Information AboutBillie Holiday |
Billie Holiday ( April 7 , 1915 – July 17 , 1959 ), born '''Eleanora Fagan''' and later nicknamed '''Lady Day''' (see " Jazz Royalty " regarding similar nicknames), was an American Jazz singer, generally regarded as one of the great female jazz vocalists of the twentieth century. BIOGRAPHY Early life Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood, which greatly affected her life and career. Much of her childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by her autobiography, ''Lady Sings the Blues'', published in 1956 . This account is known to contain many inaccuracies. Her professional pseudonym was taken from Billie Dove , an Actress she admired, and Clarence Holiday , her probable father. At the outset of her career, she spelled her last name "Halliday," presumably to distance herself from her neglectful father, but eventually changed it back to "Holiday." Holiday's grandfather was one of 17 children of a black Virginia slave and a white Irish plantation owner. There are conflicting reports about whether her thirteen-year-old mother, Sadie Fagan, and fifteen-year-old father, Clarence Holiday, ever married, but if they did, they did not live together for any significant period. Clarence Holiday played guitar and banjo professionally and joined jazz-band leader Fletcher Henderson in the early 1930s, so he was on the road much of the time and was apparently not a family man. There is some controversy regarding Holiday's paternity, stemming from a copy of her birth certificate in the Baltimore archives that lists the father as a "Frank DeViese". Some historians consider this an anomaly, probably inserted by a hospital or government worker 1. On the infrequent occasions that she did see him, Billie would extort money from her father by threatening to tell his then-girlfriend that he had a daughter. |
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