Billie Holiday

Holiday had a small voice and almost no range, and she made both irrelevant by treating a melody as something to be pulled behind the beat and bent until the words meant what she wanted. She learned in Harlem clubs, recorded with Lester Young, who named her Lady Day, and toured with white bands at a time when that meant entering hotels by the service door and sometimes not being allowed to sit with the musicians she had just played with.

In 1939 she began singing Strange Fruit, a poem about a lynching set to music by a New York schoolteacher. Her label refused to record it; another company did. Federal agents pressed her for years to drop it, and the pressure became a narcotics prosecution that cost her the cabaret card she needed to sing in New York clubs. She died at forty-four under police guard in a hospital bed, with the illness of long addiction and, by then, very little money. She is buried with her mother in the Bronx.