48 Fun Facts About Billie Holiday

Which name did Billie Holiday use as a child, before she took her stage name?

Eleanora Fagan took the surname Holiday from her father, the jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, and the first name Billie from a film star she admired.

In which city was Billie Holiday born?

Philadelphia, though she grew up in another city that some reference books still give as her birthplace; as a child she was sometimes left in other people's care.

Which musician gave Holiday the nickname 'Lady Day'?

Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist who once lodged with her and her mother, coined 'Lady Day'; she named him 'Prez', her president of the saxophone.

From which actress did Billie Holiday borrow her stage first name?

Billie Dove, a silent-film star she admired, supplied the first name; the surname came from her father, Clarence Holiday, a jazz guitarist who chose his music career over the family.

Which producer heard Holiday singing in a Harlem club and arranged her recording debut?

John Hammond had gone to hear the better-known Monette Moore and found Holiday filling in for her; he soon wrote that she sang as well as anybody he had ever heard.

With which bandleader did the 18-year-old Holiday make her recording debut in November 1933?

Benny Goodman was talked into using the unknown singer by the producer who had discovered her; their second song together, 'Riffin' the Scotch', became her first hit.

Holiday's 1935 collaboration with which pianist produced the standard 'What a Little Moonlight Can Do'?

Teddy Wilson led the small studio bands that cut these records quickly and cheaply for the jukebox trade; they are now counted among the classics of jazz.

Holiday sang in the 1935 short film Symphony in Black, built around which bandleader's music?

Duke Ellington's short let Holiday sing the blues as a woman mistreated by her lover; when Hollywood finally gave her a feature, New Orleans, it cast her as a maid.

Which song from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess gave Holiday a hit in 1936?

'Summertime' opens the opera as a lullaby sung to a baby; Holiday's record, made within a year of the Broadway premiere, took it onto the pop charts at number 12.

Which white bandleader hired Billie Holiday in 1938, soon after she left Count Basie's band?

Artie Shaw made her one of the first Black singers to front a white band, but she quit within the year after a hotel kept her from using the front entrance with the rest of the band.

'Strange Fruit' began as a poem written by which Bronx schoolteacher under the pen name Lewis Allan?

Abel Meeropol taught English at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx; he and his wife later adopted the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

'Strange Fruit' sings of Southern trees, but the lynching photograph that inspired it was taken in which Northern state?

Indiana: Lawrence Beitler photographed the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in the town of Marion in August 1930, and the poet said the picture haunted him for days.

At which integrated Greenwich Village nightclub did Billie Holiday first perform 'Strange Fruit'?

Cafe Society staged it as her closing number: the waiters stopped serving, the room went dark except for a spotlight on her face, and when the lights came up she was gone, with no encore.

Because Columbia found 'Strange Fruit' too sensitive, which label recorded it on 20 April 1939?

Commodore, Milt Gabler's small independent label, took the song her own company would not touch, and it became the best-selling record of her career.

What was on the flip side of the 'Strange Fruit' single, a jukebox hit credited with much of its sales?

'Fine and Mellow', a blues Holiday wrote herself, carried the single on jukeboxes while radio shunned the protest song on the other side; in 1957 she sang it on television in a last reunion with Prez.

Holiday said 'Strange Fruit' always recalled her father's death, which came after what?

A hospital turned him away because he was Black, and the lung illness Clarence Holiday had caught on tour killed him; she said the song 'reminds me of how Pop died' but kept singing it.

By Holiday's account, 'God Bless the Child' grew out of a quarrel over money with whom?

Her mother Sadie had borrowed from her to run a restaurant, yet turned her down flat when she needed money herself, as Holiday told it; her parting shot, 'God bless the child that's got his own', became the title.

Which impresario signed Holiday in 1952 and produced her Clef and Verve records?

Norman Granz, the promoter behind Jazz at the Philharmonic, put her back in front of small jazz groups after years of string-laden pop sessions, and together they made about a hundred recordings.

Holiday's first Decca recording in 1944, and one of her biggest hits, was which song?

'Lover Man' was the song she begged her new producer to record with strings instead of the usual small jazz band: 'I went on my knees to him,' she wrote.

Holiday said she wrote 'Don't Explain' after her husband Jimmy Monroe came home with what?

Lipstick on his collar: by her account Monroe started explaining and she cut him off, and the phrase kept running through her head until she finished the song with Arthur Herzog Jr.

Holiday's only major film role was in New Orleans (1947), opposite which trumpeter?

Louis Armstrong played a bandleader and Holiday the singing maid who loves him, a part she resented; much of the music the two filmed was cut before release.

After her 1947 narcotics conviction, Holiday served her sentence at which federal prison camp?

Alderson in West Virginia was where the court sent her for a year and a day after she pleaded guilty and asked for hospital treatment; she was released early for good behaviour.

What did Holiday's 1947 drug conviction cost her, changing where she could sing in New York?

Her cabaret performer's card, issued by New York police, was revoked, and without it she could not sing in the city's nightclubs; thereafter she worked concert halls and theatres instead.

Days after leaving prison in 1948, Holiday made her comeback with a sold-out concert at which venue?

Carnegie Hall, a concert stage, stayed open to her when her conviction shut her out of the city's nightclubs, and she packed it.

What flower became Holiday's trademark, worn in her hair on stage?

