Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), took her stage name from her father, musician Clarence Holiday, and the actress Billie Dove. She was nicknamed “Lady Day” by friend and musical collaborator Lester Young.

”Billie Holiday was a legendary American singer, songwriter and social phenomenon whose soulful, unique singing voice, introspective songwriting, as well as her ability to boldly turn any material that she confronted into her own, made her a superstar of her time and decades beyond. Considered to be one of the greatest jazz voices of all time, Holiday’s intense, emotive, highly stylized and endlessly nuanced vocal style has become one of the most imitated. She changed and revolutionized the art of traditional pop vocal music forever.”

Source: < craftrecordings.com >

Origins

Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 7 April 1915 to 19 year old ‘Sadie’ of Baltimore, Maryland, who used the surname ‘Fagan’; she had been kicked out of her family home when they learned she was pregnant. Sadie recorded her child’s name as Elinore and with the father’s name as Frank Deviese (DeVeazy), but always told her daughter that her father was Clarence Holiday. Sadie was later briefly married to Philip Gough, so Eleanora was sometimes known as Eleanora Gough.

She spent her first 12 years in Baltimore living in various places with her mother in extreme poverty.6 To say she had a hard youth would be an understatement. Young Eleanora suffered from a lack of guidance from her constantly working mother and intense feelings of abandonment from her father who showed temporary love to her only when he was in town.7

Source: < Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series) >

The emotional intensity that she put into the words she sang (particularly in later years) was memorable because she often really did live the words she sang. Her original name and birthplace have been wrong for years, but were finally listed correctly by Donald Clarke’s definitive Billie Holiday biography "Wishing on the Moon." Holiday's early years are shrouded in legend and rumor due to her fanciful ghost-written autobiography, "Lady Sings the Blues," but she did not have a stable life. Her father, Clarence Holiday, (who never did marry her mother) played guitar with Fletcher Henderson and abandoned his family early on; her mother was a poor role model.

Source: < Find A Grave >

Early Career

At age 18, after gathering more life experience than most adults, Holiday was spotted by producer John Hammond with whom she cut her first record as part of a studio group led by clarinetist Benny Goodman – then on the verge of his own superstardom. From 1935 to 1941 Holiday’s career accelerated, recording hit after hit with pianist/arranger Teddy Wilson. Simultaneously, in 1936 she began a legendary string of collaborations with tenor sax giant Lester Young, who's complimentary tone was a perfect trading partner for Billie. They became the best of friends and inseparable, legendary musical partners, even living together with Billie's mother for a time. Lester would famously christen her "Lady Day" as she would him "The Prez". By the time Holiday joined Kansas City's phenomenal Count Basie Orchestra for tours in 1937 she was an unstoppable force, suited for top billing across the United States. In 1938 Artie Shaw invited her to front his Orchestra, making Billie the first black woman to work with a white band – an impressive and courageous accomplishment. …

Despite her lack of technical training, Holiday’s uncanny syncopations, her inimitable phrasing and her dramatic intensity made her the outstanding jazz singer of her day. White gardenias, worn in her hair, were her trademark.

Ever combining her typical humor with profound gravitas, she wrote in her autobiography, “Singing songs like the ‘The Man I Love’ or ‘Porgy’ is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. I’ve lived songs like that.”

Source: < “Billlie’s Story” >

Legal Issues and later career

On May 16, 1947, Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics in her New York apartment. On May 27, she was in court. "It was called 'The United States of America versus Billie Holiday'. And that's just the way it felt", she recalled.

She was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. (Martha Stewart served five months there in 2004-2005.)

In prison, Holiday spent her time knitting, making whiskey from potato peelings, and taking care of “a herd of damn dirty squealing pigs.” One thing she didn’t do was sing. “Unless I feel something, I can’t sing,” she writes. “In the whole time I was there, I didn’t feel a thing.”
Source: Lady Sings the Blues (1959)

Holiday was released early (on March 16, 1948) because of good behavior. When she arrived at Newark, her pianist Bobby Tucker and her dog Mister were waiting. The dog leaped at Holiday, knocking off her hat, and tackling her to the ground. "He began lapping me and loving me like crazy", she said. A woman thought the dog was attacking Holiday. She screamed, a crowd gathered, and reporters arrived. "I might just as well have wheeled into Penn Station and had a quiet little get-together with the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service", she said.[80]

