SONG OF THE DAY
“Body & Soul” by Billie Holiday (All Or Nothing At All, Verve Records, 1959). Written by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton and Johnny Green.
INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)
– Rising quickly to popularity, Libby Holman introduced “Body and Soul” in the revue Three’s a Crowd and it was used as the theme to the 1947 film, Body and Soul.
– Like many pop songs of the time, it became a jazz standard, with hundreds of versions performed and recorded by dozens of artists.
– There are variations on the lyrics, primarily between renditions by male and female performers.
– Classic vocal recordings include those of Ella Fitzgerald, Annette Hanshaw, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra.
– Among the most famous of these is the take recorded by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra on October 11, 1939, at their only recording session for Bluebird, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. The recording is unusual in that the song’s melody is never directly stated in the recording; Hawkins’ two-choruses of improvisation on the tune’s chord progression constitute almost the entire take. In 2004, the Library of Congress entered it into the National Recording Registry.
– Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan April 7, 1915; died July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter.
– Nicknamed “Lady Day”, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing with her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneering a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.
– Billie Holiday was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to her Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan (née Harris), and Clarence Halliday (Holiday), who was a musician.
– Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood. Her parents never married nor lived together. Her mother had been expelled from her parents’ home in Sandtown, Baltimore, after becoming pregnant at age thirteen; she moved to Philadelphia, where her daughter was born. With no support from her parents, Sadie arranged for Eleanora to stay with her older married half sister, Eva Miller, who lived in Baltimore.
– Eleanora frequently skipped school and her truancy resulted in her being brought before the juvenile court on January 5, 1925 when she was not yet 10.
– She was sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school. She was baptized there on March 19, 1925 and after nine months in care, was “paroled” to her mother on October 3, 1925. Sadie had opened a restaurant called the East Side Grill, where she and Eleanora worked long hours. By the age of 11, the girl had dropped out of school.
– Sadie returned to their home on December 24, 1926, to discover a neighbor, Wilbur Rich, raping Eleanora. Rich was arrested. Officials placed the girl at the House of the Good Shepherd in protective custody as a state witness in the rape case. Eleanora was released in February 1927, nearly 12.
– Sadie and Eleanora wound up living with and working for a madam. During this time, Eleanora first heard the records of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. By the end of 1928, Sadie decided to try her luck in Harlem, New York and left Eleanora again.
– During her final period of separation from her mother, Eleanora began to perform the songs she learned while working in the brothel.
– By early 1929, Sadie sent for the girl to join her in Harlem. Their landlady was a sharply dressed woman named Florence Williams, who ran a whorehouse at 151 West 140th Street. In order to live, Sadie became a prostitute and, within a matter of days of arriving in New York, Eleanora, who had not yet turned fourteen, was also turning tricks for $5 a time.
– On May 2, 1929, the house was raided, and Sadie and Eleanora were sent to prison. After spending some time in a workhouse, Sadie was released in July, followed by Eleanora in October, at the age of 14.
– Eleanora took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and the musician Clarence Holiday, her probable father. At the outset of her career, she spelled her last name Halliday, the birth-surname of her father, but eventually changed it to Holiday, his performing name.
– Holiday made her recording debut, at age 18, in November 1933 with Benny Goodman, singing two songs: “Your Mother’s Son-In-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch”, the latter being her first major hit.
– In 1935, Billie Holiday had a small role as a woman being abused by her lover in Duke Ellington’s short Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life.
– By the late 1930s, Billie Holiday had toured with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, scored a string of radio and retail hits with Teddy Wilson, and became an established artist in the recording industry.
– In September 1946, Holiday began work on what would be her only major film New Orleans. She starred opposite Louis Armstrong. Plagued by racism and McCarthyism, producers and script writers were pressured to lessen Holiday and Armstrong’s role in the film as to not give the impression that black people created jazz, however the producer was sent to jail. Holiday was not pleased that her role was reduced to that of a maid: “I thought I was going to play myself in it,” she said. “I thought I was going to be Billie Holiday doing a couple of songs in a nightclub setting and that would be that. I should have known better.” “They had taken miles of footage of music and scenes,” Holiday said, “[and] none of it was left in the picture. And very damn little of me.”
– Holiday’s drug addictions were a growing problem on the set. She earned more than a thousand dollars a week from her club ventures at the time, but spent most of it on heroin. Her lover Joe Guy traveled to Hollywood while Holiday was filming and supplied her with drugs. When discovered by Joe Glaser, Holiday’s manager, Guy was banned from the set.
– On May 16, 1947, Holiday was arrested for the possession of narcotics in her New York apartment. On May 27, 1947, she was in court. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday’. And that’s just the way it felt,” Holiday recalled. During the trial, Holiday received notice that her lawyer was not interested in coming down to the trial and representing her. “In plain English that meant no one in the world was interested in looking out for me,” Holiday said.
– Dehydrated and unable to hold down any food, she pled guilty and asked to be sent to the hospital. At the end of the trial, Holiday was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, more popularly known as “Camp Cupcake”. Other notable celebrities to serve time at Alderson are Martha Stewart, Sara Jane Moore (who tried to assassinate President Ford), and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme of the Charles Manson family of murderers.
– Because of her 1947 conviction, Holiday’s New York City Cabaret Card was revoked, which kept her from working anywhere that sold alcohol for the remaining 12 years of her life.
– During the show, someone sent Holiday a box of gardenias. “My old trademark,” Holiday said. “I took them out of box and fastened them smack to the side of my head without even looking twice.” There was a hatpin in the gardenias and Holiday, unknowingly, stuck the needle deep into the side of her head. “I didn’t feel anything until the blood started rushing down in my eyes and ears,” she said. After the third curtain call, Holiday passed out.
– Holiday was arrested again on January 22, 1949, inside her room at San Francisco’s Hotel Mark Twain.
– By the 1950s, Holiday’s drug abuse, drinking, and relationships with abusive men caused her health to deteriorate. Her later recordings showed the effects on her voice, as it grew coarse and no longer projected the vibrancy it once had.
– On March 28, 1952, Holiday married Louis McKay, a Mafia enforcer. McKay, like most of the men in her life, was abusive, but he did try to get her off drugs. They were separated at the time of her death, but McKay had plans to start a chain of Billie Holiday vocal studios, Ã la Arthur Murray dance schools.
– On November 10, 1956, Holiday performed two concerts before packed audiences at Carnegie Hall, a major accomplishment for any artist, especially a black artist of the segregated period of American history. Live recordings of the second Carnegie Hall concert were released on a Verve/HMV album in the UK in late 1961 called The Essential Billie Holiday.
– On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959.
– In 1987, Billie Holiday was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
– In 1994, the United States Postal Service introduced a Billie Holiday postage stamp.
– In 1999, Holiday was ranked #6 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Rock n’ Roll.
2000, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.