Gardenias pinned in her hair were part of the stage persona she fixed in the late 1930s: head tilted back, fingers snapping the beat, a single spotlight, and rooms that fell silent for her.

Which head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics is alleged to have targeted Holiday from 1939 onward?

Harry Anslinger had his agents pursue Holiday as a high-profile drug case, and she was under arrest in her hospital bed when she died in 1959.

Holiday's 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues was ghostwritten by whom?

William Dufty, a New York Post journalist, wrote it quickly from conversations with her; Holiday later claimed she had never read the book that carries her name.

Holiday's 1958 Columbia album Lady in Satin featured a 40-piece orchestra arranged and conducted by whom?

Ray Ellis admitted he was unhappy with her singing at the sessions, and realised how great the performance was only when he heard the final mix a few weeks later.

On which 1957 CBS broadcast did Holiday sing a jukebox hit of hers in a famous final reunion with Prez?

The Sound of Jazz went out live; when the ailing Prez stood to play his chorus, the show's Nat Hentoff recalled, the two locked eyes, she nodded and half-smiled, and the control room was in tears.

Which rock band recorded the 1988 single 'Angel of Harlem' as a tribute to Billie Holiday?

U2 cut it at Sun Studio in Memphis, where Elvis Presley once recorded, and brought in the Memphis Horns, as the Irish band worked its way through American roots music.

When Holiday died in 1959, how much money was reportedly found strapped to her leg?

750 dollars in fifty-dollar bills was, the story goes, all she had left after years in which those around her had drained her earnings.

Whom did Holiday marry in March 1957?

Louis McKay, like other men in her life, used her name and drained her earnings; the two were already living apart when she died two years after the wedding.

Which actress won a 2014 Tony Award for playing Holiday in the Broadway play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill?

Audra McDonald took her sixth Tony for the part and, accepting it, thanked the strong and courageous women on whose shoulders she stood, 'most of all, Billie Holiday'.

Who earned an Oscar nomination for her debut as Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (1972)?

Diana Ross had never acted in a film before; the movie took liberties with Holiday's life, but it sent a new generation of listeners back to her records.

Who won a Golden Globe for playing Holiday in the 2021 film The United States vs. Billie Holiday?

Andra Day had little acting experience, and director Lee Daniels resisted casting the singer until her acting coach showed him half a minute of video of her getting into character.

Whose National Recording Registry included 'Strange Fruit' among its first 50 recordings?

Library of Congress: it named the song in the registry's very first list, more than sixty years after her own label had declined to record it.

Which Holiday recording of 1941 was kept off the airwaves by broadcasters worried about its effect on listeners?

'Gloomy Sunday', a Hungarian song, came trailing rumours that it drove listeners to suicide, and the BBC kept Holiday's record off the air as bad for wartime morale.

In 1999, which magazine named Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' the song of the century?

Time gave the title to a record that, sixty years earlier, her own label had refused to make and some radio stations had refused to play.

As a girl, Holiday ran errands for a brothel in return for hearing its records, among them those of which blues singer?

Bessie Smith and a famous trumpeter were the two voices on the parlour Victrola, and Holiday took something from each: she said she tried to use her own voice like a horn.

A statue of Holiday was erected in 1985 in which city?

Baltimore unveiled the bronze in 1985 without its sculptor, James Earl Reid, who skipped the ceremony after a dispute with the city over costs; the panels he had planned were added only in 2009.

Which crooner said every major pop singer of Billie Holiday's generation had been 'touched by her genius'?

Frank Sinatra told Ebony in 1958 that she was still the greatest single musical influence on him, and the most important influence on American popular singing of the previous twenty years.

Which bebop trumpeter was Holiday's partner on and off the bandstand in the mid-1940s?

Joe Guy shared her heroin habit and, by some accounts, supplied it; the two parted in 1947, the year of her drug conviction.

Which pianist was Holiday's regular accompanist from 1957 until her death?

Mal Waldron is the pianist a famous elegy for her remembers: she whispers a song to him along the keyboard, and the whole room stops breathing.

Which singer with the Chick Webb Band was seen as Holiday's rival in the late 1930s?

Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb's band met Holiday and Count Basie's in a battle of the bands at the Savoy Ballroom in January 1938; Webb's side was declared the winner, and musicians argued over the verdict for years.

Holiday's four posthumous Grammy Awards were all in which category?

Best Historical Album went four times to boxed sets of her old recordings, starting in 1980; the first Grammys of all were handed out in May 1959, two months before she died.

Which singer's stark 1965 recording of 'Strange Fruit' was later sampled by Kanye West?

Nina Simone recorded it for her album Pastel Blues, one of the few singers to attempt Holiday's song in the 1960s; Kanye West built 'Blood on the Leaves' (2013) around her performance.

Which New York poet wrote the elegy 'The Day Lady Died' after Holiday's death in 1959?

Frank O'Hara never names her: the poem follows his lunch-hour errands until he buys a newspaper with her face on it, then recalls her whispering a song in a club while everyone stopped breathing.

The 2021 film The United States vs. Billie Holiday was based on which book by Johann Hari?

Chasing the Scream (2015), Hari's history of the war on drugs, supplied the story of the Narcotics Bureau's pursuit of her; director Lee Daniels wanted to present her as a civil-rights figure rather than a tragic heroine.