The drug possession conviction caused her to lose her New York City Cabaret Card, preventing her working anywhere that sold alcohol; thereafter, she performed in concert venues and theaters.[78]

The loss of her cabaret card reduced Holiday's earnings. She had not received proper record royalties until she joined Decca, so her main revenue was club concerts. The problem worsened when Holiday's records went out of print in the 1950s. She seldom received royalties in her later years. In 1958, she received a royalty of only $11.[88] Her lawyer in the late 1950s, Earle Warren Zaidins, registered with BMI only two songs she had written or co-written, costing her revenue.[89]

On November 10, 1956, Holiday performed two concerts before packed audiences at Carnegie Hall. Live recordings of the second Carnegie Hall concert were released on a Verve/His Master's Voice album in the UK in late 1961 called The Essential Billie Holiday.

The critic Nat Hentoff of DownBeat magazine, who attended the Carnegie Hall concert, wrote the remainder of the sleeve notes on the 1961 album. He wrote of Holiday's performance:

Throughout the night, Billie was in superior form to what had sometimes been the case in the last years of her life. Not only was there assurance of phrasing and intonation; but there was also an outgoing warmth, a palpable eagerness to reach and touch the audience. And there was mocking wit. A smile was often lightly evident on her lips and her eyes as if, for once, she could accept the fact that there were people who did dig her. The beat flowed in her uniquely sinuous, supple way of moving the story along; the words became her own experiences; and coursing through it all was Lady's sound – a texture simultaneously steel-edged and yet soft inside; a voice that was almost unbearably wise in disillusion and yet still childlike, again at the centre. The audience was hers from before she sang, greeting her and saying good-bye with heavy, loving applause. And at one time, the musicians too applauded. It was a night when Billie was on top, undeniably the best and most honest jazz singer alive.

Marriages

Holiday was married at least twice.

First to Jimmy Monroe on August 25, 1941, whom she divorced in 1947. Holiday’s philandering first husband, the trombonist Jimmy Monroe, would inspire the heartbreaking ballad “Don’t Explain.” “One night he came in with lipstick on his collar,” she writes. “I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it, and he started explaining and explaining…Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. ‘Take a bath, man,’ I said, ‘don’t explain.’”

Source: Lady Sings the Blues (1959)

While still married to Jimmy Monroe, Billie Holiday was involved with musician Joseph Luke “Joe” Guy. He became Holiday’s trumpeter, her bandleader, her husband [unconfirmed], and her drug runner.

Source: “As Ever Your Lady Billie Holiday”: Love Letters from Prison.” (2019) < link > In the spring of 1947, the feds finally caught up with Holiday and Guy, busting them for narcotics possession in their room in New York’s Hotel Grampion. … Guy wound up back in his hometown of Birmingham, playing local clubs and mentoring younger players, who he emphatically urged to keep away from dope.

Second to Louis McKay on March 28, 1957. She and McKay were separated at the time of her death two years later on, but he had plans to start a chain of Billie Holiday vocal studios, based on the model of the Arthur Murray dance schools.

Holiday was childless, but she had two godchildren: the singer Billie Lorraine Feather (the daughter of Leonard Feather) and Bevan Dufty (the son of William Dufty).

Other Relationships

A brilliant, generous, hard-partying artist, Holiday loved nothing more than the camaraderie of epic jam sessions with peers like Harry James, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. Her romantic tastes were equally iconoclastic; allegedly, she had affairs with Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Orson Welles, the “finest cat” she ever met.

Source: “Good Morning Heartache: The Life and Blues of Billie Holiday.” < vanityfair.com >

Her platonic best friend and musical collaborator was tenor saxophonist, Lester Young. They met in 1934 in New York. He nicknamed her “Lady Day” and she called him “Prez.”

Source: “Billie Holiday and Lester Young: the intimate friendship between Lady Day and Prez.” (2015) < theguardian.com >

Death

In the sad final chapter of her life, she was placed under arrest for heroin possession while on her deathbed.

On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of liver disease and heart disease.

