No figure in American music led a more interesting, troubled and tragic life than Billie Holiday. She was the tortured soul of jazz, whose pain could be heard in every note she sang.

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She had a childhood of privation and struggled throughout her life with drug addiction, racial discrimination and violent billie holiday book reports — yet she managed to create an unforgettable body of work. An anthropologist and onetime jazz musician who has taught at Columbia and Relorts, Szwed is best known for his biographies of Miles Davis and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who traveled the country recording folk music.

He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three. Holiday was born when her mother was 19 and her father 17, and her biklie were never married.

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In the s, actress Tallulah Bankhead had something reprots an obsession with Holiday. Bankhead, whose father had been speaker of the House of Representatives, even used her connections to appeal to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to have drug charges against the singer dropped.

Hoover replied that the FBI had no authority over state narcotics laws. Her singing may not have been acrobatic, but it was original, subtle billie holiday book reports deeply communicative. She is all but absent from one chapter about the history of blues and minstrel singing.

Billie Holiday in a photo. Show Caption. By Special to The Denver Post.

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