Billie Holiday

Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Holiday survived a turbulent childhood and began singing in Harlem nightclubs, where producer John Hammond heard her and got her signed to Brunswick in 1935. Her collaboration with Teddy Wilson produced "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", a hit that became a jazz standard, and through the 1930s and 1940s she had mainstream success on Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s legal troubles and drug abuse landed her in prison, but she walked out to a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert and kept performing through the 1950s with two more sold-out Carnegie shows. Her voice had c…