Billie Holiday rose to prominence in 1939 headlining at Manhattan’s Café Society, America’s first integrated nightclub. The price of that fame was to be stalked by law enforcement and the media. Holiday’s reputation as a beloved jazz singer was marred by the counter-narrative that she was a hapless drug addict and victim of shady men. Now, 65 years after her death, it’s time to restore Holiday’s legacy — unconditionally — as an indisputable creative genius and American icon.
Holiday died in Room 6A12 in Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital in July 1959 at age 44. The cause of death was heart failure brought on by cirrhosis of the liver — in short, alcoholism. Yet, as she lay on her deathbed, she was hit by an avalanche of lurid headlines like “Charge Billie Holiday Used Narcotics While in Hospital” and “Singer Held in Dope Case.”
News stories cited a foil envelope of heroin that was found in a Kleenex box on her nightstand, yet they failed to note that Holiday’s associates believed the envelope was planted by authorities, as had been done before in a pattern of harassment that had gone on for two decades.
Some have speculated Holiday was pursued because she refused to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching protest song released in 1939, but the reason may have been more basic. She was vilified because she was a successful African-American woman.
Col. George White, San Francisco head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, admitted this when he said privately, “[Holiday] flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns — she was the big lady wherever she went.” As such, she had to be put in her place.
On Jan. 22, 1949, White led a raid on her San Francisco hotel room, arresting her and her boyfriend-manager, John Levy, on narcotics possession. Charges against Levy were dropped. At trial, a jury determined Levy and White conspired to plant evidence on Holiday and found her not guilty. “Miss Holiday had been framed,” the jury foreman said after the trial.
By the end of her life, Holiday had recorded more than 300 songs including classics like “Don’t Explain,” “Fine and Mellow,” and “God Bless the Child” (all of which she co-wrote) as well as the history-making anthem, “Strange Fruit,” named Song of the Century by Time magazine in 1999.
Among her albums was “Lady in Satin,” now considered a masterpiece. She was the first African-American woman to tour with an all-white orchestra. She was the first African-American woman to sing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.
With such accomplishments, Holiday made herself a target to local, state, and federal authorities. She attempted to advance her own carefully crafted image, of a sophisticated “song stylist” with an adoring fan base, but the negative press her pursuers generated was unending and debilitating. Many friends believed the stress of another narcotics trial looming in 1959, based yet again on planted evidence, led to her death.
The besmirchment of Holiday continued after she died. In print accounts and movies, she was portrayed as a heroin addict at the mercy of men. One biographer called her a “hag.”
Consequently, it has been difficult to evaluate Holiday for who she actually was: a determined, ambitious woman who overcame considerable obstacles — a troubled youth, romantic unions with violent and dishonest men, substance abuse — to become jazz’s foremost artist.
Today, critics laud Frank Sinatra as his era’s ultimate singer, they congratulation Bob Dylan for his Nobel Prize in Literature, but they hesitate to bestow comparable praise on Holiday, even though it was Holiday who changed the direction of American music by rejecting the stylized delivery preferred by popular singers of the day to embrace a style, inspired by Louis Armstrong, informed by the common vernacular.
“[S]he had the uncanny ability,” composer David Amram says, “to make you feel as if she were singing right to you. She was a communicator on a soul-to-soul level, which is the highest achievement any human can make.”
So, during this Black History Month, Holiday should be reclaimed from past representations and celebrated as an iconoclastic artist in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Aaron Copeland. Journalist Philip Martin celebrated her this way: “She made her slim, spare voice into a line as confident, proud and indelible as those of Edgar Degas…. She…turned performance into art.”
As Sonny Rollins, the consummate jazz artist, concludes: “Sometimes when I listen to her it brings me to my knees the way she improvises on a song. She was at least a genius.”
Alexander is the author of “Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year,” just published by Alfred A. Knopf. He teaches at Hunter College.
