Holiday, Billie

By: James Sellman

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Holiday, Billie

Sex:  Female

Born:  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
7 April 1915

Died:  New York, New York, United States
17 July 1959

Activity/Profession:  Jazz Singer

1915–1959
African American jazz singer who greatly influenced the course of American popular singing.

Billie Holiday lived two irreconcilably different lives: one as an outstanding Jazz artist, one as the emotionally traumatized victim of abuse. Her singing has inspired generations of musicians, and she is one of the few women—along with Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan—to have attained the status of jazz legend. Jazz scholars treat her no less seriously than they do Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Although Holiday had limited popular appeal during her lifetime, her impact on other singers was profound. In 1958 Frank Sinatra cited Holiday as “the greatest single musical influence on me” and “the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.” On the other hand, Holiday's life story also partakes of myth, for example, in the inaccuracies and exaggerations of her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (1959).

African American singer Billie Holiday, nicknamed “Lady Day” by tenor saxophonist Lester Young, sang jazz with the weight of the blues.

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Holiday was also a profoundly tragic figure. Abandoned by her father, raised in poverty, and abused as a child, she claimed that she had become a prostitute by age eleven. Throughout her life she remained barely literate, and she lacked self-esteem. Many of the men in her life victimized her and, when she was in her mid-twenties, one—trumpeter Joe Guy—introduced her to heroin. Holiday became addicted, and in 1947 she was imprisoned on narcotics charges.

In attempting to explain the power of Holiday's singing, musicologist Gunther Schuller bordered on the mystical. Her art, he wrote, “transcends the usual categorizations of style, content, and technique” and reached “a realm that is not only beyond criticism but in the deepest sense inexplicable.” Schuller underscored her “uncanny ability to go … beyond the song material [and to] … characterize it in whatever mood she happened to be in.” Holiday also linked her life and her singing. She said that it was easy to sing songs like “The Man I Love” or “Porgy” because, in her own words, “I've lived songs like that.” Yet this sort of observation reinforces an unfortunate stereotype of jazz musicians as intuitive performers whose music simply mirrors their lives. Such an image—and the related theme of jazz artists as tortured and tragic figures—discounts the hard work and creative choices that go into jazz.

Although Holiday had no formal musical training, she pursued a far more demanding course of study in the late 1920s and early 1930s in such Harlem speakeasies as the Log Cabin, the Yeah Man, and the Hotcha. She worked hard to perfect her singing. Her 1933 recording debut—a novelty number titled “Your Mother's Son-in-law”—reveals a vocalist still not in command of her art, but two years later she secured a long-term contract with Columbia Records.

Between 1935 and 1942 Holiday recorded her greatest work, including “I Must Have That Man,” “I Cried for You,” and “I'll Get By.” She also recorded her best-known original, “God Bless the Child.” Swing-era stars such as pianist Teddy Wilson and alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges supported her performances, but her key collaborators were Teddy Wilson and tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Wilson's elegant style contributes to the classic quality of these recordings, and Young was Holiday's musical soul mate. He was renowned for his lyrical improvisations, and together the two achieved a rare musical intimacy. Young gave Billie Holiday her nickname, Lady Day, and she dubbed him Prez, the president of the tenor saxophone, a nickname that also stuck.

Holiday gained a reputation as a racial activist, although she never sought that role. In 1938 she joined clarinetist Artie Shaw's white big band for several months, which placed her in the forefront of those who were challenging racial segregation in popular music. Her most political act was singing the antilynching ballad “Strange Fruit” (1939), which became her signature piece. Columbia Records refused to record the song because the company feared alienating white record buyers, but at last permitted her to record it for tiny Commodore Records.

Holiday's style was simple and finely crafted. It was partly dictated by the nature of her voice. She had a limited range, and she compressed her singing into little more than an octave. Unlike Bessie Smith, she could not fill a hall with her voice, so she perfected the art of singing with a microphone. Her small voice conveyed an intimacy that more powerful singers could rarely approach. She was also highly improvisational. Even in stating a theme, Holiday reinvented and simplified the song's melody. Unlike most singers of the day, she used very little vibrato, but she employed other vocal embellishments—shifts in rhythm, especially singing behind the beat, and variations in pitch, including dips, scoops, and fall-offs.

During her lifetime, these qualities worked against her. She rarely got to record the most popular songs of the day. She sang with a subtlety that did not win her great popularity, and record companies reserved the best material for their best-selling singers. In addition, music publishers and successful songwriters opposed having her record their best songs because she changed the written melodies.

Throughout her life, Holiday resented the limitations of the blues singer label, and she was greatly disappointed when Doubleday published her autobiography under the title Lady Sings the Blues. She had wanted to name it “Bitter Crop,” from the final words of “Strange Fruit.” Holiday—like her musical alter ego Lester Young—faced serious difficulties during the 1950s. Although she and Young did not collaborate regularly in these years, their lives remained linked. Personal problems hampered their performing abilities, and Holiday's voice, in particular, revealed the ravages of her personal life. In 1957—on The Sound of Jazz, a television special—the two performed together in a moving rendition of “Fine and Mellow” that perfectly captured their vulnerability and their profound musical empathy. Holiday and Young died within four months of each other in 1959.

See also Blues; Music, African American.

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