American Decades
Holiday, Billie 1915-1959
JAZZ SINGER
Childhood.
The facts of Billie Holidays early life are uncertain. She was born Eleanora Fagan, probably in Baltimore. There are conflicting reports about whether her thirteen-year-old mother, Sadie Fagan, and fifteen-year-old father, Clarence Holiday, ever married, but if they did, they did not live together for any significant period. Clarence Holiday played guitar and banjo professionally and joined jazz-band leader Fletcher Henderson in the early 1930s, so he was on the road much of the time, and he was not conceivably a family man, in any case. Eleanora had a delinquent adolescence. She was sent to a reformatory at the age often and had become a prostitute by the time she was twelve. In Baltimore (or perhaps later) she assumed the first name of her favorite movie star, Billie Dove, and the last name of her father, and practiced to be a singer, taking Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong as models. She moved...
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1940's The Arts
