Billie holiday lesbian lyrics

Biographies Billie Holiday. Frank Sinatra listed Holiday as his most important influence. From her earliest days as a singer she gave as good as she got, loved to live it up and enjoyed the life of a Harlem nightclub performer, complete with marijuana, alcohol, and sex with both men and women. Nightclub owner Barney Josephson characterized her unique personality:. Billie Holiday … did what she liked. All she wanted was to have fun in whatever way it struck her.

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FEW people alive today, even among her most ardent fans, have heard Billie Holiday other than on recordings or seen her other than in photographs and random film clips. Holiday was eighteen years old and a worldly former prostitute when she recorded "Your Mother's Son-in-Law" with Benny Goodman in ; she died from the cumulative effects of heroin and alcohol in , a ravaged forty-four. Yet with the obvious exception of Frank Sinatra, who was born in the same year as Holiday but outlived her by almost four decades, no other recording artist from the first half of the twentieth century seems more real to us -- more like our contemporary. Jazz aficionados have always enjoyed nothing more than debating the relative merits of different performers. But when conversation turns to Billie Holiday, the only way to start a fight is to state a preference for early, middle, or late -- her jaunty recordings of the s, her diva-like ballads of the s, or her work from the s, when she had almost nothing left but compensated for her husk of a voice with the intimacy of her phrasing closer to speech than song.

These singers expressed themselves in their songs, not only their frustrations in love but also their decision to love who they want. Fortunately, blues music at the time was under the radar of mainstream America so these women were able to get away with expressing themselves through song. In , her home was raided by the police during a lesbian orgy. Sure got to prove it on me; Went out last night with a crowd of my friends.