Had it not been for the chance cancellation of a performer one night, Billie Holiday’s life might have taken a very different turn. Born on the heels of the World War I, Holiday’s life was once scarred by abuse, discrimination and addiction. We tend to think mostly about her iconic voice and style, not so much about the pain and disappointment that permeated her life before she became famous, and that would likely haunt her after as well.
Aspects of Holiday’s life are mysterious, mostly because she liked to blur the line between truth and a good story. But we do know she was born on April 7, 1915 as Eleanora Fagan. In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday wrote that her mom, Sadie, was 13 and father, Clarence, was 15 when they had her, though other historians say it’s more likely that her mom was 19 and her dad 17. Though Sadie lived in Baltimore, her parents sent her to Pennsylvania to give birth to the illegitimate child, but soon returned home with her daughter. Holiday’s father, Clarence Holiday, was a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson’s band and quickly abandoned the child and her mother.
While Holiday was still young, Sadie moved to New York to find better work, leaving Holiday behind with her grandparents and cousins. Holiday’s cousin Ida beat her while Ida’s son, Henry, made fun of her. One day Henry hit Holiday in the face with a bat. Fed up with the abuse, Holiday turned around, grabbed the bat, supposedly beat him so badly she sent him to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Holiday then dropped out of school in the fifth grade and started cleaning peoples’ doorsteps for nickels. More formative, though, was her job with a local madam. She ran errands for the prostitutes in a local Baltimore brothel so she could listen to the house’s Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records.
When Holiday was just 10-years-old, a man named Mr. Dick sexually molested her. Though he ended up going to jail for his crimes, Holiday, too, was punished and sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic home for misbehaving girls. After she was released when she was 12, she decided to leave Baltimore behind and move to Harlem to be with her mother. Her mother found her a room at Florence Williams’ house. Holiday later said her mom didn’t know she’d sent her daughter to live in the popular madam’s home, but when Williams approached Holiday to work, she jumped on it. “I had a chance to become a strictly twenty-dollar call girl and I took it,” she recounted in her autobiography. Her life as a prostitute didn’t last long, though.
According to one account, Holiday refused to provide services to a wealthy client who became so enraged, he had her arrested to get back at her. Another account says she was arrested alongside her mother and 23 other women in a raid on the home. Holiday, who told authorities she was 21, was sentenced to 100 days imprisonment on Welfare Island, a well-known jail that prostitutes and drug addicts were often sent to. After she was released, she worked briefly again as a prostitute before finally declaring she was done and started focusing on singing and dancing. It was then that Eleanora Fagan became Billie Holiday, naming herself after her favorite actress, Billy Dove, and then taking on her father’s last name.
Like so many great artists, Holiday was discovered by accident. One night, when she was 17, she replaced a singer that had called out at show at Monette Moore’s, a New York speakeasy. John Hammond, one of the most important talent-scouts in 20th-century music, came to the bar that evening to see the promised headline singer only to find Billie as her replacement. When she opened her mouth and began belting her sultry notes, Hammond was swept away. Hammond introduced Holiday to great jazz musicians like Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Duke Elington and Lester Young, who later gave her the famous nickname “Lady Day.” Hammond eventually signed Holiday to Brunswick Records, and she officially hit it big on her own with her 1939 “Strange Fruit,” a haunting song about the lynching of a black man.
In the early 1940s, Holiday turned to drugs. As the years progressed, she leaned heavily on drugs and alcohol, which eventually led to her downfall. Faced with a fierce heroin addiction as well as liver and heart problems, Billie died in the hospital in 1959 when she was just 44.
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