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Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 - July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop singing. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

Eleanora Fagan was born on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia to African American unwed teenage couple Clarence Halliday and Sarah Julia "Sadie" Fagan. Not long after Eleanora was born, Clarence abandoned his family to pursue a career as a jazz banjo player and guitarist.

Eleanora grew up in Baltimore and had a very difficult childhood. Her mother often took what were then known as "transportation jobs", serving on passenger railroads. Eleanora lived in her aunt's house (her mother's married half-sister, Eva Miller) and was raised largely by her aunt's mother-in-law, Martha Miller. The girl suffered from her mother's absences and being in others' care for her first decade of life.

After attending kindergarten at St. Frances Academy, she frequently skipped school. When she was nine years old, she was brought before the juvenile court on January 5, 1925. She was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school for African-American girls. After nine months, she was "paroled" on October 3, 1925, to her mother. Sadie had opened a restaurant, the East Side Grill, and mother and daughter worked long hours there. She dropped out of school at age 11.

At 12, she earned a living scrubbing marble steps as well as kitchen and bathroom floors of neighborhood homes. Around this time, she first heard the records of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. By the end of 1928, Holiday's mother moved to Harlem, New York, again leaving Eleanora with Martha Miller.

By early 1929, Holiday had joined her mother in Harlem.

Career outline

After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by producer John Hammond, who liked her voice.

She took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and Clarence Halliday, whom she believed to be her father. At the outset of her career, she spelled her last name "Halliday", her father's birth surname, but eventually changed it to "Holiday".

She signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard.

Holiday had 16 best-selling songs in 1937, making the year her most commercially successful. It was in this year that Holiday scored her sole number one hit as a featured vocalist on the available pop charts of the 1930s, "Carelessly". The hit "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm", was also recorded by Ray Noble, Glen Gray and Fred Astaire, whose rendering was a bestseller for weeks. Holiday's version ranked 6 on the year-end single chart available for 1937.

In February 1938, Holiday was hired by Artie Shaw and became one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra. That was unusual at that time. This was also the first time a black female singer employed full-time toured the segregated U.S. South with a white bandleader. In situations where there was a lot of racial tension, Shaw was known to stick up for his vocalist. In her autobiography, Holiday describes an incident in which she was not permitted to sit on the bandstand with other vocalists because she was black. Shaw said to her, "I want you on the band stand like Helen Forrest, Tony Pastor and everyone else." When touring the South, Holiday would sometimes be heckled by members of the audience.

In 1939, Holiday recorded her biggest selling record, "Strange Fruit" for Commodore, charting at number 16 on the available pop charts for the 1930s.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.

In September 1946, Holiday began her only major film, New Orleans, in which she starred opposite Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman.

She was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Because of personal struggles and an altered voice, her final recordings were met with mixed reaction but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958.

Vocal style

Holiday's delivery made her performances recognizable throughout her career. Her improvisation compensated for lack of musical education. Holiday said that she always wanted her voice to sound like an instrument and some of her influences were Louis Armstrong and the singer Bessie Smith.

Frank Sinatra was influenced as a young man by her performances on 52nd Street. He told Ebony magazine in 1958 about her impact:

With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.

Personal life

Billie Holiday was married three times. Her first marriage was to James Monroe in 1941, but they divorced in 1947.

Billie Holiday's second husband was Joe Guy. They got married in 1951 but divorced in 1957.

Soon after, she then married Louis McKay, her third and final husband. McKay was a mobster and was abusive towards Holiday. They were separated (but not divorced) at the time of her death.

Holiday was childless, but she had two godchildren: singer Billie Lorraine Feather (the daughter of Leonard Feather) and Bevan Dufty (the son of William Dufty).

Holiday died of cirrhosis on July 17, 1959, at age 44.

Her funeral Mass was held on July 21, 1959, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.

Interesting facts about Billie Holiday

She was nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young.

Holiday was friends with the popular singer Ella Fitzgerald.

Holiday authored an autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, published in 1956.

Holiday won four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumously, for Best Historical Album.

She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.

In 2000, she was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence.

She was named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR; and was ranked fourth on the Rolling Stone list of "200 Greatest Singers of All Time" (2023).

Several films about her life have been released, most recently The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021).

In 1985, a statue of Billie Holiday was erected in Baltimore; the statue was completed in 1993 with additional panels of images inspired by her seminal song Strange Fruit.

The Billie Holiday Monument is located at Pennsylvania and West Lafayette avenues in Baltimore's Upton neighborhood.

In 2019, Chirlane McCray announced that New York City would build a statue honoring Holiday near Queens Borough Hall.

The song Angel of Harlem by Irish rock band U2, released as a single in December 1988, was written as a homage to Billie Holiday.

Billie Holiday qoutes

"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."

"Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough."

"Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose."

"If I don't have friends, then I ain't got nothing."

