A 1939 song about bodies hanging in southern trees, written by a Bronx schoolteacher under a pen name (1939)
'Strange Fruit' — words by Abel Meeropol as 'Lewis Allan'; Columbia refused it, so Commodore released it.
Popular music · Jazz & blues
Billie Holiday
1915–1959 · American
Jazz and blues singing; Lady Day
Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan and known as Lady Day, had a small voice and an unmatched sense of how to place a phrase behind the beat. She sang with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, made a lynching ballad into the first great protest record of American popular song, and died at 44 after decades of addiction and harassment by the authorities.
How to spot them
- ▸Nickname Lady Day, given by Lester Young, whom she in turn christened 'Prez'; the gardenia in her hair
- ▸A narrow range used as an instrument — phrasing dragged behind the beat, vibrato withheld
- ▸Count Basie's band in 1937, then Artie Shaw's in 1938, one of the first Black singers fronting a white orchestra
- ▸Talent-spotted by John Hammond; early sessions under pianist Teddy Wilson
- ▸The New York cabaret card she lost after a drugs conviction, which kept her out of city clubs for years
Songs & albums
A 1941 song she co-wrote taking its moral from a biblical proverb about those who have their own (1941)
'God Bless the Child' — written with Arthur Herzog Jr after a row with her mother over money.
A 1944 ballad in which a woman waits alone in her room for someone she has never met (1944)
'Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)' — written for her and one of her biggest sellers on Decca.
The blues she sang on a 1957 CBS television broadcast, while an ailing Lester Young played a chorus that made her smile (1957)
'Fine and Mellow' on The Sound of Jazz — the most famous few minutes of jazz on television.
A 1958 album with a Ray Ellis string orchestra, her ruined voice set against lush arrangements (1958)
Lady in Satin — the last album released in her lifetime.
Her 1956 memoir, ghostwritten by a New York Post journalist and filmed in 1972 with Diana Ross (1956)
Lady Sings the Blues, written with William Dufty; famously unreliable but hugely influential.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on 7 April 1915 and raised in Baltimore
- •The stage name came from the actress Billie Dove and from Clarence Holiday, the guitarist she believed was her father
- •'Strange Fruit' was first performed at Café Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, and closed her set in silence
- •She served a year at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, in 1947–48, and sold out Carnegie Hall days after her release
- •She was arrested for narcotics possession on her deathbed at Metropolitan Hospital, New York, and died on 17 July 1959
- •She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 in the Musical Influence category, inducted by Diana Ross
- •Time magazine named 'Strange Fruit' the song of the century in 1999
- •The US Postal Service issued a Billie Holiday stamp in 1994
- •Andra Day played her in The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), about the federal campaign to stop her singing 'Strange Fruit'
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Sources
- Billie Holiday — Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
- John Szwed — Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth