Essay On Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday was an influential and famous jazz artist. Holiday had a good career for many years before she died of drug addiction. She was born on 7th April 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At birth, she was named Eleanor Fagan, and based on some sources, her birth certificate reports that she was named Eleanor Harris. She was born to a teenage mother, Sadie and father Clarence Holiday who was also a thriving Jazz artist. Unfortunately, her father was absent during most of her life, especially when she was growing up. A large part of her childhood was spent in Baltimore, Maryland; this was a tough period for Holiday (Greene, 2007). At the age of 10 years, she was sent to a reformatory for criminal behavior; therefore, she did not get much education. When she was a teenager, she moved to New York in 1928 where she reunited with her mother who had left her some years before to look for a job (Szwed, 2015). During this time, Holiday started performing in small clubs where she earned a reputation fast as a talented, American jazz musician. In 1933, Billie Holiday’s career started when producer John Hammond, who is also a writer, noticed her singing talent at Monette’s a club in New

James that was released in 2015. It has been part of a wave of the celebration of the 100th birthday of Billie Holiday. The album is a collaboration work of Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland. Remembering his long relationship with the music of Holiday, James said that he wanted to broadcast the importance of Holiday as an activist, band leader, and a feminist (Chinen, 2015). James made each of the songs in the album feel punchier and more important. James also included a significant outlier, a song that he had never sang before, which is “My Man,” a tortured ballet that is adapted from the French chanson, and the Billie Holiday turned into a suggestive talisman. The song is prefaced by James with some thoughts about sexism (Chinen,