Films and plays about Holiday

The biographical film Lady Sings the Blues, loosely based on Holiday's autobiography, was released in 1972 and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Diana Ross for Best Actress.

Another film, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, starred Andra Day and was released in 2021. It is based on the book Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari.

Holiday is the primary character in the play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, with music by Lanie Robertson.

Billie is a 2019 documentary film based on interviews in the 1970s by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who was researching a book on Holiday that was never completed.

Billie Holiday was also portrayed by actress Paula Jai Parker in Touched by an Angel's 2000 episode "God Bless the Child".

Discography

Filmography

Theatrical films

1933: The Emperor Jones, appeared as an extra

1935: Symphony in Black, short (with Duke Ellington)

1947: New Orleans

1950: 'Sugar Chile' Robinson, Billie Holiday, Count Basie and His Sextet

Television appearances

August 27, 1949

Arlene Francis Show, NY (1)
Arlene Francis
"The Man I Love", " All of Me", "Lover Man"

November 3, 1957

Live Broadcast from Mister Kelly's, Chicago (1)

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"Good Morning Heartache", "You Better Go Now"

November 18, 1958

Mars Club, Music Hall Parade Voyons Un Peu, Paris France (2)

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"I Only Have Eyes for You"

(1) = Available on audio (2) = Available on DVD

In Spanish: Billie Holiday para niños

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Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996), was an American jazz singer. She was called "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz", and the "First Lady of Song".

Her voice spanned three octaves. She could sing very high notes and very low notes. She was famous for her scat singing. She won 14 Grammy Awards. She was awarded the National Medal of Art and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, United States to William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Soon after Ella was born, her parents separated. She went to live in Yonkers, New York with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. In 1923, Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born. When she was a child, Fitzgerald lived in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, the Bronx.

As a youngster, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer. She loved listening to jazz music by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She especially liked the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it....I tried so hard to sound just like her."

In 1932, Fitzgerald's mother died. Ella began doing badly at school. She got into trouble with the police, and was sent to a reform school. She escaped from the reformatory, and for a time was homeless.

Fitzgerald had her first job as a singer when she was 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Harlem Opera House in Harlem, New York. She was able to compete in one of its famous "Amateur Nights". At first she was going to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by some local dancers, she decided to sing instead. She won the first prize of US$ 25 singing Connee Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection".

Big-band singing

In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. She met a drummer and bandleader called Chick Webb here. Webb had already hired a singer called Charlie Linton to work with the band. According to The New York Times, Webb was "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough." Webb let her try singing with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.

Fitzgerald began singing often with Webb's Orchestra during 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. She recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". In 1938 she co-wrote and sang a version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket". After this, she started getting famous.

Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra". Fitzgerald became the bandleader. She recorded nearly 150 sides during her time with the orchestra.

Singing with Decca

In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band and began to work as a solo singer. She was signed to the Decca label, and she had several popular hit songs. She recording with other musicians like the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Delta Rhythm Boys.

Decca's Milt Gabler became her manager and she began working often for the jazz producer Norman Granz. She often sang in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Then, Granz became her manager, but he did not record her on any of his record labels for nearly a decade.

In the mid-1940s, after the swing era, and the end of the great touring big bands, jazz music became quite different. A new kind of jazz called bebop became popular and Fitzgerald changed her style of singing. She worked with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and started including scat singing as a big part of her performances. About singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald said, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."

Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" was later described by The New York Times as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her be-bop recording of "Oh, Lady be Good!" (1947) was also very popular, and made people think of her as one of the most important jazz singers.

Granz did not like some of the music Fitzgerald was given at this time, so during her last years on the Decca label she recorded some duets with pianist Ellis Larkins, released in 1950 as Ella Sings Gershwin.

Singing with Verve

In 1955, Fitzgerald left Decca, and joined Granz's new record label, Verve Records. She said later, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing bebop. I thought bebop was 'it', and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman....felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life."

A new album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, was released in 1956. It was the first of eight multi-album "Songbook" sets that she would record for Verve between 1956 and 1964. Many of the songs were standards and Fitzgerald tried to cross over into a non-jazz audience.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook was the only Songbook on which the composer of the songs also played with her. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, who had worked together for a long time, both played on half the set's 38 tracks, and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues", and a musical piece about Fitzgerald (the only "Songbook" track that Fitzgerald does not sing on).

The Songbook series became the Fitzgerald's most critically acclaimed and popular work. The New York Times wrote in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration."

Ella Fitzgerald also recorded albums of the songs of Cole Porter and George Gershwin in 1972 and 1983. The albums were called Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get It. A later album of songs by a single composer was released when she was with Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, with songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

While she was recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, with Norman Granz. Granz helped her to become one of the most important live jazz performers.

In the mid-1950s, Fitzgerald became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo (a Hollywood nightclub), after Marilyn Monroe had persuaded the owner to make the booking. This was very important in Fitzgerald's career. The event was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer which is to receive a production in London's West End from November 2009.

Some live albums on Verve that she recorded are well thought of by critics: Ella at the Opera House, Ella in Rome and Ella in Berlin.

Later years

In later life, Fitzgerald kept a busy concert schedule, but her health worsened. She had heart surgery in 1986. She had diabetes, which accounted for her failing eyesight. Her diabetes worsened, and both legs were cut off (amputated) below the knees. She never completely recovered. She was unable to perform often. She spent time with family. Fitzgerald died in her Beverly Hills, California home on June 15, 1996. She was interred in the Sunset Mission Mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

By the 1990s, Fitzgerald had recorded more than 200 songs. In 1991, she gave her final concert at Carnegie Hall. She had performed there 26 times. She received numerous awards. In 1979, she received Kennedy Center Honors. In 1987, she received the National Medal of Arts. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. France presented her with the Commander of Arts and Letters award. Yale University, Dartmouth, and other schools awarded her honorary doctorates. Several of Fitzgerald's awards, significant personal possessions, and documents were given to the Smithsonian Institution, the library of Boston University, the Library of Congress, and the Schoenberg Library at UCLA.

Personal life

In 1941, Fitzgerald married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer. The marriage was annulled after two years. In December 1947, she married double bass player Ray Brown. They adopted a child of Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances. They named him Ray Brown, Jr.. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953.

In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. The affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman.

Images for kids

Fitzgerald with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, and Timme Rosenkrantz in New York City, 1947.

Ella Fitzgerald at the Paul Masson Winery, Saratoga, California in 1986

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Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996), was an American jazz singer. She was called "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz", and the "First Lady of Song". Her voice spanned three octaves. She could sing very high notes and very low notes. She was famous for her scat singing.

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https://kids.kiddle.co/Langston_Hughes

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(1902?–67). American writer Langston Hughes was celebrated for his poetry, but he also wrote plays, children’s books, and newspaper columns. His poems, which tell of the joys…

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https://kids.kiddle.co/W._E._B._Du_Bois

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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Learn about Black History with W.E.B. Du Bois. Here's a W.E.B. Du Bois cartoon for students

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James Armistead Lafayette (December 10, 1760 - August 9, 1830) was an African American slave. He served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War as a double agent. He served under the Marquis de Lafayette. He reported on the activities of Benedict Arnold after he had gone over to the British. He also reported on Lord Cornwallis just before the Battle of Yorktown. James gave the British false information on the Americans.

Life and career

He was an African-American slave. He was owned by William Armistead of Virginia. James took his master's name and called himself James Armistead. James was born about 1748 in Virginia.

After getting the consent of his master, he volunteered in 1781 to join the American army under the Marquis de Lafayette. The Marquis used him as a spy. Armistead posed as a runaway slave to the British. He joined the camp of Brigadier General Benedict Arnold the turncoat who was leading some British forces in the area. Pretending to be a spy for the British, Armistead gained Arnold's trust. Arnold used him to guide British troops through local roads. " The ex-slave, who later renamed himself James Armistead Lafayette in the general's honor, served as a double agent against the british under the avowedly antislavery Lafayette."

After Arnold departed north in the spring of 1781, James went to the camp of Lord Charles Cornwallis. Again he posed as a runaway slave. He was given a job serving General Cornwallis. He moved frequently between British camps. In each case the officers would speak openly about their strategies in front of him. James kept this information in written reports. He gave these reports to other American spies. In this way he relayed much information about the British plans for troop movements and about their weapons.

Cornwallis hired James to spy for the British. When he was sent to spy on the Americans he brought back an order for General Daniel Morgan to bring up all his reserves. Morgan didn't have any reserves, it was a false order. But it kept Cornwallis where he was leading to his defeat at the Battle of Yorktown. The intelligence reports from his espionage were also instrumental in helping to defeat the British.

After the war

After the war James had to return to his live as a slave. He was not eligible for emancipation under the Act of 1783 for slave-soldiers. Spies were not considered soldiers. When Lafayette returned to Virginia in 1784 he found out that James was still a slave. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote a letter to the Virginia legislature praising James and what he did. This won James his freedom and a pension. James took the name James Armistead Lafayette.

Armistead continued to live in New Kent County with his new wife, one son and several other children and became a rich farmer . In 1818, he applied to the state legislature for financial aid; he was granted $60 for present relief and $40 annual pension for his services in the Revolutionary War. He died on August 9, 1830 in Virginia.

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James Armistead Lafayette Facts for Kids

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James Armistead Lafayette (December 10, 1760 - August 9, 1830) was an African American slave. He served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War as a double agent. He served under the Marquis de Lafayette. He reported on the activities of Benedict Arnold after he had gone over to the British.

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During his term, he resolved a conflict against France peacefully. He also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which made it illegal to say bad things about the government. Many people did not like those acts because they felt it took away their freedom of speech.