Café Society, 1939
The Greenwich Village club that seated Black and white customers alike. She sang there from 1939 and ended her sets with Strange Fruit.
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Billie Holiday
1939
Lady Day. She sang a little behind the beat, like a horn, and the songs came out as hers.
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.
Record Box
What’s On
OCT22Thursday
NOV8Sunday
NOV23Monday
The trio, two sets
Minton's PlayhouseNew York
Watch and Listen
What They Say
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
Projects
Lady Day and Pres
The small-band sides she made with Lester Young and Teddy Wilson between 1937 and 1941.
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Carnegie Hall
She sold it out in 1948, and again in November 1956, when passages of her autobiography were read between the songs; the second night was released as The Essential Billie Holiday.
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Snapshots
Among roses, in Kodachrome, 23 March 1949.Carl Van Vechten In her dressing room with Mister, her boxer, New York, 1946.William P. Gottlieb In black satin, 23 March 1949.Carl Van Vechten At the Downbeat, New York, 1947.William P. Gottlieb The same sitting, with the bouquet.Carl Van Vechten