On this day in 1959, Billie Holiday died in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital of heart failure brought on by alcoholism and drug abuse. Only 44, she was ravaged by her addictions, but even in her later years, she could deliver a song like no one else.
As Studs Terkel recalls of a performance three years earlier: “Billie’s voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long a big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps fifteen, twenty patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang ‘Fine and Mellow,’ you felt that way. And when she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me,’ you wept. Something was still there, that something that distinguished an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.”
