An American Icon Project
Billie Holiday: Her Life
and Legacy as an Twentieth Century Icon
Prepared for the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library
Teaching American
History Grant Program
By:
Mark R. Day
History Teacher: Liberty
High School Bedford, VA
On July 21, 1959 the world of Jazz music
lost one of its most eternal stars.
Billie Holiday was gone, but she would never be forgotten. As the more than 3,000 individuals that had
come to her funeral sat in St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, we will never
know what images came to mind as they reflected on the life of the Woman they
called "Lady Day." However,
we must reflect on her life for ourselves in an attempt to find the proper
meaning and position of importance, of this amazing woman whose life still has
resonance in American culture and society today.
My purpose therefore is to look back over the life of Billie Holiday and review
the details of her struggles growing up in poverty, prostitution, racism, and drug addiction, while searching
for her true legacy and the impact her
life has had on twentieth century American culture. To that end, we will
use the following as guiding questions to facilitate the investigation and establish Billie Holidays relevance
as a representative icon in African American twentieth century history.
·
What makes her an authoritative spokesperson
on the African American sub-culture and
its values
·
How did she embody the values of
twentieth century African American culture both negatively and positively
.
·
What historical impact does she have
beyond her lifetime.
To answer the first and second guiding question and
determine her individual significance; comparisons will be made by reviewing her life in relation to the general assumptions
we have about Twentieth Century African American society. To
answer the final question, we will look at the body of her work as a singer and
the impact her work had on culture in her lifetime and on future generations.
Billy Holiday was born into hardship and ugliness
on April 7, 1915. She was raised in a
section of Baltimore called Pig town which was described in this manner in 1896
by an anonymous journalist in
John Whites Billy Holiday (1987)
"Open drains, ashes and garbage, cellars filled with filthy black water . . . villainous-looking
Negro's who loiter and sleep around street corners and never work; vile and
vicious women with but a smock to cover their black nakedness, lounging in
doorways or squatting upon steps, hurling foul epithets at every passer-by,
foul streets, foul people, in foul tenements, filled with foul air. This description reeks of the sordid
stereotypes that informed the public on the topic of race at the turn of the
century and establishes the background for the early life of the little girl
named Eleanora Fagan who would later become Billie Holiday. Eleanora's mother was nineteen and her father
was sixteen. They were unmarried and the
mother "Sadie" was a woman of
ill repute. As a child Eleanora, aka
Billie, was often taken to court for truancy and minor misdemeanors and in some
instances Eleanor was sent to reform
school. However, she was always returned to her mother's care. The tragedy is that the child was never really
safe in that home and her mother was often absent. Evidence of this failure can be seen in 1926 when Eleanora was raped by a neighbor and once
again spent time in reform school under witness protection. Truly the experiences that Eleanor / Billie
had in the formative years of her life contain
a plethora of worst case
situations from which she would never completely overcome as she transitioned
into adulthood.
We can begin to get a sense of the
realities of Eleanora / Billie's life and begin to form some opinions about her
relevance in the context of the values that existed in the society that
produced her. Born in poverty, she
would incorporate the harsh lessons which life in such vile conditions had forced her to endure, to discover a source of
creativity based in human emotion and then communicate the cruelty, injustice, and
pain which was so prevalent in Twentieth Century African American society, effectively to both black and white Americans
through her music. We can see how she
was able to transcend the social boundaries and influence the society in
general though her interpretation of the
words and the feeling she projected in her performances.
Billie is quoted as having once made the
following statement "Somebody once
said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough." Billie Holiday experienced the full gamete of
sins and tribulations that made up the African American experience and she was
a symbol of overcoming an environment of disadvantage to find success and
public acknowledgement in the face of the society's reluctance to accept a
person of color. Billie said. "You can be up to your boobies in white
satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can
still be working on the plantation." Billie was often seen in photographs dressed
in white satin and Gardenias so her quote is a telling statement of how she saw
herself in society. It is her unique
awareness which creates the iconic image of a black woman who has made a name
for herself but who is also, as Ralph
Ellison might say, still invisible as a person in the general society at
large.
