heard of Billie Holiday? I doubt it,’ said George Sinclair, a native Southerner who spent his life
working with the underprivileged and the disenfranchised. ‘If Billie Holiday lit the fuse, she
unquestionably fed the flame’” (Margolick 19). Holiday’s contributions to music and (through
her book Lady Sings the Blues) literature helped to pull forth a heightened social consciousness
and an increased awareness of social inequities and civil injustice. Her work opened up avenues
for understanding aspects of commonality and differences that form the human experience.
Holiday’s life was often under social scrutiny, and was marred by arrests and
hospitalizations for rehabilitation. Her inability to completely disengage from heroin addiction
adversely affected her career, her health, and her image in a society with little compassion or
understanding for the ravages of her addiction. In 1959, at age 47, Holiday collapsed. She was
hospitalized and diagnosed with severe cirrhosis. During her hospitalization, drugs were found in
a Kleenex box at her bedside, and she was arrested for drug possession. Billie Holiday died alone
in the hospital on July 17, 1959. “ She died virtuously penniless. Her worldly fortune amounted
to just $848.54 in cash” (Nicholson 226). According to Nicholson, “Few careers in the
performing arts have ended ignominiously yet begun so promisingly as that of Billie Holiday. By
the time she was twenty-three she had performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in
jazz, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie
Lunceford, Benny Carter, Bunny Berigan, Lester Young, Artie Shaw, and Teddy Wilson” (229).
Billie Holiday’s music and life story provide a compelling testament to what it is to be black in
America. Nicholson states, “Today she is part romantic martyr, claimed by feminists and civil
rights campaigners, and part heroine of excess whose details of self-extinction threaten to
obscure her genuine achievements in jazz” (234). Holiday’s work provided and continues to
inspire an increased awareness of cultural and sociological inequities. Her take on jazz and her