signing with Decca Records (where she finally had an apparent champion in Milt Gabler) in 1944. The same woman who sold out Carnegie Hall at least three times would die with just seventy cents in liquid funds; in her famous autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, she recalled asking the same mother she’d supported for years for some money, only to get turned down (the fight they had inspired Holiday’s, “God Bless the Child”). Running from 1947-52, Holiday’s Decca years were massive: she had a regular income of $250,000 per year (for a few of them) and ranked high in pop culture polls from outlets like Downbeat and Billboard.
Holiday’s problems with drugs and alcohol boiled over during the same period – starting with her arrest and conviction on a narcotics charge in May of 1947; related, remember the name Harry J. Anslinger. Her withdraw symptoms had kicked in hard enough that she pleaded guilty just to get the to hospital. Worse, her conviction meant the loss of her cabaret card, which meant she couldn’t play in any venue that served alcohol. Two of those sold-out Carnegie Hall shows happened due to her ban. Holiday worried about what her arrest would do to sales, but, in a refreshing change from the misery, both shows saw the fastest pre-sales to date.
From there, the story mixes good, bad, and horrific. Holiday bounced to the Verve label starting in 1952 and, by most accounts, she had some more productive years there. Verve returned her to working in small groups – i.e., “settings from which her genius had originally grown” (from a very brief official bio) – but that same choice could have been a necessary change due to what years of drug abuse had done to her voice. The contrasting light and dark continue from there, sometimes quite immediately – e.g., she landed a role in the movies, only to find herself in a film (New Orleans, 1946) “plagued by racism and McCarthyism” that included, 1) creative pressure “to avoid the impression that black people created jazz,” and 2) ended with the script writer, Herbert Biberman, getting jailed as one of the Hollywood 10; moreover, her bandmate drug-dealer, Joe Guy, helped her blow through a $1,000/week salary by bringing heroin to the set (until they wisely banned him).
Those contrasts only got wider by the end. Lady Sings the Blues, a book she (effectively) co-wrote with New York Post reporter (and actual friend, apparently), Maely Duffy, allowed her another mini-revival when it came out in 1956. If nothing else, it opened up space to release new material – e.g., “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “Willow Weep for Me” – and recording in high fidelity helped her voice recover some of its old subtlety and power.
Incredibly – and I mean this in the full “what is this madness?” sense – life visited a final indignity on an already troubled life:
“On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of both liver and heart disease. According to writer and journalist Johann Hari, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry J. Anslinger had been targeting Holiday since at least 1939, when she started to perform ‘Strange Fruit.’ Narcotics police went to her hospital room, claiming they had found heroin in her bedroom. A grand jury was summoned to indict her, and she was arrested, handcuffed to her bed, and placed under police guard.”
No human being deserves an end like that and a legend like Billie Holiday damn sure didn’t. I’ve found at least one unpleasant thing about most people from his era, but I haven’t read one bad thing about her. I fully appreciate this doesn’t make remotely make up for the indignity and suffering of Holiday’s death, but people remember her both well enough and fondly to where a fair chunk of the population can place Billie Holiday in time, place and reputation nearly sixty years after her death. Musicians all over the world cover her songs and honor memory to this day. Meanwhile, without his damning connection to her name, people could google “Harry J. Anslinger” for days and come up with nothing.
About the Sampler
I’m going to come out and admit that I struggled with both getting my arms around Billie Holiday’s catalog and enjoying it; for anyone wondering about that preamble, that’s your sub-text. I don’t know why it didn’t click with me – was it because I didn’t encounter it in real time? do I just find it boring and very, very repetitive? (why not both?) – but getting to a true, personal Top 20 would very likely take me a full month of intensive listening. And, because I’ve got stuff to do, other artists to write about, I wound up framing most of the sampler on the various periods and collaborations of Holiday’s career.
I’ve already linked to a couple above, but, to pass on some associated with a particular period, I included “I Can’t Get Started” from her brief time with Count Basie and “Any Old Time” from her (literal) days with Artie Shaw. Her stuff with Teddy Wilson turned out to be my favorite period (expect to see some in July’s samplers), and those include “Easy Living,” “This Year’s Kisses,” “Mean to Me,” and, another one of Holiday’s early hits, “Miss Brown to You.”
I repped the Decca years with a handful of songs devoted to heartbreak and unlikely love, including “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” “My Sweet Hunk O’ Trash” (with childhood idol, Louis Armstrong), “That Ole Devil Called Love,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” and, one wrote to memorialize the infidelities of her once-husband, Jimmy Monroe, the searingly broken, “Don’t Explain.” (For those with up for it, here's Holiday performing it live in 1958)
It's a melange of mid-to-late career from there (I believe), songs where only she got billing – and these include some of her spins on standards (and there are tons of those in her catalog, but I tried to steer clear, despite the temptation). To round out the sampler, which include some of her more famous tunes: “Fine and Mellow,” “Solitude,” “April in Paris,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (couldn’t help it; love that one by most artists), “No Regrets,” “Billie’s Blues,” “Good Morning Heartache,” and, finally, another hit, “Big Stuff.”
Again, you could spend days on Billie Holiday. And I think it’s well worth the time, even to listeners in the streaming/personal playlist era. Till the next one...in which I’ll take a fairly major turn.
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