The Brilliance of Billie Holiday and Her Demise 61 Years Ago This Weekend

Billie Holiday burst into the American cultural consciousness with artistic innovation that grounded itself in the blues, but which had every intention of expanding the jazz vocal tradition like no singer has since.

Holiday emerged as a poplar artist at aged 19 in the 1930s after a woebegone childhood that featured iterative abandonment by her mother and father. She had been in reform school by 12. Her teen years witnessed adventures in the world of prostitution and a police arrest — which happened at the same time with her mother, who was practicing the same trade.

Yet, Holiday, born in Philadelphia and raised in Baltimore, developed a gift for song and an inclination toward the world of entertainment she inherited from her father, Clarence Holiday, an itinerant guitarist who would eventually become a sideman in the famed Fletcher Henderson Orchestra.

Today, July 17, 2020 is the 61st anniversary of Holiday’s death; she passed away at the Metropolitan Hospital in New York City where she was also being held under arrest for drug possession. Holiday was as much a casualty of the cirrhosis of liver that claimed her life, as she was a victim of a highly segregated society, a rapacious recoding industry and the patriarchal milieu wherein she performed.