"You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing. No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music." ~ Billie Holiday
Incomparable jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-1959) copied no one. She endured an impoverished childhood as Eleonora Fagan in Baltimore, Maryland to become a world legend.
"Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married," she explained. "He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three."
"Lady Day" began singing in small Harlem clubs and recorded her first song in 1933 with clarinetist Benny Goodman before joining Count Basie's band and making jazz history by collaborating with brilliant saxophonist Lester Young.
"God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody," she once said.
With no musical training and wearing her trademark white gardenias in her hair, Holiday performed magic on stage. She sang with the distinctive "behind the beat phrasing" and haunting, melancholy passion, as if she lived every word she sang.
About her technique, she said, "The whole basis for my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can’t sing."
With the pure honesty of her hard life in her voice, her heart shining through on each song, Holiday's timeless artistry changed musical interpretation forever.
"You just feel it," she believed, "and when you sing it other people can feel something too."
Live with real feelings and celebrate your uniqueness.