Billie Holiday Louis Armstrong New Orleans

Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong - From the film New Orleans 1947

Billie Holiday (born April 7, 1915, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 17, 1959, New York City, New York) American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the ’50s.

Eleanora (her preferred spelling) Harris was the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a professional musician who for a time played guitar with the Fletcher Henderson band. She and her mother used her maternal grandfather’s surname, Fagan, for a time; then in 1920 her mother married a man surnamed Gough, and both she and Eleanora adopted his name. It is probable that in neither case did her mother have Eleanora’s name legally changed. The singer later adopted her natural father’s last name and took the name Billie from a favourite movie actress, Billie Dove.

Louis Armstrong (born August 4, 1901, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died July 6, 1971, New York, New York) was the leading trumpeter and one of the most influential artists in jazz history. Although Armstrong claimed to be born in 1900, various documents, notably a baptismal record, indicate that 1901 was his birth year. He grew up in dire poverty in New Orleans, Louisiana, when jazz was very young.

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