As a child, she ran errands in a brothel: Who is Billie Holiday?

Lady Day, also known as Billie Holiday, is a jazz singer and songwriter who was born into poverty, loneliness, and a very difficult childhood in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent almost 30 years of her 44-year life actively singing. One of the most striking issues in the singing career of Lady Day, one of the most important representatives of popular American singing, is that she avoids scat singing in her performances. Although She gives full credit to the element of improvisation, one of the most important musical elements of jazz music, in the melodies and lyrics she sings, she does not perform scat singing neither in her recordings nor in her concerts.

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

One of the songs that made Billie Holiday most popular was the song "Strange Fruit", for which she did not write the lyrics or music, contrary to popular belief. Everyone who listens to this song carries a piece of Holiday with them.

Life story

Eleanora Fagan (stage name Billie Holiday) was born in Pennsylvania in 1915, the daughter of a 15-year-old father and a 13-year-old mother - although there is no certainty about this. Then the father goes to war and the mother and daughter are left alone. “I didn't have the chance to play with dolls like other children, because I was six years old when I started working,” the girl writes in her autobiography, years later. As a child, she began running errands in a brothel and listening to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. She is 11 years old, she is raped, but it is said that she is the one who seduced the man. She lives with her grandmother for a while and learns almost everything about life from her. In the morning of a night they slept together, the young woman wakes up with her dead body in her arms.

She returns to her mother in New York. However, her living conditions did not change much, and she was raped again while working as a prostitute at the age of 14. She is trying to pave a better way for herself. While trying her luck as a dancer in a nightclub, she is noticed to have a beautiful voice and things begin to change. John Hammond discovered this beautiful voice in 1932. Billie Holiday made her first recording in 1933 when she was 18 years old. She performs the song 'Your Mother's Son-in-Law' with a band including Benny Goodman. “He was a little shy, a little nervous. Billie wasn't good at lying. That's why she said all the words in the songs with feeling. Billie was a jazz singer, but all her renditions had a 'blues' sound to them, which may have been a remnant of Eleanora's experiences. (…) She made her audience believe every word she said. Because she believed in herself in the first place. ‘You just feel it, and when you say it, the listeners feel it too.’ (Jones).”

The period known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Black Movement in the United States lasted from 1918 to the mid-1930s. This was a period when black artists were very active in every branch of art. It was possible to see musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith as part of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as names such as blues poet Langston Hughes, bass-baritone Paul Robeson, and dancer Josephine Baker. Billie Holiday was not far from these names either. Billie Holiday interpreted the poem 'Strange Fruit', written by Abel Meeropol, a communist teacher from the Bronx, in 1939. Her mother warned Holiday, who even had to enter the clubs where she sang from different doors because of the color of her skin, and said that her song would put her in a difficult situation; But despite all the threats, her daughter did not back down and released the record with her own efforts.

The 'strange fruits' in the poem were black people who were lynched, beaten, and hung from trees. Although it was Holiday's biggest success selling one million copies, it also caused the greatest damage to her career, and Time magazine selected it as the "Song of the Century" in 1999.

Following the death of her mother, increasing heroin addiction, alcohol, and cigarette addiction, as well as pain and disappointments in her love life, accelerated the collapse of Holiday, nicknamed 'Lady Day'. In 1947, she was arrested for drugs and spent a year in prison. She tried to get rid of her addiction, but she couldn't do it completely. Her voice was increasingly negatively affected by this lifestyle, but her emotion and melancholic effect on the listeners never changed.

In 1958, while she was recording her album Lady In Satin, which consisted of her chosen songs, Billie Holiday was a dying woman. 'For Heaven's Sake' and 'You Don't Know What Love Is', which followed the opening 'I'm A Fool To Want You', were again love songs, but the second of them contained a great disappointment.

About a year after the release of the Lady In Satin album, in May 1959, Lady Day took the stage one last time. She gave another concert at New York's Phoenix Theater, unaware that she was saying goodbye to jazz, the microphone, the audience, the stage, and most importantly, herself. Afterward, she was hospitalized. Her body could not handle the alcohol-drug combination she clung to to escape from her life. Neither her heart, nor her consciousness, nor her organs had the strength to endure. On the twelfth day of her hospitalization, heroin was found in her room. While she was in the hospital, she was arrested once again. This imprisonment ended with death, the union that reunited Billie with little Eleanora, her grandmother, Sadie Fagan, and her childhood. "On June 17, 1959, Billie Holiday won her freedom, this time never to lose it again."

When her lifeless body was examined, $750 was found taped to her leg. This was the advance she received for her autobiographical writings. She had only 75 cents in her bank account. By the end of the year, she would have accumulated $100,000 in her account from increased record sales, but Holiday would no longer need this money.