As a result of this curious dichotomy of
identity Billie Holiday was never able to leave the abuse, neglect and
depravity of the sub culture which had produced her or overcome the racist
attitudes of America. Billie Holiday was a drug addict and Billie Holiday was black and that marked her
as separate from the people she entertained, who were primarily white, particularly in the 1920s and 1930's when
lynching was at its most violent levels.
Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and newspaper editor, said,
" Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden
outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob." However, it will be the issue of lynching that will
elevate Billy Holiday to the status of Icon for African American rights. For she will take a stand and sing what will
become a theme song against intolerance and bigotry, "Strange Fruit",
and it is in that stand against lynching that she will find her greatest
significance.
The guidelines posed at the beginning of
this paper required us to review the impact of her work on the society both in her time and in the
present. Billie Holiday's song "Strange
Fruit" was released as a recording in 1939. The words to the song were
written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher as a response to lynching. It is, however, Billie Holidays intense and
dramatic interpretation of the song which would jolt her mostly white audiences
from their complacency and be hailed by her peers, such as Leonard Fisher, to be "the first significant protest in
words and music, the first un-muted cry against racism ". In her monograph, With
Billie, Julia Blackburn makes the following comment "People started to
come just to hear that one song." The song was a powerful and thought provoking
exposure of racism in America which lead
Jazz singing legend Lena Horne to say that in singing 'Strange Fruit', "Billie
was putting into words what so many people had seen and lived through. She seemed to be performing in melody and
words the same things, I was feeling in my heart." Billie Holiday had, as
her record producer Ahmet Ertegun said, "Declared War on
Racism." She had become a
revolutionary through the power of her music to speak to the heart of black
Americans.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
The words
of Strange Fruit stir strong images in the mind of the modern listener just as
they did at its release seventy-four years ago. Billy Holiday found a way to
impart an honesty about the issue of race in America that had heretofore eluded
the society. Out of her emotions and
experiences people found an outlet that
spoke to the humanity of the situation and through her music Billie Holiday
became an inspirational icon for generations of African Americans.
What then is Billie Holiday's legacy s today and into the future. The Critic John Bush wrote that Billie
Holiday "changed the art of American pop vocals forever." The
great singer Frank Sinatra said the
following in an interview with Ebony Magazine in 1958 ; "With few
exceptions every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been
touched in some way by her genius. It is
Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical
influence on me. Lady day is unquestionably
the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty
years." Clearly Billie Holiday has
changed the manner in which music is perceived as a method of protest.
On the day Billie
Holiday died the poet Frank O'Hara, a huge admirer, wrote the poem "The Day Lady Died." His
poem written in that moment of personal loss has become an American Classic,
but it is just one of the many honors that Billie has been given since her
death. In 1987, Billie Holiday was
posthumously awarded the Grammy for Lifetime Achievement. In 1994, the United States Post Office issued a Billie
Holiday postage stamp. In 2000, she was
inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. Billie has also been the subject of many television
and cinematic presentations.
Billie Holidays emergence as an artist was
based on an emotional intensity born out of her environment. As a result of her humanity she was able to
frame the question of racism in terms so simple that the hearts of those who
heard the message burst open in awe of the truth that her voice revealed to
them. Yes Billie Holiday was, is, and will continue to be an Icon of American history whose
significance in terms of American and international culture will endure the
test of time. Her life is a commentary
on the reality of being African American in the early Twentieth Century, and
her courage and humility stand as beacons to the ideas that one person can make
a difference.
Bibliography
Brainy Quote. Brainy Quote. Com. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/lynching.html
(accessed July 19, 2012).
Elyrics.net.
http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/billie-holiday-lyrics/strange-fruit-lyrics.html
(accessed July 19, 2012).
Lewis, Jone Johnson. About.
Com: Woman's History "Billie Holiday Quotes".
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/billie_holiday.htm (accessed July
19, 2012).
Public Broadcaasting
Service. American Masters (PBS). June 8, 2006.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/billie-holiday/introduction/68/
(accessed July 19, 2012).
Copyright 26 July 2012 by Mark R. Day, all rights reserved
