Demo · Billie Holiday

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Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday

Lady Day. She sang a little behind the beat, like a horn, and the songs came out as hers.

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The Story

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) was born Eleanora Fagan and grew up in Baltimore. She came to New York as a girl, sang for tips in the clubs of Harlem, and was heard there by the producer John Hammond, who recorded her with Benny Goodman in 1933.

With the pianist Teddy Wilson and the saxophonist Lester Young she made the small-group records of the 1930s that singers still learn from; Young named her Lady Day, and she named him Pres. She sang with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, and in 1939, at Café Society in Greenwich Village, she first sang Strange Fruit.

She phrased like a horn player and changed the melody when it suited the words. Her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, came out in 1956; Lady in Satin, recorded with strings, in 1958. She died in New York the next year, at forty-four.

Records

Live Dates

  1. Songs from Café Society, the late set

    ThursdayCafé Carlyle, New York

    Tickets

  2. Lady in Satin, with a string quartet

    SundayRonnie Scott's, London

    Tickets

  3. The trio, two sets

    MondayMinton's Playhouse, New York

On Film

What They Said

Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.
Frank Sinatra“The Way I Look at Race”, Ebony, July 1958
Billie Holiday was a poet. She gave you back your experience.
James BaldwinInterview, 1973, in Conversations with James Baldwin (1989)
Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of the self.
Studs TerkelTalking to Myself, 1977, on hearing her in 1956

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