Billie Holiday Presentation Outline 

Megan Malovich
MUSC 1040
Summer 2021

Slide 2 – Early Life

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, to unwed teenaged couple

Sarah Julia "Sadie" Fagan and jazz guitarist and banjo player Clarence Halliday. Her father

abandoned the family early on to become a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson's band, and her

mother often pawned her off to whomever she could to travel to find work. These jobs usually

were "transportation jobs', often found on railroads, and thus meant her mother was often gone

and left Billie with whoever she could. As a result of her chaotic upbringing, Billie often was

truant to school and eventually resulted in being brought in front of a juvenile court at age nine

and ultimately lead to her dropping out of school in the fifth grade at age 11. At age 12, she

began working at a brothel running errands and cleaning. Working at the brothel is where she

first heard the records of jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith and first found

inspiration and passion in singing jazz music. 

Slide 3 - Music Career Beginnings

When Billie was 14, she moved to Harlem, NYC, to live with and work alongside her

mother in a brothel. She also began singing in local jazz clubs around this time and took on the

name Billie Holiday, the first name Billie from the film star Billie Dove, and Holiday as a nod to

her biological father. At 18, she was discovered singing in a Jazz club by producer John

Hammond, who helped her get recording work with up-and-coming bandleader Benny

Goodman. She recorded two songs with Goodman, "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the

Scotch," with the latter becoming her first hit record. In 1935 she was signed to Brunswick
records with help from Hammond and recorded several songs now known as some of her

standards, like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "I Cried for You." 

Slide 5 - Big Band Tours & Breaking Barriers In The Segregated South

From 1937-38 Billie traveled as a vocalist with Count Basie and his band, which was

usually a chaotic time as they performed at new venues almost every night, hopping from city to

city. Her stint brought more music classics into her repertoire, such as "Summertime" from

Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and "They Can't Take That Away From Me" She was fired by Count

Basie in February of 1938 for reasons still unknown but was quickly scooped up by bandleader

Artie Shaw. This made her one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra and the

first time a band fully employed a black woman to tour the segregated southern U.S. This tour

caused controversy, and there were incidents of blatant racism towards Holiday that stuck with

her. Still, being a part of Artie Shaw's band elevated Billie's status higher than ever before, with

broadcast performances in New York City ensuring her success as a jazz standard. Holliday left

the band at the end of 1938, citing tensions with travel arrangements and hotels segregating her

from the rest of the (white) band wearing her down.

Slide 6 - Strange Fruit - The First Civil Rights Song

Strange Fruit may be the most significant song Holiday ever got to record, and her fight

to perform it up until her untimely death and its importance at the very beginning of the civil

rights movement has cemented its legacy in civil rights and American music history. By the late

1930s, Holiday was at the top of her game, performing in clubs wherever segregation couldn't

reach her, most notably Café Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York City. Written by
Jewish teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, the poem "Bitter Fruit" was a

sickeningly detailed depiction of a lynching in the Southern United States. Meeropol specifically

saw a photograph taken by Lawrence Beitler of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram

Smith in Marion, Indiana, and the horrible scene prompted him to write the poem. He put the

poem to accompaniment himself, changed the title to "Strange Fruit," and performed it with his

wife around New York City protest circles, rapidly gaining popularity. How Billie first heard the

song is still speculated, but the prevailing theory is that Barney Josephson, the owner of the Café

Society in Greenwich Village, heard the song at a protest and introduced it to Holiday, who was

performing at his club Café Society at the time. She immediately knew that singing the song

would likely mean retaliation for her but decided to add it to her regular live performances

anyways.

"It reminds me of how Pop died, but I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it,

but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the

South"  – Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues.

Although the first (1939) recording of the song never received airplay on the radio due to

its dark and controversial lyrics, the first version of the song became her top-selling record of all

time, selling over a million records. "Strange Fruit" was selected for preservation in the National

Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002 as being "culturally, historically or

aesthetically significant."
Slide 8 - 1940’s - 1950’s: Success, Fame, Abuse, Jail, Drugs, And Decline.

I could cover so many more good years of Billie's life here, but my devotion to her music,

career, and personal life would make this presentation a novel in length, and I want to make my

last few slides' primary focus on her early decline.

