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.
For many people, Billie Holiday (a.k.a. "Lady Day") wasn't just a jazz singer. She was the jazz singer, and remains so today. Thanks to her lifelong struggles with men, alcohol, and drug addiction, Holiday is often viewed as an archetypal example of the suffering artist--a singer who sang her life. And there's no denying the often heartrending quality of the classic recordings she made with musicians like Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, and Harry "Sweets" Edison.But Holiday's sophisticated sense of rhythm, subtle melodic improvisations, and nuanced way with a lyric enabled her to invest everything she sang with new meaning, from swinging dance tunes to mournful ballads. And her cool, effortless manner only heightened the emotional impact of her delivery. She influenced several generations of singers and instrumentalists alike, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder alongside such iconic jazz figures as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker.Original recordings produced by Norman Granz and others.
The final decade of Billie Holiday's life was one in which the singer, in the clutches of drugs and poor taste in men, slowly withered away. Amid this tragedy, Lady Day carried on with a bittersweet dignity that seemed only to grow as the years passed. Her matchless phrasing added a profundity to a worn-out lyric and her dark, ragged timbre exuded a venerable wisdom, but at the same time she acquired a faded vulnerability not heard in her earlier years. Collecting her studio work between 1952 and 1959 (when she died), this six-CD/100-song set offers a long and loving look at the Holiday of this era. She's joined here by the crème of jazz with an orchestra session at the end. And whereas The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959 also offers uneven rehearsal tapes as well as live and radio performances, this collection zeroes in on prime studio cuts. This is for lovers of Lady Day, but not the obsessive. --Tad Hendrickson
