I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

In 1946 Holiday recorded "Good Morning Heartache". "He began lapping me and loving me like crazy" Billie Holiday said. Commodore recordings and mainstream success (1939)
Holiday was recording for Columbia in the late 1930s when Billie Holiday was introduced to "Strange Fruit" a song based on a poem about lynching written by Abel Meeropol a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx.

Music critic Robert Christgau called her "uncoverable possibly the greatest singer of the century". Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing.