Happy birthday, Lady Day

Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 — July 17, 1959)

“You know, I don’t know why they called her Hillbillie except maybe that she grew up in the foothills of the Ozarks in Arkansas where it was she’d learned to make that liquor, and that her given name was Billie. I never met another woman named Billie until the night I met Miss Billie Holiday at a house party up in Harlem. I told her about my granmama and we toasted that old woman all night long. Lady Day was such a sweet woman, to me anyway. I was young when I met her, wasn’t but twenty or so, and she took me under her wing, watched after me and told me to stay the fuck out of trouble. That’s what she said: ‘Ollie, baby, you stay the fuck out of trouble tonight’ — and then she’d laugh and drink some more. Sweet lady. Hillbillie, though, she was mean as a snake. She’s the trouble everybody shoulda been warned about.”

— Oliver Pleasant, Five Night Stand