By C. Ellen Connally
Students of Cleveland’s jazz history may remember or have read about Lindsey’s Sky Bar. Opening in 1934 and located at 10551 Euclid Avenue, it was the city’s first jazz club to bring in nationally known performers on a nightly basis. An appearance by famed blues singer Billie Holiday in 1951 helped to enhance the club’s struggling reputation. But it would close a year later.
Holiday was back in Cleveland in 1958 at the Modern Jazz Room which was located near the old Central Market on East 4th Street. But the years of alcohol and drug abuse, heavy smoking and a series of abusive relationships with male partners had taken its toll. The Call and Post reported: “For a singer who has contributed such a voice to jazz as Billie Holiday, there certainly should be a much happier ending to a brilliant career,” a career that started in the 1930’s when she was still in her teens. A year after appearing in Cleveland, Holiday would die at age forty-four on July 17, 1959, from of a combination of cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease and decades of harassment by law enforcement.
The final year of Holiday’s life is the focus of a new biography entitled Bitter Crop – The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year by Paul Alexander. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2024). Alexander has had a long and distinguished career as both a journalist and an author. In the past he has chosen a wide variety of subjects, ranging from political guru Karl Rove, former Secretary of State John Kerry and award-winning author J. D. Salinger.
But chronicling the life of Holiday was not an easy task. She had a propensity for giving varying accounts of her life, frequently misstating her place and date of birth, her birth name and accounts of her childhood. Even her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues contains several misstatements of the truth. And the 1972 movie adaptation of the book, starring Diana Ross, which caused a new generation to have interest in her music, is also a loose adaptation of her live. It leaves out some of its more tragic aspects, particularly the abusive relationship with her last husband, Louis McKay, who was nothing like the suave and debonair Billy Dee Williams who played him on the big screen.
There were plans for making the book into a movie shortly after its release. But the plans envisioned the leading lady to be played by Ava Garder or Lana Turner. Hollywood was not yet ready for a Black leading lady. Holiday’s only screen role was in 1947 when she appeared with her idol, Louis Armstrong in a movie called New Orleans. She played a maid, the only role available for a Black actress at the time.
Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915. Her mother, Sadie, was only a teenager and her father was widely believed to be Clarence Holiday, who eventually became a successful jazz musician. But the couple never married, and Clarence was absent from her life.
In 1920 her mother married and for a few years the young Eleanora had a stable childhood. But when that marriage ended, Holiday spent time in a facility for troubled African American girls for truancy. At nine years old she was the youngest resident and was a victim of sexual assault while in custody.
In her early life, she found solace in music, singing along to records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. Eventually she ended up in New York, where both her and her mother worked in a house of prostitution. By the early 1930’s, when she adopted the name Billie and started using her birth father’s name, Holiday, she was singing in clubs and surviving on her own.
As she struggled to make a name for herself, her career path touched the lives of many famous musicians. She knew and sang with an up-and-coming Benny Goodman and eventually met her idol, Louis Armstrong. She taught a young crooner named Frank Sintra phrasing and singing lessons, for which he was forever grateful. She sang with Count Basie, Duke Ellington and broke new ground with Artie Shaw becoming one of the first female African American vocalist to work with a white orchestra.
Alexander chose Bitter Crop as the title of his work because it is the final line of Holiday’s signature ballad “Strange Fruit”. It was also the name that Holiday had originally selected for her autobiography. Originally a poem written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, “Strange Fruit” was and continues to be a powerful protest song about the lynching of African American in the South. It was so controversial that the record became a hit.
Upon its release in 1939, Holiday received a warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a government agency which lasted from 1930 to 1968, to never sing the song again. But Holiday refused. The Bureau’s commissioner, Harry Anslinger, started a decades long vendetta against her. She was Black, a heroin addict, and was demanding her rights as an American citizen to sing a song which condemned lynching. It did not help that the Meeropol, was a known member the Communist Party of the United States.
It wasn’t until the civil rights era that “Strange Furit” became widely known, thanks in part to Nina Simone’s stirring 1965 rendition. It was named “best song of the century” by Time magazine in 1999 and added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2002 for its cultural and historical significance.
While Alexander does not deny or diminish Holiday’s addiction, he does demonstrate how she was constantly harassed by law enforcement. In 1947 she was convicted of possession of narcotics and sentenced to a year in a federal rehabilitation facility in Alderson, West Virginia. A consequence of her conviction was that she was unable to get a license from the City of New York to perform, which kept her out of major venues and severely reduced her income. She was arrested and tried again in 1949 on drug charges but was acquitted in a case in which by most accounts the police attempted to frame her.
Holiday had numerous heterosexual relationships, including a brief affair with actor and director Orson Wells. She also had several lesbian relationships, including one with actress Talulah Bankhead, who is alleged to have also had a romantic relationship with Oscar Award winning actress Hattie McDaniel.
As 1958 turned into 1959, Holiday’s health continued to decline, which was exacerbated by her refusal to seek medical attention. In the last months of her life, she was cited by the federal government for violating a little-known law that required a person convicted of drug offences to register with the federal government before leaving the country. Holiday had traveled to Paris and London to perform. After grueling interrogation, the government chose not to pursue the charges.
When she collapsed in her New York apartment in late May of 1959, the first hospital she was taken to refused treatment because they thought she was merely intoxicated. At the next hospital she laid on a stretcher for hours before receiving treatment, once again thinking that she was a Black woman who was simply drunk.
On her death bed, a nurse alleged that she found a suspicious white power next to Holiday’s bed. She called the police, who determined the substance was heroin. While friends and relatives argued that the substance was planted, the police believed the nurse and arrested Holiday while in the hospital. Even taking her mug shot, in what would turn out to be her death bed.
The legacy of “Lady Day,” the nickname she picked up in 1937 lives on. Her recordings are still heard on jazz radio. In 2000 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
When Holiday died, she was still married to Louis McKay, whose abuse had contributed to her demise. Ironically, he became the sole heir to her estate since Holiday had no children and no will. When McKay passed away in 1981, he left the loyalties from Holiday’s estate to his new wife and his son from a previous relationship. They still receive an income from a woman who died alone and virtually penniless. Billie Holiday sang the blues. But she also lived them. Thank you to the Cuyahoga County Public Library for making this book available.
C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she is a former member of the Board of the Ohio History Connection, and past president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table, and is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.