Lester Young nicknamed her Lady Day; she called him Prez
Billie Holiday sang as if she were another horn in the band—bending phrase and tempo the way improvising instrumentalists do. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young heard a shared mind on their records and gave her the name Lady Day. Producer John Hammond said she was the first girl singer he had heard who sang like an improvising jazz genius.
Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, she grew up mostly in Baltimore under difficult care while her mother worked railroad jobs. She took her stage name from actress Billie Dove and from her father Clarence Halliday, eventually spelling it Holiday as he did on stage. As a teenager she sang in Harlem clubs with neighbor Kenneth Hollan. Hammond first heard her at Covan's in early 1933 replacing Monette Moore; that November, at eighteen, she cut two sides with Benny Goodman. "Riffin' the Scotch" sold five thousand copies—her first hit—while "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" managed only three hundred.
In 1935 Brunswick signed her to cut swing sides with pianist Teddy Wilson for the jukebox trade. Improvisation was allowed; "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" became her claim to fame after producers had wanted her to sound more like Cleo Brown. She soon recorded under her own name for Vocalion. Wilson–Holiday sessions from 1935 to 1938 helped keep Brunswick afloat; musicians arrived without written charts, and she was paid a flat fee rather than royalties. "I Cried for You" sold fifteen thousand copies—Hammond called that a giant hit when most money-making discs sold three or four thousand.
Young had boarded at her mother's house in 1934; their rapport shaped classic small-group records. A late-1937 stint with Count Basie let her choose songs and shape arrangements around a persona of romantic hard luck. On January 16, 1938—the same day Benny Goodman played Carnegie Hall—Basie's band battled Chick Webb's at the Savoy; magazines split the verdict while Ella Fitzgerald, Webb's singer, won the audience straw poll three to one. Holiday won four Grammys posthumously, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 as an early influence, and died on July 17, 1959, from liver disease compounded by heart failure, at forty-four.
Source: Billie Holiday
