“If I’m going to sing like someone else,” said Billie Holiday, “then I don’t need to sing at all.” It’s hard to describe Holiday’s voice. Yet fans agree: She was one of the best jazz singers of all time. Holiday died 60 years ago. No one has sounded like her since.

Holiday was born in 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was in and out of school. “I never had a chance to play with dolls,” Holiday once said. “I started working when I was 6 years old.” She moved to New York City with her mom at the age of 13.

Holiday was looking for work in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The teen went into a club to try out as a dancer. Her moves didn’t impress the staff. Then the piano player asked Holiday to sing. She didn’t think she was a singer. But when she sang, the club went quiet. Some people even cried. Holiday got the job.

That began Holiday’s music career. She later became famous. Donald Clarke wrote a biography on Holiday. “She sang the popular songs of her day,” he said. “What made her unique was that she sang each song as though she had just written it herself,” Clarke added. “She bent the notes so you knew what the song was about.”

Clarke said Holiday “used her voice like a musical instrument.” And some of her best work was with saxophone player Lester Young. He gave her the nickname “Lady Day.” Clarke said “hearing Young with Lady Day was like listening to a duet.”

Holiday’s career was strong in the 1940s. But Holiday began to have health problems in the 1950s. She died on July 17, 1959. She was only 44.

We’ll never hear someone like Holiday again. Still, that’s what makes art special. “No two people on Earth are alike,” Holiday once wrote. “It’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.”


Updated July 16, 2019, 5:01 P.M. (ET)
By Ryan Cramer