Billie+Holiday



April 7, 1915-July 17, 1959
= =    "Lady Day"  Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Clarence Holiday and Sadie Fagan in 1915. Soon after she was born, she moved with her mother to Baltimore, Maryland. When she was three, her father left the family. During her young adolescence, she often spent time with close relatives because her mother was not always around. At the age of ten, she was sent to The House of the Good Shepard for Colored Girls for truancy and being reportedly sexually assaulted. Holiday had a rough childhood because her mother and father were not always around for her to look up to. In 1927, she moved to New York City after her mother. She gained a job as a prostitute in a whorehouse in Harlem.  By 1930, she was arrested and spent some time in jail. After this experience, she began to work in clubs for money. She started as a dancer, but soon became a main singer instead. Her main influences were artists like Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Once she started her career singing in jazz clubs, she changed her name to Billie after Billie Dove, an actress she had always loved, and Holiday, after her father Clarence Holiday. In 1933, she meets John Hammond who is one of the most important people in her singing career. He introduces her to Benny Goodman (a clarinetist), who plays with her in “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch.” Hammond also helps her record a demo for Columbia Records.

Holiday’s influence on the Harlem Renaissance is extremely strong. She broke the racial barrier by being the first female African-American to sing with Artie Shaw and his all white jazz band. Her most signature song is “Strange Fruit” which was written by a Jewish teacher from the Bronx. “Strange Fruit” was written about the lynching of African-American people. Later in her career, she sung “My Man” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” which were songs that reflected her relationship with the men in her life. After all of the abusive relationships that brought her singing career down, Billie turned to drugs. She became addicted to extremely hard drugs and alcohol and was sent to jail for some time again. On July 17, 1959, she died from alcohol and drug related complications. Billie Holiday’s life and success had an enormous impact on the Harlem Renaissance. Her songs were not only strongly influenced by her own life, but they also represented the troubles that many African-Americans also faced.

A few accepted themes presented in the Harlem Renaissance include alienation, marginality of blacks through institutional racism and the attempt to integrate into a diverse community, the use of African folk material, the blues tradition, and the paradox of writing or performing for elite audiences (Source 4). Billie Holiday will always be remembered for her ability to show the basic tragedies of life through song. Her gift for showing compassion through her lyrics makes her one of the most famous jazz singers of all time. Billie Holiday changed the way that listeners understood songs when using her emotions and honesty. She did not have much artistic ability but she was able to make up for it by using her unique style of diction and timing. Art and literature were not the only elements changed during the Renaissance. There was not a single political ideology, artistic style, or literary style that was popular during the Harlem Renaissance. Participants' commitment and contribution to the African- American experience was what made the people united. In 1939, Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit,” a poem-song written by Lewis Allan about a lynching, in a fashionable, smoke-filled Greenwich Village nightclub called Cafe Society Downtown (Source 1). Holiday worked hard on this song so that the audience could see how emotional she was about the subject. “Strange Fruit” appealed to intellectuals and the urban counterculture, who saw in it Holiday’s contribution to a growing art, music, and literature movement that aimed to give blacks in America a new identity (Source 1). **"Strange Fruit" By Billie Holiday** **Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.** 

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Resources: <span style="font-size: 10pt; color: #000000; font-family: Georgia, serif; background-color: rgb(255,255,255);">1. http://www.journalofantiques.com/Mar03/featuremar03.htm 2. http://www.biography.com/deathiversary/billie-holiday/billie-holiday.jsp 3. http://www.cmgww.com/music/holiday/about/biography.htm 4. http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/harlem-renaissance/diverse-and-common-themes.html

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