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Good morning, GUSsacks! I hope everyone had a good night with minimal stress and as few triggers as possible. Join me below the fold for a memorial to a musical legend.
Eleanora Fagan was born April 7, 1915. Hers was not an easy childhood -- the illegitimate bi-racial daughter of a thirteen-year-old single mother, raised in a poor section of Baltimore, she was twice raped before the age of thirteen. She was forced into prostitution before the age of fifteen, and served prison time for solicitation. But there was something Eleanora had that lifted her above the pale; her voice. She started out singing for tips, but the purity and emotional resonance of her voice led to regular work in clubs. By 1933, she was working at a club named Monette's, and she had changed her name to Billie Holiday.
By the late 1930s, Holiday had worked with various orchestras including Count Basie's and Artie Shaw's, making her among of the first black performers to work with white bands. Some time in the late 30s, she was introduced to a song built around a poem by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol. She recorded the song in April of 1939; it was to become one of her signature pieces.
Billie continued recording and performing throughout the 30s and 40s. In 1947, she was offered a role in the film New Orleans starring Louis Armstrong. From her autobiography:
"I thought I was going to play myself in it. I thought I was going to be Billie Holiday doing a couple of songs in a nightclub setting and that would be that. I should have known better. When I saw the script, I did. You just tell one Negro girl who's made movies who didn't play a maid or a whore. I don't know any. I found out I was going to do a little singing, but I was still playing the part of a maid."
Holiday had started doing hard drugs, especially heroin, sometime in the early 1940s. 1947 marked Holiday's first arrest and imprisonment for narcotics possession. Because of her record, the city of New York revoked her Cabaret Card, meaning she was not allowed to perform in the city's clubs for the rest of her life. She was arrested again in 1949. By the 1950s, her drinking, drug and cigarette use had coarsened and roughened her voice, but its emotional resonance was unblunted. Holiday's catalog of recordings for Verve Records from the 1950s, with her vocal chords shot and her range severely diminished, remain among her finest.
On May 31, 1959, Billie Holiday was admitted to hospital, suffering from heart and liver disease. She was promptly arrested for drug possession as she lay on her deathbed, and spent her last days having her hospital room raided by the police and then placed under guard until her death from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959. She died with 70 cents in the bank and an uncashed check for $750 in her purse.
Fifty years later, her legacy is indisputable. She's been posthumously venerated by artists as diverse as Ken Burns and U2. I would go so far as to say that Billie Holiday is considered one of the seminal American voices in the history of popular music.
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