Billie Holiday has one of the most distinctive voices of all time; she inspired many artists; Frank Sinatra, Andra Day, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin and Etta James. But why is her voice so relevant over 60s years after her death in 1959? What makes Billie Holiday so great?
I’ve picked some songs that I think show Billie’s vocal journey and explain why she connected to many people. To understand Billie and her voice, you need to understand her journey, so rather than heading straight to her later work, I’m going to start at the beginning.
Riffin’ The Scotch (1933)
At age 17, Billie worked as a singer for a few years in Nightclubs in Harlem. It was here where she cut her teeth, moving between tables, singing for hours and improvising melodies as she went, something that became a feature in her vocal style. Soon she was asked to replace singer Monette Moore at a club called Coven. One night record producer and talent scout John Hammond who loved Monette Moores voice, turned up to listen to her. Instead, he found Billie Holiday. He loved her. He was a talent scout for Columbia Records, discovering and signing talents like Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. When Billie turned 18, he arranged for her to work with Benny Goodman on two tracks. This track was the second of these and was her first hit, selling 5000 copies.
She sounds so different here than on her later records. Although her vocal nuances are less defined than later in her career, you are already starting to hear fingerprints of her fabulous expression at age 17. It has the brighter edge you get with younger voices; as women age, your voice does lower. However, it does not sound like a 17-year-old. She was young, but she had already lived quite a traumatic life by this point, and she has a depth to her voice that defies her age. She sounds like someone in their 30s. You can hear that tone if you isolate her vocals.
Not the voice of a 17-year-old. There are a few nuances here that she is already using that defined her style throughout her career. Her wonderful fast fluttery vibrato gives the sound energy and drive and a little edge of fragility and anxiety. You can hear on the word ‘man’ how she also allows the pitch to drop with it - adding the feeling of “oh dear”. In terms of tone, it’s mostly pretty clean at this point. Billie is known for using distortions like vocal fry, which is this sound. She doesn’t use it as much as later on in her career but there is a tiny bit in this phrase on the word ‘me’.
She also has a nasality that most singers would shy away from, she makes a feature of it in the higher part of her range. It is direct and in your face, and although her voice is not loud, that tone hits your right between the eyes - then she softens the edge by either sliding off the notes or using that lovely vibrato. You can hear it on “breaking my heart” and “fire” here.
She has strength in those higher notes in the early days. She wasn’t known for a big range, but those well-produced stable mixed tone notes suggest that it wasn’t because she couldn’t, certainly at this point in her vocal development. It was because she chose expression as her primary focus.
I also love how she is never entirely on time - something she does throughout her career. The band kept that rhythm driving, and she just sits a little behind it, which some people have very strong opinions on, but it gives it a feeling of ease and nonchalance. You can hear it in this phrase if you try and tap along.
She pushes and pulls that rhythm so much it shouldn’t be right, but it still does feel right. I tried to put this in time as best I could, so I’ll play my “standard timing” and then her timing
This behind the beat feel, influenced countless singers, including Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, and she was already doing it at 17. How did she develop all these vocal tools by the age of 17?
Billie was born Eleanora Fagan. She had a tough childhood that I think is important to know about to understand her. She was born out of wedlock to Sadie Fagan and musician Clarence Halliday (Holiday was his stage name). She had a tough childhood, had a difficult relationship with both of her parents and spent time in and out of a Catholic “Reform” School for Troubled Young Women. Her mother worked as a prostitute and she eventually became a victim of sex trafficking in a brothel, where she was arrested and sent to labour in prison for five months. Amongst all this horror, Billie found her escape and love for singing by listening to jazz and blues artists Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.
““I think I copied my style from Louis Armstrong. Because I used to like the big volume and the big sound that Bessie Smith got when she sang ... So I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn’t work with me, because I didn’t have a big voice. So anyway, between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday.” ”
How Louis Armstrong Influenced Billie Holiday
Both Louis and Billie recorded the song Yours and Mine. I’m not sure who recorded it first, as they both recorded it in 1937. If my research is correct, Billie probably hadn’t heard his version when she recorded it. However, it’s fascinating to listen to how they both approach voice; the phrasing, articulation and nuances are very similar. Let’s Listen to Louis first.
You can hear how Louis plays with the rhythm adding syncopation and articulation, sometimes in his version, he falls behind the beat but not as dramatically as Billie. He falls away at the end of each phrase favouring rhythm over melody. I’m not sure how the original melody was written. However, I suspect Billie is the one who adapted it, as her version is starkly different.
