The Real Billie Holiday, Part Two – 1940s

Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan, 1915-1959) emerged as a fully formed artist in the 1940s, her voice was its richest and most expressive.  She imparted unprecedented emotional depth to ballads, blues, torch songs and her own striking originals. This profile of Billie Holiday recaps the basic outline of her story in three chapters covering the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Holiday is quoted from interviews and her famed autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. This is also a photo essay presenting her constantly shifting visage. See: The Real Billie Holiday, Part One – 1930s, part three will run in April.  An Artist in Full The 1940s was a decade of growth and transformation for Holiday. She turned decisively from ephemeral popular and Tin Pan Alley songs to broader emotional landscapes. But her chaotic personal life was complicated by addiction to heroin, doing prison time before the decade was over. Billie became recognized on her own terms as a singer-songwriter, composing songs that were moving statements of love and loss that have stood the test of time. Her original, “God Bless the Child” (1941) became a durable standard. In “Gloomy Sunday” (1942) she addressed suicide frankly. ‘Strange Fruit’ “Strange Fruit” (1939) directly confronted the horror of Southern lynching. A genuine political protest song, it forcefully confronted Northern white audiences with the u