Billie Holiday(April 7, 1915 / July 17, 1959), also called Lady Day (and born Eleanora Fagan Gough in Baltimore MD), was an American singer, generally considered one of the greatest female jazzvoices of all time, alongside Sarah Vaughanand Ella Fitzgerald. She sang with Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shawand more - but it was her voicethat was said to dominate many others' music. Holiday was working for Columbia in the late 1930s when she was introduced to a song entitled "Strange Fruit," which began as a poem about the lynching of a black man written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. Meeropol used the pseudonym "Lewis Allen" for the work. The poem was set to music and performed at teachers' union meetings, where it was eventually heard by the manager of Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, who introduced it to Holiday.
last.fm page