Billie’s parents, Sadie and Clarence Holiday, were both in their early teens when she was born and her father left when she was still a baby. At the age of six, Billie was blamed for her grandmother's death. When she was ten, Billie was raped by her neighbor. He went to jail but Billie was sent to a home for disobedient girls because the law, acted on the age-old assumption that most women asked for it.
A couple years later, she moved with her mother to New Jersey and later on to Brooklyn. Around this time Billie got her name, given to her by her mother, because she idolized the silent screen star, Billie Dove.
After going to work with her mother awhile, Billie decided she did not like washing steps and waiting on white people so, Billie ran errands for a brothel, one of the most successful in the area. It was here that Billie claims she was bitten by the jazz bug. During the next couple of years she spent her time listening to records.
She started her singing career in a small club called Covan's on West 132nd Street, accompanied by a pianist named Dot Hill. It was here that John Hammond, expecting to see the regular singer, Monette Moore, stumbled upon Billie Holiday. He immediately realized that he was listening to something quite unique in contemporary music.
John Hammond was a major influence in starting Billie's career as a singer and recording artist. In late 1933, Hammond took Billie to Columbia's studios to make a demo. She was accompanied by Dot Hill. Unfortunately, Columbia's files show no written record of the date, and no one seems to remember the tune Billie sang on her recording debut.
Billie sang in numerous clubs and was a singer for the Count Basie Band and later the Artie Shaw Band. Both of these big bands later became the most successful in the big band era which by then, Billie was creating a name for herself as a jazz singer.
Given the times she lived in, Billie Holiday would have been rich except for her choice in men and her heroin addiction. No one knows for sure when she became hooked but the changeover seemed to take place in the 1940's. She did not truly become addicted until she married her second husband, Joe Guy. He was a hard-line drug user and as well as drawing Billie into his web he took off with her savings of thirty-five thousand dollars.
In the last years of her life she was bitter, lonely, and short on money. Her years of heroin and alcohol took a toll on her. On May 31st she collapsed in her apartment and was taken to the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem where she found out she had a liver complaint and a cardiac failure. She was in the hospital for over two months fighting drug addictions and liver and cardiac failure, before she died early in the morning of July 17th 1959 at the age of 44.
Billie Holiday is ranked by many as the finest vocalist and stylist that jazz produced in the 1930's. Her most memorable recordings include several acid-toned songs, among them Strange Fruit (1939), about a lynching in the South, and God Bless the Child (1941), one of her own compositions, about poverty.