    
Title: Billie Holiday Description: Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan; AKA: Lady Day; April 7, 1915-July 17, 1959), American black singer and songwriter, a legendary vocalist with a unique jazz and pop singing style; Holiday impressively manipulated phrasing and tempo in her delivery from one song to the next, which inspired countless jazz instrumentalists of her era; she was best known for a singing style that personified and embodied an intimate approach to her wide-ranging singing repertoire; some of her few compositions (co-written) are such standards as Lady Sings the Blues, God Bless the Child and Don't Explain; she is also well known for widely popularizing a controversial song, Strange Fruit, which indicts lynching, and was first recorded by her in 1939; (author Jay Robert Nash was introduced to Lady Day in a nightclub in 1947 by his mother, who was also a singer, when he was 10-years-old; Holiday asked him if she could sing a song for him during her next performance and he naively asked her to sing "a good one" she laughed and replied: "Young gentleman, I have never sung a bad one"); indeed, this wonderful woman only sang the good ones; Category: Music Topic: Singers & Vocalists Keywords: blues singers, legendary entertainers, performing arts, pioneering jazz vocalists. Orientation: Portrait Dimensions: 1140 x 1445 (1.65 MPixels) (1.27) Print Size: 9.7 x 12.2 cm; 3.8 x 4.8 inches File Size: 4.72 MB (4,947,910 Bytes) Resolution: 300 x 300 dpi Color Depth: 16.7 million (24 BitsPerPixel) Compression: None Image Number: 0000035002 Source: Jay Robert Nash Collection |
