Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday couldn’t do what Ella Fitzgerald did – the range, the acrobatics weren’t hers. What she had instead was a way of inhabiting a lyric so completely that a familiar song became a confession. She sang a little behind the beat, bent the melody to the words, and made you feel she’d lived every line. Often she had.

Her life was hard from the start and got harder – poverty, abuse, a recording career shadowed by addiction and a justice system that hounded her. None of it stayed out of the music. When she sang about heartbreak, it landed because there was no distance between the singer and the song.

“Strange Fruit,” her 1939 recording about lynching, is one of the bravest performances in American music. She risked her career to sing it and kept singing it for the rest of her life, a protest delivered in a hush that was louder than any shout.

By the end her voice was frayed, the range narrowed to almost nothing. It didn’t matter. She could break your heart with a few worn notes, because what she was really playing was feeling, and that never left her.