Black History Series: Billie "Lady Day" Holiday

1938, New York-Billy Holiday appears with Artie Shaw's Band. Boogie Woogie popularized at a Carnegie Hall.

Billy Holiday, dubbed "Lady Day" by Lester Young, belongs to the great blues tradition dominated by such figures as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

While still a young girl, she moved from her home town of Baltimore to New York City and in 1929, began her singing career in an assortment of Harlem night spots. Four years later, she cut her first sides with Benny Goodman and, from 1935 to 1939, established her reputation with a series of records made while she was a vocalist with Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, and several other all-star bands.

Although Billie Holiday is often compared with Bessie Smith, her style and material were really far removed from those of the older singer. In fact, there is no earlier jazz artist who is known to have had a direct influence on Billie Holiday. What she shared with Bessie Smith and other blues singers was an ability to project a universal sense of loneliness--that feature which is thought to be at the core of true blues artistry.

In such classic records as "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child," she departed from popular material to score her greatest artistic triumphs, depicting the harsh reality of Southern lynching's and the personal alienation she had experienced because of it.

Miss Holiday died of lung congestion and other ailments in Metropolitan Hospital, New York City.

Once addicted to drugs and alcohol, she had written in her1956 autobiography: "All dope can do for you is kill you---and kill you the long, slow, hard way."

Boxer Henry Armstrong defeats Barney Ross for welterweight championship and Lou Ambers for lightweight champion and thus holds three championships currently.