Billie plays with articulation as well, playing with syncopation and staccato. However, she lands that last note sliding it and using vibrato. I think it is interesting how they both use the attack. One of the tools used for both of them is a glottal stop on vowels, which is where the air builds behind the vocal cords before popping open. It gives a rhythmic percussive feeling. You can hear it one both versions here on the word “are”
They both do a similar thing by letting the air build behind the consonants, sometimes making them crisp and percussive or sometimes using dark or dental consonants by using the flat of the tongue rather than the blade. They both also lean into the ‘n’ sound, further adding to the nasality in both tones, singing on the consonants. And, the distinctive growl in Louis' voice is starting to sneak into Billie’s style here.
Some situations in her life also contributed to her style at this time. In 1937, Billie's father had died after being exposed to mustard gas in WW1. He developed a lung disorder and was refused treatment at a local hospital on account of his race. By the time he did manage to get the treatment, it was too late. She was devastated despite her relationship with him. She dealt with her grief by throwing herself into work, landing a gig with Count Basie, from which she was eventually fired. There are many reasons sighted for her firing. However, it is reported that she refused to change her style for the band. I think you can hear that in Yours and Mine. Although that style is there it is less pronounced, the style is cleaner than both her earlier and later work. She takes this cleaner sound even further into 1938 when she records When You Are Smiling, a song made famous by Louis Armstrong.
Billie would almost certainly have heard Louis 1929 recording when she recorded this, and at this time, she was working with Artie Shaw as the first black woman to perform with a white orchestra. They toured the South of America, and although Shaw stuck up for Billie, she faced a lot of the realities of segregation and racism.
Here, the sound is clean and bright without distortion. She uses a few of those slides but doesn’t lean into it as she does later in her career. She uses a great singer's trick of modifying vowels, so instead of singing ‘smile’ with a wide ‘i’ sound, she is opening it up to an ‘ah’. Vowel modifications like these make it easier to sing and give a warmer tone. She plays around with rhythm and consonants, but it's a lot more polite and restrained. Without talking to her, it is hard to say how she felt at this time, but vocals have an eerie way of echoing life and exposing how we think and feel.
How Bessie Smith Influenced Billie Holiday
Let’s have a look at Bessie Smith and what Billie gained from her. Bessie was the most popular Blues Singers of the 20s and 30s. Nicknamed the Empress of Blues, she had a big voice. The song we will look at is Tain’t Nobody's Bizness If I Do, first recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923 and by Billie in 1949. I’ll play Bessie’s version first and then Billies. Billie's voice is a little different from everything I have just shown you so far. She had stepped entirely away from any expectations and owned it.
They both have very different tones. However, although Bessie is heavier and warmer, they both use twang and fast vibrato to express. Of course, Billie leans into that tone especially vowels vowels like eh on anyway, and Bessie opens up her vowels to give a warmer tone. Bessie also uses a lot of slides into a note
What does Billie do?Take it further and slide up and down, flipping between her head voice and chest voice until it almost becomes a yodel and, of course, mixing it with some Louis Armstrong style staccato articulation.
I wanted to make sure I show you in the later version the classic Billie Holiday yodel that developed into her voice in later years and is a defining factor of her vocal style. So here are a couple of clips. They are such a fun interesting sound that I haven’t heard anyone do in quite the same way.
But back to Bessie, although they are different singers, they both aimed for the same thing just from different angles - expression. Bessie Smith could certainly command an audience and make them feel; she conveyed emotion through dynamics, power and tone. Although that may have been what Billie originally wanted as a teen, she had a lighter voice. She did what she did throughout her career, take a perceived limitation and make it into a strength by making a feature of her lighter sound. She enjoyed the lyrics. Her expression was equally powerful but focuses on diction, attack of consonants and rhythm. Bessie honours the original piece’s phrasing and structure, whereas Billie pushes and pulls it and plays around with it. Bessies chose songs with feisty lyrics that were controversial for this time. Billie took this further and sang Strange Fruit.
Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit was originally a poem written by Abel Meeropol as a protest after seeing a picture of a lynching that occurred in the South of America. As an amateur musician, he set it to music. I could make an entire video on him - I recommend you look him up. There are many different reports on how Billie first heard the song, but she decided to sing it because the dark imagery reminded her of her father’s death. If you haven’t listened to this song before, it is provocative, grotesque, dark, but I think it is a song that everyone should hear.
It is still shocking to this day, so I can only imagine how shocking it must have been at the time. Although this was a massive political statement, Billie didn’t see herself as an activist but just wanted to do the right thing. I am going to start with the 1939 version. I wanted to show you her early performance and then her late so you can hear how much her voice changed and how understandably tentative she was. Initially, she was reluctant to perform it out of fear of retaliation. Once she did, she realised how it connected with people and how important it was. Still, her producer at the time John Hammond, who was a civil rights activist, refused to produce it out of fear of adverse reaction. Eventually, Commodore records agreed, and this is the initial recording.