From < Wikipedia >

Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who was the announcer at Holiday's 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts and wrote parts of the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday, described her death in these sleeve notes, dated 1961:

Billie Holiday died in Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death. She had been strikingly beautiful, but her talent was wasted. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her. The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.[99]

On July 15, she received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church and died two days later, at the age of 44, on July 17, 1959, at 3:10 a.m., of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

In her final years, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings by her husband, Louis McKay, and she died almost penniless with only $0.70 (US$6 in 2017 dollars) in the bank and $750 (US$6,296 in 2017 dollars), which was a tabloid fee, taped to her leg.

The New York Times published a short obituary on page 15 without a byline. She left an estate of $1,000 ($10,577 in 2023), and her best recordings from the 1930s were mostly out of print.

Her funeral Mass was on July 21, 1959 at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan.

Her funeral over-crowed the streets of New York with over 2500 people showing up and some 500+ who waited outside just to get a glimpse of her casket.36

She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.

Legacy

Billie Holiday died intestate, and estranged husband Louis McKay was the sole heir of her estate.

Source: “Billie Holiday’s Estate” (January 15, 2016) < heirsandsuccessors.com > “Holiday’s estate is worth around $1,000,000 and brings in $121,212 per year.” (as of 2016)

In the book The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz, jazz historian Loren Schoenberg asserted that "no one would dispute that Billie Holiday is the definitive Jazz Singer."[117]

Billie Holiday received several Esquire Magazine awards during her lifetime. Her posthumous awards also include being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame.

In 1985, a statue of Billie Holiday was erected in Baltimore; the statue was completed in 1993 with additional panels of images inspired by her seminal song "Strange Fruit". The Billie Holiday Monument is located at Pennsylvania and West Lafayette avenues in Baltimore's Upton neighborhood.[120] Holiday is also featured in a Romare Bearden mosaic at the Upton metro station.[121]

In 2019, Chirlane McCray announced that New York City would build a statue honoring Holiday near Queens Borough Hall.[122]

Frank O’Hara‘s poem from 1959,[123] "The Day Lady Died"' 124] concludes with an impression of Holiday performing at the Five Spot Café at the end of her career, and the impact of that performance on her listeners.[125]

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The song "Angel of Harlem" by Irish rock band U2, released as a single in December 1988, was written as a homage to Holiday.[126]

Films and plays about Holiday

The biographical film Lady Sings the Blues, loosely based on Holiday's autobiography, was released in 1972 and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Diana Ross.

Another film, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, starred Andra Day and was released in 2021.[127] It is based on the book “Chasing the Scream” (2015) by Johann Hari. Director Lee Daniels saw how Holiday was portrayed in the 1972 biopic, and wanted to show her legacy as "a civil rights leader [ ... ] not just a drug addict or a jazz singer".[128] The film also depicts Holiday's bisexuality and relationship with Tallulah Bankhead.[129] Day was also nominated for Best Actress but did not win.[130][131] However, she won a Golden Globe in 2021.[132][133][134][135]

Holiday is the primary character in the play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, with music by Lanie Robertson. It takes place in South Philadelphia in March 1959. It premiered in 1986 at the Alliance Theatre and has been revived several times. A Broadway production starring Audra McDonald was filmed and broadcast on HBO in 2016; McDonald received an Emmy Award nomination.[136] In 2014, she received a Tony Award win. [137]

Billie is a 2019 documentary film based on interviews in the 1970s by Linda Lipnack Kuehl,[116] who was researching a book on Holiday that was never completed.

Holiday was portrayed by actress Paula Jai Parker in Touched by an Angel's episode "God Bless the Child".[138]

Signature of musician Billie Holiday

Source: < based on Billie Holiday/Rock & Roll Hall of Fame >

---

• Residence: 1920 - Baltimore Ward 5, Baltimore (Independent City), Maryland, United States
• Residence: 1930 - Manhattan (Districts 0751-1000), New York, New York, United States
• Residence: 1930 - Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
• Residence: 1935 - Same Place
• Residence: 1940 - New York City, New York County, New York, United States
• Residence: July 17 1959 - New York
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Apr 13 2025, 9:38:08 UTC

