She had come a long way from the girls’ reformatory where she had been sent at age nine, and from the traumas of sexual assault she had endured by age 12, and from her early star turns as a soloist with the greatest swing bands of the day-those led by Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw. She had traveled far from the Baltimore of her youth, where she had washed her neighbors’ stoops and bathrooms to earn extra money for herself and her single mother, while singing along to the records of her heroes Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. When Billie Holiday released Lady Sings the Blues in December 1956, she was not old, at age 41, but she had lived a long life.
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