Billie Holiday Biography

Karen Candelaria & Han Nguyen
US History
Period 4
January 25, 2016

Billie Holiday

The musical artist we chose to write about was Billie Holiday. The topics that we’ll be explaining are her life, her musical career and what lead her to become famous, and one of her songs called “Strange Fruit” with the background story behind the song’s meaning. We decided to do this project because she’s known to be one of the best jazz singer back then and we wanted to know how and why she was so interested in music. Discovering the story behind her song “Strange Fruit” and what she faced during her childhood perked our interest and that’s what motivated us to choose her more. Billie Holiday was born on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and
This was how Holiday managed a more somewhat stable home life, but unfortunately her mother’s marriage didn’t last that long either. They got divorced a couple years later which left Billie and Sadie struggling all over again. Sadie often cleaned other people’s houses, but the money she earned couldn’t support her family. Of course, Holiday went to school when she was young, but she ended up skipping school later on. In fact, she and her mother had to go to court in order to account for her truancy. In January of 1925, she was taken to a facility called “House of Good Shepherd” that consisted of African American girls who are classified as “troubled”. She was only 9 years old when this took place, so that made her one of the youngest girls there. August of that same year, she was returned to her mother and life resumed itself like before. Donald Clark, who wrote a biography about Holiday called Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, stated that she only returned back to her mother after she’d been sexually assaulted. Throughout her difficult early life, she considered music as an important aspect of her life. Two of the artists she would constantly sing along to was Louis Armstrong and Bessie
She’s usually seen in a long white evening dress and white flowers in her jet black hair. A music producer by the name of John Hammond heard Holiday sing in the nightclub she worked in. He was easily mesmerized by her singing skills and called her the best jazz singer he’d encountered. From that day on, he brought different famous people to hear her performances. Little did Holiday know, Hammond was the first to produce one of her records. The best jazz musicians were present during the recording. Benny Goodman played the clarinet, Roy Eldridge played the trumpet, Ben Webster played the saxophone, and Teddy Wilson played the piano. They soon produced one of her most famous pieces, “I Wished on the Moon”. After she had a collaboration with these different musicians, Holiday appeared with Duke Ellington in the film “Symphony in Black”. Artie Shaw’s band invited her to sing with them while they traveled around the United States and she was the very first black singer at the time to perform with a white band. The traveling process was very difficult however due to the racial separation laws in America. Over the years, she sang songs that were based off of her bad relationships, like “T’aint Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “My Man”. Her relationship with trumpeter Joe Guy led her to start using heroin and caused the drug addiction. On the same year this happened, her song “God Bless