Billie Holiday

Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia on the seventh of April 1915, the daughter of a fifteen-year-old mother and a teenage jazz guitarist who would not legally acknowledge her until the year of her death. She was raised in deeply impoverished conditions in Baltimore and entered the singing trade in Harlem at fourteen.

The Columbia talent scout John Hammond heard her at Monette Moore's club in 1933, when she was eighteen. Her recordings across the next twenty-five years — particularly the small-group sessions with Lester Young in 1937-39 — established a vocal phrasing of unprecedented expressive depth. The looseness with which she sat behind the beat, the conversational diction, the willingness to subordinate vocal technique to emotional truth: these became, by the 1960s, the operating model of jazz singing.

In 1939 she recorded "Strange Fruit" — Abel Meeropol's poem on Southern lynching set to music — for Commodore Records, after Columbia refused to release it. The recording sold one million copies. The song remained the principal anti-lynching anthem of American popular music for the next eight decades.

She struggled with heroin addiction from the early 1940s and was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned by federal agents — the activity was documented in the 2015 book Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari as a particular vendetta by Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The Cabaret Card system stripped her of the legal right to perform in New York City venues that served alcohol from 1947 until her death.

She died in handcuffed police custody at Metropolitan Hospital in New York on the seventeenth of July 1959, age forty-four, of complications from cirrhosis and forced narcotics withdrawal.

She is honored here as the singer who taught American music how to phrase.