"Lady Day" sang the Blues

Jazz singer Billie Holiday was born on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. She made her professional singing debut in Harlem nightclubs in 1931, and made her first recordings in 1933. Although she had no formal musical training, she became one of the greatest jazz singers of all time, and her recordings are now regarded as masterpieces.

Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues,1 opens with the line: "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married; he was 18, she was 16 and I was three." Holiday's given name was Eleanora Fagan, but when she started to perform she chose the stage name Billie after Billie Dove, an early movie star.

The tension of racism was a powerful subtext to Holiday's life story. Because of Jim Crow laws, still in effect through most of her career, she occasionally found herself in the ironic situation of being the featured vocalist in clubs that refused to serve blacks. The liner notes to Immortal Sessions of Billie Holiday describe her 1939 rendition of Lewis Allan's "Strange Fruit," a composition about lynching, is "…the most anguished and harrowing expression of protest against man's inhumanity to man that has ever been made in the form of vocal jazz." 2

Nicknamed "Lady Day" by musician Lester Young, Holiday often wore white gardenias fastened in her hair when performing. She worked with many jazz greats including Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and, in the film New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong and Kid Orey. She appeared at both small clubs and prestigious venues like Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater.