Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday was born on April 7, 1915, in a United States whose jazz and blues traditions would come to define the contours of her life's work. The historical record places her birth in both Philadelphia and Baltimore — two cities whose distinct African American cultural worlds shaped the early twentieth century in which she came of age. A citizen of a country she would navigate on her own terms, Holiday worked primarily in English, moving through musical spaces where jazz, swing, vocal jazz, and blues converged.
Over the course of her career, Holiday established herself as a singer, songwriter, composer, musician, and bandleader, demonstrating a range of creative roles that extended well beyond performance alone. She also worked as an actor and, notably, as an author and autobiographer, bringing her own voice to bear on the written record of her life. Among her compositions, "God Bless the Child" stands as a documented work associated with her name. Her contributions to music were formally recognized through the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — a breadth of institutional acknowledgment that crossed genre lines.
Holiday died on July 17, 1959, at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York City. She was forty-four years old. The city that received her at her death was also, in many respects, the city most closely associated with the professional world she had inhabited — a fitting, if somber, geographic anchor for the close of a life spent largely in American music.
Quotes by Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday's insights on:
I don't think I missed a single picture Billie Dove ever made. I was crazy for her. I tried to do my hair like her, and eventually, I borrowed her name.
Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day. p153.
I guess I’m not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse. But I never tried to make anything of it. If I’d heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree, I’d have loved it just the same.
If you find a tune and it’s got something to do with you, you don’t have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too.
You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.
You can get in just as much trouble by being dumb and innocent as you can by breaking the law.
In this country kings or dukes don’t amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.
Singing songs like ‘The Man I Love’ or ‘Porgy’ is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.
There’s no damn business like show business – you have to smile to keep from throwing up.