Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), also called Lady Day is generally considered one of the greatest jazz singers of all time.

Born Eleanora Fagan, she had a difficult childhood which affec

Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), also called Lady Day is generally considered one of the greatest jazz singers of all time.

Born Eleanora Fagan, she had a difficult childhood which affected her life and career. Much of Holiday's childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by herself in her autobiography published in 1956. She was born in Philadelphia but grew up in the Fells Point section of Baltimore. According to her autobiography, her house was the first on their street to have electricity. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was just thirteen at the time of her birth; her father Clarence Holiday, a jazz guitarist who would play for Fletcher Henderson, was fifteen. Billie Holiday's parents married when she was three, but they soon divorced, leaving her to be raised largely by her mother and other relatives. A hardened and angry child, she dropped out of school at an early age and, allegedly, began working as a prostitute with her mother. This preceded her move to New York with her mother sometime in the early 1930s.