1915–1959 · American jazz singer, born Eleanora Fagan
Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia in 1915, Billie Holiday became the most influential jazz singer of the twentieth century without a day of formal training — she built her style by listening to how horn players phrased, not only to other singers. She told the Voice of America in 1956 that she had wanted Bessie Smith’s big sound and Louis Armstrong’s feeling, found that Smith’s power didn’t suit her small voice, and out of the compromise “sort of got Billie Holiday.” Her 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, ghostwritten by William Dufty, is the source of most of what she is quoted as saying; she died in New York in 1959, aged 44.