As she got older, her performance changed a lot. Billie had been through a lot by the end of her life, and in the later version, she is not limited by any musical rules. If it gets in the way of expression, she throws it out. The songs moved from unsettling to something more in your face. I can only describe it as ugly and disgusting, not as a slight on Billie but because that is what she wanted it to be. And this is the reason it is such an important song. As someone who has never had to deal with racial injustice, I will never fully know what it feels like to live with. Hearing Billie's delivery of Strange Fruit takes me beyond intellectual understanding into the realm of feeling. It makes me uncomfortable, but progress doesn’t come from comfort and apathy. It embodies a terrible history and helps us understand the pain inflicted, and reminds us that we still have far to go.
Interestingly, it made headlines a few years ago when Donald Trump asked British singer Rebecca Ferguson to sing for his inauguration. She refused to perform it unless she was allowed to sing Strange Fruit. He did not accept.
““If you allow me to sing ‘Strange Fruit’, a song that has huge historical importance, a song that was blacklisted in the United States for being too controversial. A song that speaks to all the disregarded and downtrodden black people in the United States. A song that is a reminder of how love is the only thing that will conquer all the hatred in this world, then I will graciously accept your invitation and see you in Washington.”
”
Speaking Voice
I wanted to touch on this because I find singers speaking voices interesting, even more so with Billie as she had no training and therefore sings with much of the vocal tract, tongue and jaw posture that she does as she speaks. So I will ask you to listen to this interview of her speaking and not listen to what she says, but how she says it.
You can hear how she naturally uses those slides to express the phrasing and articulation, the nasality and the way she moves between registers of the voice in almost a yodel. This is her voice later in her career, so you can also hear the hoarseness that points to vocal damage caused by lifestyle and drug addiction.
I wanted to quickly touch on her nasality as it comes from her speech. The soft palate is a portal to the nasal cavity. Nasality is a quality that occurs when we lower the soft palate and send the sound through the nose. A lot of singers feel this as forward placement. When we speak, our soft palate raises and lowers depending on the sound. You can feel it lower on an m sound and raise on a b. Often singers, especially opera singers, are trained to keep in that raised position. Billie's voice is so connected to her speaking voice that she uses the same soft palate position, contributing to her nasality and the thinner sounding high notes.
I haven’t talked much about Billie improvisation yet, but it is a massive feature of her singing. Unlike singers like Ella Fitzgerald, she did not scat unless she wanted to show the band members what she wanted them to sing. She focused on expressing the lyrics and focused her improvisation around that.
Here is the original melody from the opera
Ella Fitzgerald also does a version within a jazz style and different key but stays pretty true to that original melody.
Let's listen to what Billie does. I am going to play three versions from three different points in her career. You will hear how her voice develops but also how she plays with melody. She also changes it to “I love you porgy’ to make it more true to how she would say it.
Lady Sings The Blues
The last song I want to touch on is Lady Sings The Blues. It is my favourite, written by Billie and Herbie Nicols. She recorded this version at the end of her life. She was not in good health at the time, and you can hear the effects her lifestyle and drug abuse has had on her voice. It’s lower, has lost its range and has a distorted husky range. However, at least some of this distortion is a choice. A feature of Billie's career, instead of choosing to hide a flaw, she leans into the sound it creates and uses it to make us feel.
She is so defiant in how she sings now. She has taken the features that people tried to get rid of in her early career and made more of them. Every note has a texture, an adaptation, a meaning.
I love those distorted lower notes. The cause of distortion is when something disrupts the even vibrations from healthy vocal cords and causes them to become irregular. Although people often think this sound is unhealthy, done correctly, it usually is fine. It’s the husky breathy tone that is the area where she isn’t purposefully putting on distortion, which points to her vocal cords’ health. However, I love how she plays her voice like an instrument. Those lower notes sound to me like a trombone, and her thinner direct tone at the top echoes the sound of a clarinet. In her early days, she was slightly softer in her consonants, using more of her direct tone. She has swapped that for something huskier and more fragile but keeps up that attack by changing how she hits each note. Here she is punching the rhythm, switching between using the flat of her tongue to produce consonants to using the blade to make them defined and crisp.
Billie was one of the first to express fearlessly when this was not the norm, and this fearless attitude and bravery went beyond her singing. She was beyond her time in her vocals and civil rights and stood up bravely against injustice while honestly bearing her soul. Now and again, a trailblazer comes along and changes the space for everyone, and Billie was one of those people. She allowed the ugly and the pain to show, and in fact, made a point of it, moving the aim of singing from perfection to humanity. She showed us that our flaws can be our beauty and that we might need some uncomfortable truths to provoke change. Her gift leaves a legacy beyond her, paving the way for many of our great artists, giving new generations permission to innovate their own forms of expression and stand up against the injustices they face.
