Billie Holiday: “One day, we were so hungry we could barely breathe"

Billie Holiday: “One day, we were so hungry we could barely breathe,” she told Downbeat magazine in 1939. “I started out the door. It was cold as all hell and I walked from 145th to 133rd down Seventh Avenue, going in every joint trying to find work. Finally, I got so desperate I stopped in the Log Cabin Club, run by Jerry Preston. I told him I wanted a drink. I didn’t have a dime. But I ordered gin (it was my first drink — I didn’t know gin from wine) and gulped it down. I asked Preston for a job … told him I was a dancer. He said to dance. I tried it. He said I stunk. I told him I could sing. He said sing. Over in the corner was an old guy playing a piano. He struck “Travelin’” and I sang. The customers stopped drinking. They turned around and watched. The pianist, Dick Wilson, swung into “Body and Soul.” Jeez, you should have seen those people — all of them started crying. Preston came over, shook his head and said, ‘Kid, you win.’ That’s how I got my start.”

It was in a Harlem nightclub that a 22-year-old jazz enthusiast and future record producer named John Hammond first heard Holiday sing. Hammond was so taken with the young singer, he returned several times to see her. “I heard a singer who was an improvising horn player,” he later said. “That’s how she sounded.”

Holiday concurred: “When I was a little girl, there was a lady on the corner that had a record machine and I could hear Bessie Smith and Louie Armstrong and I always wanted to sing like Louie Armstrong played, I always wanted to sing like an instrument.” By then Elenora Fagen had become “Billie Holiday,” in part to honor her favorite actress, Billie Dove.

Frank Sinatra told Ebony magazine, “Billie Holiday is the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years.”

-Sharon M. Hannon

Photo by Herman Leonard

via Don's Tunes