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	The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. ~John Bush (allmusic.com)
The Billie Holiday Story – BBC Documentary (56min)

April 07: The late Billie Holiday was born in 1915

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Strange Fruit:

Birth name	Eleanora Fagan
Also known as	Lady Day
Born	April 7, 1915 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Origin	Harlem, New York, United States
Died	July 17, 1959 (aged 44) New York City, New York, United States
Genres	Vocal jazz, jazz blues, torch songs, swing, blues, R&B
Occupations	Singer, songwriter, actress
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1933–59

 

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.

Critic John Bush wrote that Holiday “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.” She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably “God Bless the Child”, “Don’t Explain”, “Fine and Mellow”, and “Lady Sings the Blues”. She also became famous for singing “Easy Living”, “Good Morning Heartache”, and “Strange Fruit”, a protest song which became one of her standards and was made famous with her 1939 recording.

Music critic Robert Christgau called her “uncoverable, possibly the greatest singer of the century“.

Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong – The Blues Are Brewin’

A few of her many honors & awards:

• 1987, Billie Holiday was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
• 1993, R&B singer Miki Howard released an album dedicated to Holiday titled Miki Sings Billie.
• 1994, the United States Postal Service introduced a Billie Holiday postage stamp.
• 1999, Holiday ranked No. 6 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Rock n’ Roll.
• 2000, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Album of the day:

Verve Ultimate Cool

 

Other 7 April:

• Robert Joseph “Bobby” Bare (born April 7, 1935, Ironton, OH) is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is the father of Bobby Bare, Jr., also a musician.

• Ravi Shankar (born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to by the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
  
• Bruce Springsteen plays a fantastic concert @ Allen Theatre – Cleveland, Ohio in 1976.
  The concert was part of his “Chicken Scratch Tour”: This colorfully named tour began on March 25, 1976; the official 1984 Springsteen chronology would state of that date, “The fabled ‘Chicken Scratch Tour’ begins, taking Springsteen and E Streeters on an extremely meandering route through the south, midwest, and northeast United States.” The name was actually given by the band’s road crew, due to many of the shows being in secondary markets in the South.

-Egil & Hallgeir