After Strange Fruit catapulted her into stardom, she had a great decade of making jazz

music, traveling the world, and cementing her place as an American Music icon with her unique

voice and ability to make any song given to her all her own. She sang with icons like Louie

Armstrong and even performed at Carnegie Hall. Unfortunately, a tumultuous upbringing meant

a lot of unhealed trauma, which lead to hard drug abuse, arrests, and Holiday being a victim of

domestic assault and financial abuse throughout her life. Singing Strange Fruit also put a target

on her back for the rest of her life. Almost immediately after her first performances of the song,

Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and would continue

to be monitored by them incessantly until her untimely death.

By the late 1950's she was twice divorced from extremely abusive men, frail, unhealthy

from a lifetime of abusive and drug abuse, financially destitute, and had fallen back into serious

heroin addiction. Some of her last performances are so sad to watch because of how small and ill

she looks, but the passion and pain she evokes in her performances still draw you to her. By early

1959 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, rapidly lost 20 pounds, and was suffering

from heart disease on top of suffering from heroin addiction. Holiday gave her final performance

in New York City on May 25th, 1959, but her body was giving out on her, and she had to be

admitted to the hospital soon after. When she arrived at the hospital in early June of 1959, she
was almost immediately arrested for drug possession by the same agent who'd been trailing her

since 1939, Harry J. Anslinger. It is speculated that the drugs were planted in the room by federal

agents to frame her, as the heroin found was in a place she physically wouldn't have been able to

reach in her frail condition. Federal agents took all her books, radio, record player, magazines,

banned any visitors, and took all other media and gifts, and handcuffed her to the bed to sit alone

in silence with an armed guard at the door at all times unless she told them who her narcotics

dealer was. Billie was withdrawing from heroin alone, handcuffed to a hospital bed when her

heart finally gave out. On July 17th, 1959, she died at age 44 of heart failure caused by cirrhosis

of the liver, alone, handcuffed to a bed, in the dark.

Slide 9 - Billie Holiday: I Love You Porgy - February 1959

In this performance, her last televised one before her death, her frailness is palpable through the

video. Her voice has become rough with all the hard-living, drug, and alcohol abuse, and you can

hear it on the higher sustained notes in this performance. Yet, despite it all, she still performs the

song wonderfully, and her performance is still as iconic as she is, but you can tell throughout it

all that she is suffering and in need of medical intervention - that she received all too late.

Slide 10 – Thank You For All The Magic, Lady Day.

Billie has been cemented in music history as one of the great jazz singers of the 20th

century. Her voice was like no other performer of her time, piercing through the chaos and the

noise around her. Although she couldn't formally read music, she seemed naturally inclined to

pick up on the chaotic improvisational level that jazz music lives on and worked well within it.

Her trumpet-like voice will be forever iconic, and she will be forever known as a troubled yet
endlessly talented artist up until the end of her life. She deserved so much better than she got but

nevertheless spoke her mind, lived life how she wanted to, and defied the authorities to bring

protest music to the minds and hearts of the next significant wave of social change protests, the

Civil Rights Movement. Unfortunately, she didn't live long enough to see herself become an icon

or even begin to see the beginning of the increased rights for African Americans in the United

States, but she will still live on to both inspire others to action and give warning to those

embroiled in drugs and hard living. She has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Rock

and Roll Hall of Fame, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, National Women’s Hall Of Fame, and the

ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame, to name a few. She’s even been on a U.S. Stamp. She’s an icon and

will be missed. Bless you, Lady Day, and may you rest in peace.

Bibliography

Carvalho, John M. (2013). "'Strange Fruit': Music between Violence and Death". The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 71 (1): 111–119 at 111–112.  ISSN 0021-
8529. JSTOR 23597541.

Davis, Angela (1999). Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-
679-77126-5

Gourse, Leslie (2000). The Billie Holiday Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary. New
York: Schirmer Trade Books. ISBN 0-02-864613-4.

Holiday, Billie; Dufty, William (1992). Lady Sings the Blues. Edition Nautilus. ISBN 978-3-
89401-110-9. Autobiography.

Lynskey, Dorian (2011). "33 Revolutions Per Minute". London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-
571-24134-7.