In November 1934, a seasoned
Chitlin-Circuit comedian shoved a terrified 19-year-old New York City transplant toward the center of The Apollo Theater stage. Dressed in a cheap white satin dress thick enough to hide no flaws, it wasn't long
before a woman seated in the Apollo's notoriously discerning and expressive audience spotted the singer's knees. They were shaking violently,
almost rhythmically.
"One little broad in the front row shouted, 'Look, she's dancing and singing at the same time,'" Billie
Holiday would later write about
that nerve-wracking moment in her memoir, Lady Sings The Blues. The sheer terror of Holiday's first time on The Apollo stage quickly transformed to a moment of bliss. Harlem,
it seemed, loved Billie Holiday's voice.
Today, on
what would have been Holiday's 100th birthday, Apollo Theater staff
installed a permanent sidewalk plaque just outside the famed 125th
Street performance space bearing Holiday's name.
The plaque quite literally situates Holiday, her music and her legacy
just to the left of Stevie Wonder, above Little Richard and to the
immediate right of Chaka Khan in the Apollo's Walk of Fame. But, the
plaque, first unveiled Monday, also serves as a symbol
of just how widely recognized and, in many circles, revered Holiday's
uncanny legato phrasing, her "thin"
and "piercing," wail of a voice, her white dresses and those gardenias in her hair have all become.
Holiday,
the woman who had been terrified to take Harlem's best-known stage, is
not just an almost unquestioned fixture of Harlem arts history but, an
essential part of the broader American musical
cannon.
On Monday, moments before Holiday's plaque was unveiled, Apollo President and CEO, Jonelle Procope, described Holiday as a woman with a, "one of a kind voice with
influence that has spanned generations." Holiday, she said, was an artist who utterly altered the American cultural landscape.
"Everything
about Billie, from her voice to her trademark gardenia, was just deeply
felt," Procope said to a gaggle of reporters, bloggers, and downtown,
young blonde public relations types uptown to commemorate Holiday and
jazz singer Cassandra Wilson's latest CD, Coming Forth By Day.
The CD includes
a series of reimagined Holiday covers delivered by Wilson's own distinctive voice. On Friday, Wilson
will perform for the first time at The Apollo, making the Holiday
tribute either an extremely well-timed coincidence graced by the gods of
American capitalism, or, more likely, a shrewd bit of cross promotion. Also
out this week: a 20-song collection of Holiday's recordings and a
tribute CD featuring Jose James, covering Billie Holiday hits.
Born Eleanora Fagan to a 13-year-old mother and a 15-year-old father in
Philadelphia, then reared in a Baltimore brothel before becoming a
child victim of sexual assault and later, a, prostitute, almost nothing
about Holiday's early years suggested she would become the kind of
American whose birthday would be commemorated
on the pages of major national publications or the stuff of
celebration in establishment Harlem. But, a move to New York with her
mother in search of domestic work and The Great Depression changed
everything.
In need of a job at a
time when even some of New York's rich could no longer employ multiple
women to scrub their floors, Holiday thought she might find work in one
of Harlem's then thriving night clubs.
There was just one problem. Holiday couldn't dance. But, she could sing.
In short order, a failed
dance audition lead to a series of long-term, uptown and downtown
singing gigs. During an extended run at Cafe Society, the Greenwich
Village night-club, Holiday first took to wearing gardenias
in her hair and sang the haunting anti-lynching protest song Strange
Fruit, according
to her obituary in the New York Times.
By 1947, Holiday had
reached what she would later describe as the peak of her commercial
success -- earning about $250,000 in just three years, or $2.6 million
in 2015 dollars. Then in May 1947, law enforcement
officers stormed her New York apartment.
Privately, Holiday's life had long been punctuated by physically abusive and financially exploitive relationships. Her
biographers would later speculate that Holiday's decisions and
addictions to mind-numbing substances like heroin were rooted in her
unquestionably traumatic childhood and the need to quiet understandable
anxiety.
Publicly, some critics -
black and white - already disapproved of Holiday's late-night,
unabashedly man-loving lifestyle. Brash and pioneering, Holiday wasn't a
musician who, during her lifetime, ranked high on
the respectability scale so carefully watched by blacks concerned with
racial uplift and more specific efforts to secure African American human
rights. And, Holiday had even been bold enough to memorialize her
lifestyle when she covered the 1920s blues number, Ain't
Nobody's Business. But the drug possession arrest,
guilty plea and sentence (one year in a West Virginia federal facility
providing a crude and early version of drug rehabilitation treatment)
made even Holiday worry about her relationship
with the country's publicly puritanical audiences.
The drug arrest made it
clear that the drinking, the drugs, the abusive men Holiday may have
been singing about in jest were real and ugly features of her life. And,
it created a professional and financial crisis.
The drug conviction cost
Holiday her cabaret license, a document needed to work in most of New
York City's night-clubs. Without one, Holiday's options were limited to
massive performance spaces and physically and
emotionally-taxing tours. In fact, just two weeks after her release,
Holiday sang in front of a packed house at Carnegie Hall and, later,
joined a Broadway show.
In the decade that
followed, Holiday, bounced between periods of intermittent sobriety and
heavy use of heroin, alcohol and other substances. Her once singular
voice, lost some of its quality. And, by 1957 Holiday
was struggling with cirrhosis of the liver, a failing heart and
fluid-filled lungs. When she died in a New York hospital that year,
Holiday was under arrest and facing another round of drug charges.
Back at the Apollo on Monday, the Apollo's Procope read from an account of what her predecessor, Ralph Cooper, told staffers as they weighed the idea of booking
a then teen-aged Holiday to sing on The Apollo stage.
"You never heard singing so lazy, so slow, with such drawl," Cooper told The Apollo's managers. "It
ain’t the blues. I don’t know what it is, but you got to hear her.”
Before her death at just 44, Holiday performed at The Apollo Theater, at least 23 times.
Janell Ross is a reporter who lives in Harlem.
