Billie Holiday
1915–1959
Jazz and blues singer of unmatched phrasing whose 1939 “Strange Fruit” turned the blues tradition toward open protest.
(born Eleanora Fagan) reshaped popular singing with her behind-the-beat phrasing and emotional directness, working with the leading jazz musicians of her time — from the Columbia small-group sides of the mid-1930s into a career that never sat still. In 1939, at Café Society in Greenwich Village, she began closing sets with “Strange Fruit,” Abel Meeropol’s stark poem about the lynching of Black Americans. Columbia would not touch it; she recorded it for Commodore, and it became the song she is most remembered for. She made the blues tradition’s undercurrent of witness and protest explicit, and she made the song her own. She died in 1959, at 44.