Rebecca Carey Rohan - Billie Holiday: Singer

PART I

The Life of Billie Holiday

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it.

Billie Holiday

Billie Holidays unique talents as a singer have kept her legacy alive.

Holiday emotes into the microphone while performing at the Downbeat Club in New York City, circa 1947.

CHAPTER ONE

A LEGEND IS BORN, BUTTOO LATE

T here are two important things to know about Billie Holiday, and the first is that she was not technically an artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Not the way Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, or Duke Ellington were. Though she lived in Harlem during the latter half of the movement, she was too young to have really participated in the era. However, if it werent for the Renaissance and some of its musical forerunners, Holiday may have never had the career that she did. Her career did not exist in a vacuum. It was very much a continuation of the yearsand the careersthat had come immediately before.

The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic movement that came out of Harlem between the end of World War I (1918) and the mid-1930s. Harlem had become a cultural center, attracting African-American writers, of segregation and racism. During this period, Harlem was more than the birthplace of an artistic movement: it was also the center of the New Negro movement, in which people of color began demanding equal civil and political rights.

The music of the Harlem Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues. White people interested in the new musical style flocked to Harlem speakeasies. Through their mutual love of music, interracial socializing was encouraged, though the cultural impact of the Renaissance did little to break down the that were still enforced around the country. It did, however, reinforce racial pride among African Americans.

Its a shame that Billie Holiday was born too late to have been a true participant in the movement. Taking part in the Harlem Renaissance may have given her a sense of belonging that she seemed to lack for most of her life. Holiday was born into a fractured family under a sense of shame, and she had a far from upbringing.

This leads to the second important thing to know about Billie Holiday: much of the information that has endured about her existence, much of what is taken as fact, may very well be fiction. Even her FBI file is thin, jumbled, and inconclusive. Some of the source material about Holidays life comes from newspapers, magazines, and even video recordings. But some comes from unreliable sources.

One of those unreliable sources is Holiday herself. Although she published an autobiography called Lady Sings the Blues in 1956, with the assistance of a cowriter, she later claimed shed never read it. She embroidered or glossed over many of the details of her life in the book. It presents a melodramatic but sanitized version of her life, especially her early years. Many books about Holiday contain anecdotes collected by a writer named Linda Kuehl, who conducted more than 150 interviews with Holidays colleagues, friends and peers. However, many of those people were elderly, drunk, or otherwise under the influence when she spoke to them. Over time, the truthas much as multiple memories can be treated as truthcame out. There is now a certain level of agreement about the sad facts of her early life.

HOLIDAYS PARENTS

Holiday kicked off her autobiography with the following tale: Mom and Pop were only a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was fifteen and I was three. Unfortunately, that was far from the truth. Perhaps this was what she wanted people to think. Or it could have been that she thought it was better than her reality. Regardless, here are the accepted facts of her childhood, such as it was: her mother, Sarah (better known as Sadie), was nineteen, and her father, Clarence, was only sixteen when Holiday was born. They never did get married.

Sadie, in fact, was also born out of daughter of an illegitimate daughter. That status had a far-reaching negative effect on both womens lives.

Not much is known about Sadies mother, except that her name was Susie and that she had another daughter, Eva, who was Sadies half-sister. Both girls were born out of wedlock and from different fathers. Its unclear where Susie lived when Sadie was first born, though it was almost certainly on the wrong side of the tracks in Baltimore. When Sadie was almost two years old, her mother married a man named Harris. The three of them moved to Carroll Street in Baltimore. Sadies last name became Harris, also. Susie worked almost constantly, and Sadie had very little education. In fact, she was working by the time she was ten years old.