![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Hammond coerced Brunswick Records into a session and the recordings came out as Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra – the first of close to 100 recordings Billie made with Wilson. It would be a year or so before Billie recorded again. The first, ‘Your Mother’s Son-In-Law’, gives no hint of her promise. In October 1933, John Hammond, a music critic and record producer, heard her singing in a Harlem club and had her record a couple of sides with Benny Goodman. On her release, Billie took up with a saxophonist and the pair of them began playing Harlem dives, Billie trying to emulate Bessie Smith whose records she loved. By 1928, Billie’s mother moved to Harlem with her daughter and before long they were both working in a brothel fourteen-year-old Billie was charged with vagrancy and sent to a workhouse. Billie’s birth certificate named her father as DeViese whereas she insisted he was Clarence Holiday – Billie’s mother, Sadie’s childhood sweetheart, who later played guitar in Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra.Ībused as a child, she had a spell in a Catholic children’s home before cleaning and running errands for a brothel madam. We know that Billie was born on 7 April 1915, but the facts about her childhood are murky at best, made no clearer by Lady Sings The Blues, Billie’s autobiography, which confused things further. ![]()
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