Billie Holiday at Town Hall, New York City, 1948 Framed Art Print
Loren, Dennis
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Billie Holiday was born on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Nicknamed Lady Day, Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and song writer that could stop traffic with her voice. She got intimate with songs and music the way most people get intimate with one another. She co-wrote several songs that have gone down in jazz history, notably “God Bless the Child”, “Don’t Explain”, and “Lady Sings the Blues”. She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including “Easy Living” and “Strange Fruit”.
She’s often remembered as the lovely lady with a gardenia in her hair belting out songs like nobody’s business.
Sadly, as was the case with quite a few of the stars from the past, drugs were Billie Holiday’s undoing. She was arrested several times due to an addiction she never overcame. She was even arrested on her death bed – literally. Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had partly written the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday, described her death:
“Billie Holiday died in the Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her. … The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.”
An incredibly tragic and sad ending for a woman who left a beautiful mark on our musical history. She deserved better – what a shame that she didn’t realize it.
To learn more about Billie Holiday, buy her autobiography on Amazon: Lady Sings the Blues
