, 1949
'''Billie Holiday''' (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), also called '''
Lady Day''', was an American singer, generally considered one of the greatest female jazz voices of all time, alongside Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.
Early life
Born '''Eleanora Fagan Gough''', Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood which greatly affected her life and career. Much of her childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by her in her autobiography published in 1956. This account is known to contain many inaccuracies. Her professional pseudonym was taken from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and Clarence Holiday, her father. At the outset of her career, she spelled her last name "Halliday," presumably to distance herself from her neglectful father, but eventually changed it back to "Holiday."
She was born in Philadelphia, but grew up in the Fells Point section of Baltimore, Maryland. According to her autobiography, her house was the first on their street to have electricity. Her mother Sadie moved to Philadelphia to hide her pregnancy. Sadie was allegedly only 13 at the time of her birth (according to Ancestry.com, her mother's birth year is 1896, making Billie's mother 19 when she was born); her father Clarence Holiday, a jazz guitarist who would play for Fletcher Henderson, was 17. There is some controversy regarding Holiday's paternity, stemming from a copy of her birth certificate in the Baltimore archives that lists the father as a "Frank DeViese." Some historians consider this an anomaly, probably inserted by a hospital or government worker (See Donald Clarke, ''Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon'', ISBN 0-306-81136-7). Clarence Holiday accepted paternity, but was hardly a responsible father. In the rare times she did see him, she would shake him down for money by threatening to tell his then-girlfriend that he had a daughter.
According to her autobiography, her parents married when she was three, but they soon divorced, leaving her to be raised largely by her mother and other relatives. At the age of 10, she reported having been raped, which resulted in her being sent to a Catholic reform school. It was only through the assistance of a family friend that she was released two years later http://launch.yahoo.com/ar-251457-bio--Billie-Holiday. Sadie remarried, and abandoned Billie. She was raised by a woman that she called grandma, Martha Miller. She started skipping school heavily, and in 1925, she was sentenced to a year at House of the Good Shepherd.
Early singing career
Scarred by these experiences, Holiday moved to New York with her mother in 1928. According to her accounts, she was recruited by a brothel,
