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Billie Holiday: Most Influential Women In Jazz

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Billie Holiday could be considered one of the most influential women in jazz, if not one of the most influential women in general. She was one of the first to incorporate anti-racist ideals and progressive thoughts through the outlet of music, influencing many others down the road. Her intense desire for equality and change could be due to the immense amounts of hardship during her younger years, which may have very well carried over into her adult singing career. Billie Holiday was abandoned at a very young age as her father was out of the picture and her mother could not care for her, seeing as her mother was only 13 and barely an adult herself (Holiday, 1992). Born in 1915, Holiday was put into the care of her extended family. The living situation was not ideal; a large sum of people were living under one roof. Holiday would also get beat for things she didn’t do, such as wetting the bed, which her cousins child had been doing. Her cousin Ida would beat her regardless of if she pleaded or claimed she hadn’t done it. These were some of the first instances of Holiday experiencing unfair treatment for something she couldn’t control, as she hadn’t ever done anything to deserve the physical punishments. In her autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” Holiday gives the reader insight into many traumatizing moments in her life that had affected …show more content…

The implications of the song were so questionable for the time that Columbia Records did not want to record it, and actually refused, forcing Billie to record with Commodore Records (McNally, 2000). The song had been so politically contestable that it was even banned from the radio and hardly played. Regardless of its banning, people still heard it and it quickly became embedded as a “cult protest song” (McNally). Holiday had successfully created a masterpiece that had implications other than making music for the artist or the company; she had started a

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She left a huge impact on the music played today. Some people say, if it was not for her, we would never have singers like Adele nor Lady Gaga. Nevertheless, we would never have had Frank Sinatra or Janis Joplin who also found inspiration in her. There are many more singers/performers who were influenced by Bessie and her way of singing. However, some people do not know who she was or anything about her.

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Eleanora Fagan, better known by her stage name Billie Holiday, was born on April 7, 1915 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was a famous Jazz performer, recognized for fragile, raspy voice that was etched with emotion as she sang and her geniuse imporvisation skills. Billie became one of the first African American vocalists to work with a white orchestra (Artie Shaw and his band) and tour the Southern U.S, which at the time was segregated. Several of her songs including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, “Embracable You” and “Easy Living¨ became jazz standards after several artist imitations and her rendition of “Strange Fruit” became one of her best selling records. Her performance popularized and brought attention to the contoversal song. Aroud the same time she released the song,

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Billie Holliday's life was tragic. Born into poverty and out-of-wedlock, she rose to a position of artistic preeminence in the world of jazz, but her personal life was one of constant turmoil and struggle. She fought seemingly endless wars-with drug addiction, narcotics agents' harassment, racial discrimination, self-serving lovers, and with human parasites in and out of the music business. Withal, her vocal artistry was joyously and bitters sweetly transcendent. Many serious listeners consider her the greatest jazz vocalist ever.

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The Jazz Age was a period of time from the 1920s-1930s. African Americans were often given most of the credit to the birth of Jazz music, but both black and white Americans were responsible for its huge rise in popularity. The rise in jazz music coincidentally came with the rise of radio broadcasting and recording technology. Female Musicians such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday started making music at this age, paving the way for future female musicians. Bessie Smith started her career in 1923.

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Louis Armstrong was a singer, soloist, comedian, trumpeter and a film star. He was and still is considered one of the most influential artists in jazz history, he is known best for songs like “What a Wonderful World,” “ Stardust,” and "La Vie En Rose." In Armstrong’s early career he received a call from King Oliver to come to Chicago and join his Creole Jazz Band on second cornet and he accepted. He made his first record with Oliver on April 5, 1923, thus the start of Armstrong’s career with his first recorded solo being “Blues Chimes.”

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