Becoming Billie Holiday
Becoming Billie Holiday

Author: Carole Boston Weatherford

Publisher: Boyds Mills Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1629791733

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Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award The stunning voice and hard life of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is revealed through evocative, accessible poetry. In 1915, Sadie Fagan gave birth to a daughter she named Eleanora. The world, however, would know her as Billie Holiday, possibly the greatest jazz singer of all time. Eleanora's journey to become a legend took her through pain, poverty, and run-ins with the law. By the time she was fifteen, she knew she possessed something that could possibly change her life--a voice. Eleanora could sing. Her remarkable voice led her to a place in the spotlight with some of the era's hottest big bands. Through a sequence of raw and poignant poems, New York Times best-selling and award-winning poet Carole Boston Weatherford chronicles the singer's young life, her fight for survival, and the dream she pursued with passion.

The Very Best of Billie Holiday Songbook
The Very Best of Billie Holiday Songbook

Author: Billie Holiday

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1495055485

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(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). Two dozen songs are presented in this centenniel edition saluting jazz musician and singer/songwriter Billie Holiday. It includes piano/vocal/guitar arrangements of: Billie's Blues (I Love My Man) * Crazy She Calls Me * Don't Explain * Easy Living * God Bless' the Child * Good Morning Heartache * I'll Be Seeing You * Lady Sings the Blues * Now or Never * Stormy Weather (Keeps Rainin' All the Time) * Strange Fruit * Them There Eyes * and more.

Lady Sings the Blues
Lady Sings the Blues

Author: Billie Holiday

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2006-07-25

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0767923863

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Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday

Author: John Szwed

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1101614706

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• Kirkus Best Books of 2015 selection for Biography • Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talent When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

Lady Day
Lady Day

Author: Robert O'Meally

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2000-09-07

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780306809590

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"Billie Holiday deserves a biography in which her musicianship isn't overshadowed by the tragic events of her life. O'Meally has written that book," says Entertainment Weekly about this absorbing and authoritative account of the greatest jazz singer in history. O'Meally emphasizes Holiday's artistry and training rather than her personal miseries, and he uses voluminous archival material to correct common myths about Holiday. Chronicling her rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, particularly Lester Young, Lady Day is an impassioned testament to Holiday's genius that confirms her place in American jazz.

Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit

Author: Gary Golio

Publisher: Millbrook Press (Tm)

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 1467751235

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Tells the story of how Billie Holiday and songwriter Abel Meeropol combined their talents to create "Strange Fruit," the iconic protest song that brought attention to lynching and racism in America.

The Very Best of Billie Holiday
The Very Best of Billie Holiday

Author: Billie Holiday

Publisher: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781495028045

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For voice and piano. Includes chord symbols and guitar chord diagrams.

With Billie
With Billie

Author: Julia Blackburn

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-10-10

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0307829219

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From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it. Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure. In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people–piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.

Billie Holiday: The Last Interview
Billie Holiday: The Last Interview

Author: Billie Holiday

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1612196748

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The first-ever collection of interviews with the tortured but groundbreaking singer Billie Holiday, part of Melville House’s beloved Last Interview series Legendary singer Billie Holiday comes alive in this first-ever collection of interviews from throughout her career. Included is her last interview, given from her deathbed in a New York City hospital, where police were standing by ready to arrest her for a parole violation should she recover. Also included: The transcript of an interrogation by a US Customs official questioning about whether she'd violated her parole by using drugs on a foreign tour. But the book is more than a look at just the famously tragic side of her life. In other conversations, drawn from music magazines, late-night radio programs, and newspapers across the US and Canada, she discusses her childhood, musicians who influenced her, her friendship -- and falling out -- with the influential sax player Lester Young, why she chose the gardenia as her symbol, why she quit Count Basie's band, her substance abuse problems, writing songs and whether she wrote her own memoir, and more. In frank and open conversations, Billie Holiday proves herself far more articulate, aware, intelligent, and even heroic than the way she's often portrayed. This collection is an essential volume for all who have been moved by her music.