Original name ELEANORA FAGAN (b. April 7, 1915, Baltimore, Md., U.S.--d. July 17, 1959, New York, N.Y.), American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Holiday was the daughter of an itinerant guitarist. She first became acquainted with jazz when the brothel keeper for whom she ran errands as a child allowed her to hear recordings by trumpeter Louis Armstrong and singer Bessie Smith. After an interlude as a prostitute, she made her professional singing debut in obscure Harlem nightclubs in 1931 and recorded for the first time two years later.
She was not recognized until 1935, and her small group of recordings of that period are today acknowledged as jazz masterpieces. She toured briefly with the Count Basie and Artie Shaw orchestras before becoming a nightclub solo attraction in 1940--never, however, severing her jazz affiliations. Her last years were a pathetic struggle against heroin addiction, which eventually killed her; but her later recordings show that, although her voice was ravaged, her technique remained supreme.
Holiday had style and personality, and, with no technical training, she created sophisticated musical effects, her diction being unique and her phrasing dramatically intense. Her vintage years were perhaps 1936-43, when her professional and private liaison with the saxophonist Lester Young was perpetuated by some of the best recorded examples of the interplay between a vocal line and an instrumental obbligato. Her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, written with W. Dufty, appeared in book form in 1956 and as a motion picture in 1972.
