“All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. Or the word ‘love,’” Holiday wrote of her life experiences. “I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. “And when she starts crying, the next thing she’s going to do is start fighting.”Īnd fight she did to be true to herself and her art, no matter what the cost. “I know Lady,” Louis Armstrong once said.
Pugnacious as she was precocious, Holiday battled through the sadness of her life, time and time again. Her romantic tastes were equally iconoclastic allegedly, she had affairs with Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Orson Welles, the “finest cat” she ever met. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday and cowriter William Dufty added to her triumphant yet tragic mythos, presenting a life filled with joy, despondency, and a surprising amount of hard-edged humor.Ī brilliant, generous, hard-partying artist, Holiday loved nothing more than the camaraderie of epic jam sessions with peers like Harry James, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. There are few legends whose lives have been as mythologized as Billie Holiday’s.
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