    ---

References

1. Billie Holiday at < Wikipedia >
2. “The Official Billie Holiday website.” < link > This site is maintained by the Estate of Billie Holiday. In accordance with the generous wishes of William Gottlieb, the photographs in the William P. Gottlieb Collection entered into the public domain on February 16, 2010.
   1. “Timeline.” < link >
3. “Billie Holiday” at the < National Museum of African American History & Culture > Her autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” became a top-seller focusing on her complicated and often difficult life. Throughout her life, Holiday faced many personal tragedies and became addicted to drugs. She served a prison sentence and reportedly had several dalliances with her fellow women prisoners. Holiday was open about her bisexuality despite not being socially acceptable at the time. After years of substance abuse, Holiday’s body had grown weary of the abuse and she died from heart failure on July 17, 1959, at age 44.
   1. View objects relating to Billie Holiday < link >
4. “Billie Holiday > Quotes” < goodreads.com >
5. "Billie Holiday" on < Apple Music >
6. Holiday, Billie, with Duffy, William. Lady Sings the Blues. (1959) (autobiography) < GoogleBooks >.
7. “Good Morning Heartache: The Life and Blues of Billie Holiday.” (February 8, 2019). < vanityfair.com > In Lady Sings the Blues, the music icon presented a life filled with joy, despondency, and a surprising amount of hard-edged humor. … “I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk,” Holiday writes of her years during World War II. By the early 1940s she was hooked on heroin. She made her first attempt to get clean in 1946—but news of her stay in a sanitarium was leaked, and she began to be tailed in earnest by the feds, who were hoping to nail her for possession.
8. O'Meally, Robert G., Lady Day: the many faces of Billie Holiday. (1991, New York: Arcade Pub.) p. 69; imaged at Internet Archive, < link >, accessed 9 Feb 2023,) image 68 of 207. (free ID needed to borrow)
9. Nicholson, Stuart. Billie Holiday. (1995) Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 9781555532482 – via Internet Archive (Kahle/Austin Foundation) Page 17-19 < link > (free ID needed to borrow)
10. Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series) (2008)
11. Clarke, Donald. Billie Holiday: Wishing On The Moon (2009) < GoogleBooks >
12. “Billie Holiday and Lester Young: the intimate friendship between Lady Day and Prez.” (2015) < theguardian.com >
13. Szwed, John F. Billie Holiday : the musician and the myth. (2015) < Archive.Org > (borrow unavailable)
14. ” Review: Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth review – reclaiming Lady Day's artistry.” (2015) < theguardian.com >
15. “Billie Holiday: The wild lady of jazz who adored England.” (17 July 2019) < independent.co.uk > On the 60th anniversary of Holiday's death, Martin Chilton reflects on her musical triumphs and personal hardships.
16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_(2019_film) In The Guardian, the film was characterised as "a raw, unsanitised character study, in which Holiday is both combative and vulnerable, coy and revolutionary: a fiery, foul-mouthed thrill-seeker who never sacrificed her integrity. This is all the more refreshing considering that Holiday’s estate ... came on board as producers."[6]
17. “Singer, activist, sex machine, addict: the troubled brilliance of Billie Holiday” (Fri 6 Nov 2020) < theguardian.com >. “ New documentary uncovers lost tapes to tell the intimate real story of the jazz singer – one with terrible resonance today as the US continues to fight institutional racism.”
18. The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) at < Wikipedia >
19. The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) (movie on Hulu) < link >
20. “The United States vs. Billie Holiday vs. the Truth” (updated May 27, 2024) < jazztimes.com >
21. “Famous Bis: Billie Holiday.” (2023) < bi.org >

