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Unforgettable Moments In Music History That Shocked The Media

Khalid Elhassan March 8, 2023 32 min

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The Persecution of a Music Legend

Music - Billie Holiday in 1947 — Billie Holiday in 1947. Library of Congress

Jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915 – 1959), born Eleanora Fagan and nicknamed “Lady Day”, led a turbulent life. She was raised in a brothel, and her own mother turned out Holiday for sex work in her childhood. She was further traumatized by the death of her ill father, after he was denied medical care in a whites-only hospital because of segregation. That pain is reflected in Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit, a song about the lynching of blacks that she made her own, and that became an anthem of the budding civil rights movement.

Unsurprisingly, Holiday turned to drugs to cope with the pain. The United States vs. Billie Holiday, a 2021 autobiographical release, addresses her addiction struggles. A main theme revolves around Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger’s relentless pursuit of Holiday. Among other things, he pressures people in Holiday’s life to set her up for possession charges, has her trailed by his agents, and appoints one of them to go undercover to gather evidence against her. How much of that was real?

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.