- Her given name was Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father was Clarence Holiday and her mother was Sadie Fagan. Her father was 15 and her mother 13 when she was born.
- She had a difficult childhood. Her father left to pursue a musical career. Her mother also had to work, and left Billie with various relatives for the first ten years of her life while she went away to work. She often played truant, leading to her mother being taken to court. Billie was raped by a neighbour at ten - but was blamed for seducing him and sent to a Catholic home for troubled girls. At the age of 13 she went to live with her mother in New York. Their landlady ran a brothel and both Billie and her mother started working for her. The house was raided, and both women spent time in prison.
- She auditioned as a dancer, but didn't get the job. She said she could sing, too, so she was told to sing. People stopped drinking to listen to her - and so she was taken on as a singer.
- She's always hated her name, Eleanora. Her father used to call her Bill, because she was a tomboy, but she wanted a prettier name than that. She was a big fan of a film star called Billie Dove, so took the name Billie. Her nickname, Lady Day, was given to her by Lester Young, although years before that her colleagues at a club she worked at said of her “she thinks she’s a lady” because she refused to pick tips up off tables and asked men to give the tips directly to her instead.
- Holiday was discovered by producer John Hammond at 18. He said of her, "She was the first girl singer I'd come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius." This is in spite of the fact she had never had any singing lessons, and never learned to read Music.
- She was the first black woman to work with a white orchestra when she joined clarinetist, composer and bandleader Artie Shaw in 1938. Being a black singer with a white band wasn't easy in those days. She wasn't allowed to use the dining room or the bathroom that the rest of the band used. She left one such job when they made her wear dark make-up, because the spotlight made her look too white. She refused, and quit.
- One of her trademarks was wearing white gardenias in her hair. According to her friend Carmen McRae, this started when Billie burned her hair with curling tongs before a performance. Carmen went out to get some flowers to cover up her damaged hair, and came back with gardenias.
- In 1941, Holiday married James Monroe, but the marriage didn't last. She had an affair with trumpeter Joe Guy in the 1940s and during that time, started using heroin. This led to another arrest and more prison time, for possession of narcotics. This damaged her career, as a criminal record meant she couldn't get a license to perform in clubs. However, John Levy, owner of Club Ebony in New York gave her a chance. He would become her boyfriend and manager.
- In 1959, at the age of 44, she was arrested for drug possession again, but by this time she was seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver and was taken to hospital. She was under police guard at the hospital until hours before she died. Although she was said to be one of the highest paid singers of the time, all her money was spent on drugs and so she died with next to nothing in the bank. More than 3,000 people attended her funeral.
- The U2 song Angel of Harlem pays tribute to Holiday, and there is a crater on the planet Venus which is named after her.
See also: Billie Holiday quotes
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