Billie Holiday. Fruits, flowers and other legends – iOnline

Frankie Freedom served him a bowl of cereal and Billie collapsed shortly after, at his home in New York. The young musician who accompanied gave the alert, Holiday just admitted to Metropolitan Hospital and barely removed his oxygen mask lit a cigarette. Minor rebellion. The scent of gardenia would last little more. Was 44 years old, lightweight, cirrhosis caused by too much alcohol, respiratory and cardiac difficulties motivated by tobacco, the siege of the police for possession of drugs, the handcuffs around his wrists, the marks on the skin of regular heroin injections, one long history of wounds hidden from the naked eye, like any legend asks. And 70 cents in the bank and $ 750 on the body, the price of a hole of a tabloid, nothing was left to those who were far from knowing what it is to have everything.

“It tends to defend their music is just an unconscious product and liabilities of the contingencies of his life”, pointed Angela Davis, quoted by “The Guardian” on “Lady Sings the Blues,” the book memories that singer born 100 years ago helped William Dufty writing in 1956, and in 1972 came to the screen in the form of biopic, with Diana Ross in the lead role. In year anniversary, John Szwed review Billie’s autobiography, analyzes its public image in different media, press the movies, and illuminates the affinities, hitherto little focused, with the filmmakers Charles Laughton and Orson Welles. The result is the book “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth”, to listen to the sound of “The Centennial Colection”, the collection of 20 classic that evokes one of the most idiosyncratic voices of jazz, which operated for the last time in New York the May 25, 1959, five years after a successful tour of Europe and to launch the first albums.

Being more than a sum of hazards, it is essential to review the troubles of the brief existence of Eleanora Fagan, born on April 7, 1915 the daughter of a teenage couple. The daughter of a home, and musician Clarence Holiday, who would adopt the name, spent much of troubled childhood in Baltimore, and in 1925, further to the chronic lack of attendance at school, is forwarded to the House of Good Shepherd, an institution for african-American girls, after being sexually abused.