Billie Holiday - "Easy Living"

Billie Holiday remains (four decades after her death) the most famous of all jazz singers. "Lady Day" (as she was named by Lester Young) had a small voice and did not scat but her innovative behind-the-beat phrasing made her quite influential. The emotional intensity that she put into the words she sang (particularly in later years) was very memorable and sometimes almost scary; she often really did live the words she sang.

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), professionally known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz singer with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by the producer John Hammond, who commended her voice. She signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson yielded the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, but her reputation deteriorated because of her drug and alcohol problems.

She was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Due to personal struggles and an altered voice, her final recordings were met with mixed reaction, but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died of cirrhosis on July 17, 1959.

She won four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumously, for Best Historical Album. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1973. Lady Sings the Blues, a film about her life, starring Diana Ross, was released in 1972. She is the primary character in the play (later made into a film) Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill; the role was originated by Reenie Upchurch in 1986, and was played by Audra McDonald on Broadway and in the film. In 2017 Holiday was inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.

The way Armstrong changed jazz trumpet, Holiday changed jazz vocals.  Her delivery – the way she would play with the phrasing and tempo, singing behind the beat, sculpting the words – was so radically original that it spawned an entire generation of singers in her wake, including people like Frank Sinatra, who credited Holiday as a major influence.  But, Holiday’s importance cuts deeper than music.  First and foremost, she was a strong female presence in an era where black women were mostly forced to occupy the lowest rung of society.  Holiday, along with other legends like Ella Fitzgerald, was a different kind of black woman – one who could command a room and demand respect with the sheer power of her talent and personality.  But, unlike Fitzgerald, Holiday was also political, singing a song that foreshadowed the Civil Rights movement, “Strange Fruit.”

She had a magic we can’t seem to find anymore, and somehow that is both saddening and inspiring.

So today, with your hope filling my heart, I choose Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living” as my, living for you, living for love, living to let the light in, song for a, press outward, press into the sore spots, press on young fighter - the win is yours for the taking, Tuesday.