Records and newspaper references

1. "Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Births, 1860-1906," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPZ2-JNFW : accessed 8 March 2021), Frank Deviese in entry for Elinore Harris, 7 Apr 1915; citing Birth, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, Pennsylvania.
2. "1920 United States Federal Census"Year: 1920; Census Place: Baltimore Ward 5, Baltimore (Independent City), Maryland; Roll: T625_659; Page: 6B; Enumeration District: 61 Ancestry Sharing Link - Ancestry Record 6061 #102739402 (accessed 3 April 2022) Elenora Fagan (4), single niece, in household of Robert Miller (43) in Baltimore Ward 5, Baltimore (Independent City), Maryland. Born in Maryland.
3. "United States Census, 1930," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRZ5-Q6N?i=8&cc=181073... : accessed 27 May 2022), Eleanor Fagan in household of Luther B Mathens, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 886, sheet 5A, line 8, family 64, NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002), roll 1563; FHL microfilm 2,341,298.
4. "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K3YG-Y15 : accessed 7 January 2021), Elnora Holliday in household of Sadie Holliday, New York City, New York County, New York, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 31-1849, sheet 9A, line 12, family 167, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 2669.
5. WikiTree contributors, "Eleanora (Fagan) Holiday (1915-1959)," WikiTree: The Free Family Tree, (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fagan-466 : accessed 10 April 2025).
   1. file unit relates to jazz singer Billie Holiday, who was arrested in 1947 for narcotics use. It includes newspaper clippings, photographs, and letters (both handwritten and typed) between the Alderson, West Virginia female penitentiary prison warden and her record company detailing her return to performing onstage upon her release. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/18558234
6. “Bobby Tucker (born Robert Nathaniel Tucker; January 8, 1923 – April 12, 2007)[1] was a pianist and arranger during the jazz era from the 1940s into the 1960s. He is most famous for being Billie Holiday's accompanist from 1946 to 1949 and Billy Eckstine's from 1950 to 1993.[2][3]. On November 12, 1946, during Billie Holiday's stay at the Down Beat Club, Bobby Tucker was drafted to accompany Holiday because Eddie Heywood refused his opportunity. Billie's stay at the Down Beat was so successful due to Tucker's playing that she decided to keep him as her accompanist. The partnership lasted until 1949, where Tucker quit due to Holiday's abusive lover, John Levy, threatening him. (Not to be confused with John Levy the bass player and talent manager).
7. “Bobby Tucker R.I.P.” (thursday, may 29, 2008) < link > Pianist-arranger-accompanist Bobby Tucker died in Morristown, NJ on April 12, 2007.
8. “ ‘Unsung hero’ of the piano backed Holiday, Eckstine” (April 25, 2007) < hollywoodreporter.com >. He began working with Bailey after his discharge from the Army in 1946. That slot ended on the night he was accosted by Tony Scott outside a Manhattan club where Holiday was about to perform. He said her pianist had just quit and she needed an immediate replacement. Tucker went onstage and played without so much as a warmup. Holiday offered him the job, and he stayed until 1949.
9. ” Tony Scott. This is the Story of the Italian-American God of the Clarinet” (October 01, 2012) < iitaly.org/magazine >
10. “Billie Holliday Busted” Historical Essay by Dr. Weirde. < foundsf.org > Mark Twain Hotel, San Francisco, 345 Taylor St. Jan. 22, 1949. When jazz chanteuse Billie Holliday came to San Francisco in January, 1949, there was plenty of advance publicity. Billie had been involved in a bizarre New Year's Eve brawl in L.A. two weeks earlier, and was subsequently charged with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon. On the day of her preliminary hearing--January 13, 1949-- she opened at Joe Tenner's Cafe Society in the Fillmore District of San Francisco and played to a standing room only house. The overflow crowd was attracted not just by Lady Day's exquisitely soulful croak, but by the rash of sleazy publicity surrounding the New Year's Eve brawl, which rekindled Billie's reputation as Crime Queen of the jazz set. (She had faced several narcotics raps during the 1940's.) … A little over a week after her arrival in San Francisco, Billie found herself generating more crime page headlines. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics raided her room at the Mark Twain Hotel, where they claimed to find a small amount of opium worth less than fifty dollars and an accompanying pipe. When charged at the Hall of Justice, Billie and John Levy denied any knowledge of the drug, claiming they had been set up. If they were, maybe it was by the club owners; the next day's S.F. Chronicle front-page headline read Billie Holiday is held on opium charge. The publicity, along with the notoriety generated by the L.A. brawl and bust, made the rest of her San Francisco tour a smashing success.
11. “Inside The Famous UWS Townhouse Once Owned By Billie Holiday.” < aspiremetro.com > Holiday, known as “Lady Day,” was a resident of 26 West 87th Street until her death in 1959. While living in apartment #1B, she released one of her most famous albums, Lady in Satin, in 1958.
12. Prescott Evening Courier, Prescott, Yavapai County, AZ, USA, July 17 1959. < MyHeritage > “The Negro entertainer called “Lady Day" died in Metropolitan Hospital. Her husband Louis McKay was at her bedside. The immediate cause of death was given as congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure. Miss Holiday, 44, was taken to the hospital unconscious May 31 after she collapsed in her apartment.”
13. "Billie Holiday: An untimely end at the age of 44." (July 25, 1959) The Afro American, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland. (transcription)
14. AP. “2500 Attend Rites for Billie Holiday” July 21 1959. The Washington Post and Times Herald.
15. Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/489/billie-holiday: accessed April 10, 2025), memorial page for Billie Holiday (7 Apr 1915–17 Jul 1959), Find a Grave Memorial ID 489, citing Saint Raymond's New Cemetery and Mausoleum, Throggs Neck, Bronx County, New York, USA; Maintained by Find a Grave.
16. ”The Estate of Billie Holiday — in many sad ways reflects her life.” (Apr 29, 2018) medium.com Holiday had people in her life that would have been better at handling her estate than her estranged husband. However like many people she had neglected to make a Will and therefore her estate ended up under the control of Louis McKay. It was estimated that Billy Holiday’s estate was valued at $14 million in 2014.

