Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday once said in response to the exclusion of African Americans from the jazz clubs on famous 52nd Street: "You can live up to your white satin tits, with gardenias in your arms. hair and no sugar cane for miles around, but you can still work on a plantation. The comparison between the jazz world, or more specifically 52nd Street, and a plantation shows the immense racial tension between blacks and whites in the early to mid-20th century. At the height of the period before the civil rights movement, Billie Holiday was a prominent African-American singer who was one of the best known among white Americans. Holiday was tough enough to survive in a racist and phallocentric world where she was frequently objectified and trivialized. However, she was not strong enough to resist the lure of alcohol and narcotics, which ultimately led to her death in 1959. In addition to her drug and alcohol use, Holiday had to do facing many other challenges in his life, which inspired the beautiful music that inspired him. she left her legacy. Despite her heavy drug and alcohol abuse, Billie Holiday redefined jazz for the world and brought a new sense of equality to it. Billie Holiday's childhood and youth proved to be about as interesting and crime-ridden as her life during her singing career. . Holiday, her first name being Eleanora Fagan, was born with music in the blood of her presumed biological father, Clarence Holiday, a musician in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was a single woman who was kicked out of Baltimore because she was pregnant with a child and unmarried and had to do the interview at Philadelphia General Hospital "where she was waiting for patients and medical care.” middle of paper ......r the songs are still covered to this day and are known throughout the world as the epitome of torch singing and beautiful singing in general. Because of her immense use of torch singing, her music makes the listener feel what she feels. If the song is about a lost love, the listener feels sad, but if the song is about how she feels when she is in love, the listener feels happy. The emotions felt by the listener mirror those of the singer. If Billie Holiday were alive today, one would hope that, as unrealistic as it may seem, she would not be as involved in drugs as she was when she was alive. Holiday would also develop his own style, different from any styles heard before. One might also assume that she would be happy with the current state of race relations, given that the music industry has become more diverse over the past thirty years..