“I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.” – Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday Biography

Billie Holiday was a well-known American jazz singer who was born on 7 April 1915 as Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her prolific singing career spanned almost thirty years and what she lacked in formal music education and range, she made up for with style. She was known for her improvisational skills creating different methods of tempo, vocal delivery and phrasing with jazz instrumentalists heavily inspiring her singing style.

Her parents were unmarried teenagers Sarah Julia Fagan who was known to everyone as Sadie and Clarence Holiday. Her mother Sarah was evicted from her parent’s home in Baltimore, Maryland after she became pregnant with Eleanora at the age of only nineteen.

Sarah moved to Pennsylvania, but Clarence decided to leave his family just after Eleanora was born to become a jazz banjo player. As Sarah’s parents also offered her no support, she sent Eleanora initially to live with her married half-sister in Baltimore.

Billie Holiday continued to have a difficult childhood and was raised by numerous people during the first decade of her life. Her mother worked in transportation jobs, mostly as a server for passenger trains and so Billie did not spend that much time with her. She was often absent from school and ended up in juvenile court in 1925 at the age of nine. After this, she went to a Catholic reform school called House of the Good Shepherd. Nine months later she was reunited with her mother who had opened a restaurant. They worked there together many long hours and by the age of eleven, Billie had completely dropped out of school.

When Billie Holiday was ten years old a neighbour had attempted to rape her, but he was arrested, and she returned to House of the Good Shepherd as a form of protective custody. At twelve years old she worked for a brothel running errands and she also scrubbed floors in the neighbourhood. At this time she also started listening to music and heard the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.

In 1929 she went to live with her mother in Harlem, New York. Their landlady ran a brothel where Billie’s mother worked as a prostitute and it wasn’t long before mother and daughter were working together again with Billie becoming a prostitute herself at the age of only fourteen.

At around the same time, Billie Holiday started singing in nightclubs around Harlem. She took her father’s last name and the first name of Billie Dove, an actress she looked up to, and Billie Holiday was born. In 1932 she was singing at a club where she had replaced singer Monette Moore for the evening. Producer John Hammond had come to hear Moore sing but ended up hearing Holiday instead, a piece of good fortune that led to Billie making her recording debut at the age of eighteen. The song she recorded, ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’, sold an impressive 5,000 copies and Hammond said of Holiday, “Her singing almost changed my music tastes and my musical life because she was the first girl singer I’d come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius.” She was compared with the great Louis Armstrong, which was an incredible compliment for her.

Her career transitioned from singles and jazz clubs to mainstream success with Decca Records and Columbia Records and her song with Teddy Wilson, ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’, became a jazz standard.

At one point she was in competition with another popular singer at the time, Ella Fitzgerald, but they would later become good friends.

When working for Columbia in the 1930s Billie Holiday sang the song “Strange Fruit” based on a dark poem about lynching. The lyrics include the words, “Southern trees bear strange fruit,