Artist: Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday  was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop  singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

Holiday won four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumously, for Best Historical Album. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the  National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, though not in that genre.

Holiday's delivery made her performances recognizable throughout her career. Her improvisation compensated for lack of musical education. Holiday said that she always wanted her voice to sound like an instrument and some of her influences were Louis Armstrong and the singer Bessie Smith. 

Frank Sinatra was influenced by her performances on 52nd Street as a young man. He told Ebony  magazine in 1958 about her impact: “with few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.”

Photography credit: William P. Gottlieb, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Further information about Billie Holiday can be found at BillieHoliday.com.

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This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).