Though government officials found the song divisive and warned Holiday to stop singing it, she refused. With great dramatic effect and resonance, she would often sing “Strange Fruit” at the end of her performances and quickly leave the stage when the lights went down. Billie Holiday died on...
Eilish, whose full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell (Billie for her maternal grandfather, William, who died a few months before she was born; Eilish, the name of an Irish conjoined twin whom her parents discovered in a television documentary; Pirate, which her older brother, ...
i go for mournful shit, man. i go the opposite way. i want solitary stuff—gustav mahler, billie holiday. if i’m feeling bad, i wallow in it. if friends ask, “how you doin’?” i say, “horrible, man!” and they say, “what are you doing about it?” and i say, “...
while “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,”“Holiday” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” also became radio hits, but the centerpiece of the record was the epic multi-act “Jesus of Suburbia.”
Billie Holidayhad grown up as a fan of Armstrong and was more than happy to record for the same label as him. She joined Decca on August 7, 1944, when she was 29. She was brought to the label by Milt Gabler – the man who had been brave enough to record her song about lynching,...
Billie Holiday would have celebrated 96 today. Her melodic voice can be heard on a lengthy list of film soundtracks including Schinder’s List, Slaves Of New York, Harlem Nights, Watchmen, Angela’s Ashes, The Green Mile, August Rush, The West Wing , The Notebook , Sex In The City and...
Billie Holiday's biggest-selling recording is also one of history's most unsettling songs, with lyrics about "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze." It began as a protest poem by Abel Meeropol (writing under the pseudonym Lewis Allan), which Holiday and her team set to music. The ...
Rock guitarist Eric Clapton’s 4.5-year-old son, Conor Clapton in 1991 tragically died after falling out of an apartment window on the 53rd floor of the New York City building. Clapton famously penned “Tears in Heaven” for his young son. When Clapton performed the song, acoustic, at the...
A man places a hat at a makeshift memorial near the Staples Center in Los Angeles in memory of former NBA great Kobe Bryant who, along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, died Jan. 26 in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California. The plane was en route to Bryant’...
“And it’s very much liked. It has a busy bass line and when we did a video of the song I had to relearn the bass part, which is really complicated. I really like I Got Time. It’s all about a Billie Holiday type of character and Madeleine Peyroux sounds like Billie when she ...