Born: Eleanora Fagan Gough, on 7-April-1915, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Father: Clarence Holiday (jazz guitarist and banjo player). Mother: Sadie Fagan. Died: New York at the age of 44.
Stage name: Billie Holiday, after Billie Dove, an early movie star.
Nickname: "Lady Day"
Even with no formal musical training, Billie Holiday made her professional singing debut in Harlem nightclubs in 1931. She made her commercial debut on November 27, 1933 with "Your Mother's Son-In-Law."
Her 1939 version of "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, was described as the most haunting and sad "expression of protest against man's inhumanity to man that has ever been made in the form of vocal jazz."
"You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music." -- Billie
Holiday.
The received wisdom on the tragic torch singer's later work--of these 35 tracks, six were recorded in 1946 and '47, and the rest in the '50s--is that her interpretive skill made up for the collapse of her voice. In fact, the serious cracks in her pitch don't appear until the second disc of this set, and it doesn't approach the febrile croak of Lady in Satin until the END. But she relies on a handful of vocal tricks, and some numbers that had been in her repertoire for ages, to approximate the glory that her voice once was. At times, though, the results are lovely and heartbroken rather than saddening, especially with the simpatico musical backing she got in these sessions. --Douglas Wolk
