Although Billie Holiday is most widely hailed for her revolutionary role in jazz history, she is also indelibly associated with the blues – not so much in the musical structure of her material as in the moods and emotions she could convey with the remarkable inflections of her voice. And, despite her reported objections, her 1956 biography was entitled Lady Sings the Blues (as was the 1972 movie based on her life).
While it has generally been reported that she was born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on April 7, 1915, her birth certificate lists her as Elinore Harris, born in Philadelphia. (See internetaccuracy.org for a thorough dissection of the conflicting details reported about Holiday’s life and family.) A tragic figure in the end, Holiday embodied both the joys and sorrows of her songs. ‘The blues to me’, Holiday told Time magazine in 1957, ‘are like being very sad, very sick – and again, like going to church and being very happy.’ Her eloquent vocals could be sweet and endearing, sensual and alluring, or desolate and forlorn. Her improvisations, working around the melody, introduced a new and influential approach to singing, and her prominence helped elevate the role of vocalists in jazz . Most of Holiday’s songs were love songs; ‘Fine and Mellow’ was perhaps her best known blues, and she made a lasting mark with the controversial flip side of that 1939 release, ‘Strange Fruit’, a harrowing image of Southern lynchings that a New York songwriter brought to her at Cafe’ Society. Her own classic composition ‘God Bless The Child’ was another of the 39 songs entered in Pop Memories 1890-1954, all from 1935 to 1945, that, by compiler Joel Whitburn’s criteria, would have made the equivalent of Billboard’s pop charts had such charts been published then. Holiday’s struggle with drugs was well publicized in the 1950s, and after her death in a New York hospital on July 17, 1959, the Associated Press reported: ‘Billie Holiday, child of sordidness and slums, who rose through the smoky night clubs of Harlem to fame as a magnificent singer of the blues, died Friday on a low, sad note. Liquor and dope and high living ruined her body and stole the vibrance from her tremendous voice.’
Jim O’Neal
www.stackhouse-bluesoterica.blogspot.com