For the next seventeen years, Holiday was one of the most popular nightclub singers in New York. She always wore a long white evening dress. And she wore large white flowers in her black hair. She called herself "Lady Day."
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: In the early nineteen thirties, a music producer, John Hammond, heard Billie Holiday sing in a nightclub. He called her the best jazz singer he had ever heard. He brought famous people to hear her sing.
Hammond produced Holiday's first records. He got the best jazz musicians to play. They included Benny Goodman on clarinet, Teddy Wilson on piano, Roy Eldridge on trumpet and Ben Webster on saxophone. They recorded many famous songs with Billie Holiday. "I Wished on the Moon" is one of them.
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STEVE EMBER: In the late nineteen thirties, Billy Holiday sang with Artie Shaw's band as it traveled around the United States. She was one of the first black singers to perform with a white band. But racial separation laws in America made travel difficult for her.
During this time, a new nightclub opened in the area of New York called Greenwich Village. It was the first club that had both black and white performers. And it welcomed both black and white people to hear the performers. The nightclub was called Cafe Society.
It was here that Billy Holiday first sang a song called "Strange Fruit." A school teacher named Lewis Allan had written it for her. The song was about injustice and oppression of black people in the southern part of the United States. It told about how mobs of white men had killed black men by hanging them from trees.
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2013-11-25
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