Legacy

1. https://heirsandsuccesses.com/2016/01/08/billie-ho/ (January 8, 2016) As discussed above Holiday lived a hard life that was exacerbated by bad choices she made in men, many of whom took advantage of her. In March 1957, Holiday married Louis McKay, Jr., a Mafia enforcer. McKay was abusive, and at the time of her death they were estranged but not divorced. As Holiday died intestate under New York law McKay inherited her entire estate including her royalties. … Lady Sings the Blues, a film centered on Holiday’s life, starring Diana Ross, was released in 1972. Billy Dee Williams portrayed McKay as a stabilizing amiable figure in her life (McKay was the film’s technical advisor.) Holiday had people in her life that would have been better at handling her estate than her estranged husband. However like many people she had neglected to make a Will and therefore her estate ended up under the control of Louis McKay. When McKay died his Widow disputed his Will and she was awarded a one-third share of McKay’s estate – which was earning $15,000 a year at that time in royalties from Holiday’s music.
2. The Billie Holiday stamp was designed by Howard Koslow for the American Music Series: Jazz Singers Issue. The stamp was issued in Greenville, Mississippi, during the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. The stamp contains a photograph of Billie Holiday taken by William O. Gottlieb in 1940. < link >
3. Julian Frost, “"Baltimore Uproar",” Explore Baltimore Heritage, accessed April 12, 2025, https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/704. At the Upton Metro Station at Pennsylvania Avenue and Laurens Street, an explosion of color greets transit patrons at the conclusion of their escalator journey. “Baltimore Uproar,” a monumental mosaic by the renowned African-American artist Romare Bearden, depicts a jazz band fronted by a singer of ambiguous identity—perhaps Baltimore’s own Billie Holiday.
4. “Billie Holiday” at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Year 2000. Inducted by Diana Ross in the category, Early Influences. < link > With her luminous voice, Billie Holiday changed jazz forever. Her life was tough but so was she. Billie Holiday took her pain and channeled it into haunting vocal performances that resonated in your spine.
5. “Billie Holiday Discography.” < link >
6. “Strange Fruit” (song on YouTube) < link >
7. “On this day in 1939” (2014) < Mississippitoday.org > April 20, 1939. Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday stepped into a 5th Avenue studio and recorded “Strange Fruit,” a song written by Jewish civil rights activist Abel Meeropol, a high school English teacher upset about the lynchings of Black Americans — more than 6,400 between 1865 and 1950. Holiday was drawn to the song, which reminded her of her father, who died when a hospital refused to treat him because he was Black. Weeks earlier, she had sung it for the first time at the Café Society in New York City. When she finished, she didn’t hear a sound. “Then a lone person began to clap nervously,” she wrote in her memoir. “Then suddenly everybody was clapping.” The song sold more than a million copies, and jazz writer Leonard Feather called it “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” After her 1959 death, both she and the song went into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Time magazine called “Strange Fruit” the song of the century, and the British music publication Q included it among “10 songs that actually changed the world.”