Billie Holiday was born in the poor section of Baltimore. She had an unpleasant childhood. When she was ten, she was raped on her way to school. After that she avoided school, until her truancy landed her in a Catholic reformatory. When she was released, her mother moved the family to New York.
When she was fifteen, Holiday worked in the brothels and nightclubs of Harlem as a prostitute. It was here that she began to sing. According to one story, her first performance in a seedy bar room brought the entire audience to tears. Three years later she was discovered by a talent scout and signed.
Holiday recorded jazz standards through the 1930s and even wrote some of her own. In 1939 she recorded Strange Fruit, based on a poem about lynching by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Even though the lyrics are so explicitly macabre, audiences at the time had trouble understanding the song and often misunderstood it as a song about dancing. Eventually Holiday became so frustrated with her audience's lack of understanding that she stopped performing it altogether.
In the 1940s, Billie Holiday started using heroin and had a string of relationships with abusive dealers and managers who swindled her out of all her earnings. In 1947 she was arrested for possession. "The case was called The United States of America versus Billie Holiday," she later recalled, "And that's just the way it felt." Holiday did one year in prison.
For the next ten years Holiday struggled with drug addiction and the law. She got arrested a few more times, but never got clean. Here she is in 1957, two years before her death, singing Fine and Mellow, high on heroin.When she was fifteen, Holiday worked in the brothels and nightclubs of Harlem as a prostitute. It was here that she began to sing. According to one story, her first performance in a seedy bar room brought the entire audience to tears. Three years later she was discovered by a talent scout and signed.
Holiday recorded jazz standards through the 1930s and even wrote some of her own. In 1939 she recorded Strange Fruit, based on a poem about lynching by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Even though the lyrics are so explicitly macabre, audiences at the time had trouble understanding the song and often misunderstood it as a song about dancing. Eventually Holiday became so frustrated with her audience's lack of understanding that she stopped performing it altogether.
In the 1940s, Billie Holiday started using heroin and had a string of relationships with abusive dealers and managers who swindled her out of all her earnings. In 1947 she was arrested for possession. "The case was called The United States of America versus Billie Holiday," she later recalled, "And that's just the way it felt." Holiday did one year in prison.
In 1959, her heart gave out and she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. As she lay dying her hospital room was raided by the police and she was arrested for drug possession. A police guard remained outside her door at the hospital until she died.
One journalist wrote in her obituary: The likelihood exists that among her last thoughts was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.