Biography
Eleanora Fagan was born on April 7, 1915. Some believe her birthplace was Baltimore, Maryland, others think Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Some reports state the name on her birth certificate read “Elinore Harris”. Regardless of what she was named when she was born, she will always be remembered as Billie Holiday. Holiday was one of the most influential and successful vocalists of her time. Whether through her famous live shows or her timeless recordings, she used her broad voice and melancholy lyrics to captivate her audience between the years 1934 and 1959.
Holiday spent most of her early life in Baltimore. Her mother, Sadie, was just 13 when she gave birth, and her biological father, Clarence Holiday, was non-existent most of her childhood. Sadie married in 1920, which provided some stability in Eleanora’s life. However, Sadie divorced a few years later, leaving Holiday and her mother poor and struggling to make ends meet. With her mother working very long hours, Eleanora was often left in the care of friends and neighbors. With a lack of adult supervision, Holiday often skipped school and got into trouble. In 1925 she was sent to the House of Good Shepherd, a school for troubled African-American girls, where she spent eight months. Throughout her harsh early life, she found consolation in the music of jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.
She moved to New York City with her mother in the late 1920s and began performing in local clubs under the name “Billie”, after movie star Billie Dove. John Hammond discovered her while she was performing at a Harlem jazz club when she was 18. She began singing vocals for emerging clarinetist Benny Goodwin. “You’re Mother’s Son-and-Law” was her first commercial release in 1934. She began recording many singles and also dabbled in acting with the film Symphony in Black in 1935. Saxophonist Lester Young became friends with Holiday and gave her the nickname “Lady Day” in 1937. She began performing with Artie Shaw and his orchestra in 1938, making her the first African-American singer to work with an all white band. In 1939 she recorded “Strange Fruit”, a song about the lynching of Blacks in the South. The controversy that surrounded the song eventually helped make it a huge success.
Over the next years, Holiday had many abusive relationships, which carried over to the lyrics in her music. She had a short marriage to James Monroe in 1941 and developed an opium habit. Eventually she began using heroin with her boyfriend Joe Guy, and after the 1945 death of her mother, escalated her drinking and heroin intake. Although she was dealing with many problems off-stage, she continued to have musical success until 1947, when she was sentenced to over a year in prison for possession of narcotics charges. After her release from prison, she began having a tough time getting work due to her criminal record. She befriended John Levy, and with his influence slowly began to get work again. Holiday’s drug and alcohol habits were slowly beginning to take their toll on her voice and shortly after a hugely successful European tour, she began seeing a decline in her record sales. Holiday was admitted to a hospital for heart and liver failure in 1959. She had such a strong addiction to heroin that she was arrested for possession upon arriving at the hospital. She died on July 17, 1959 from alcohol- and drug-related symptoms, and although she died with less than a dollar in her bank account, over 3,000 people were in attendance at her funeral.
Before her tragic death, she became an immense influence to some of the great musicians of the past and present. Diana Ross played Holiday in the 1972 film Lady Sings The Blues, which was based on Holiday’s autobiography. Billie Holiday was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.