YMMV / Billie Holiday

• Creator Worship: Everyone who adores troubled artists, especially singers, admires Holiday. There is a reason why she is still the most iconic jazz singer of all time.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Strange Fruit", describing the sinister scene of a lynching and contrasting it with a peaceful Southern evening. Made worse in that it's based on an actual event.
  • "Gloomy Sunday", and how. Considering its urban legend, it's hard to not see why.
• Older Than They Think:
  • People tend to forget that the inextricable link between music and drugs long predates rock 'n' roll - or recorded music for that matter. Holiday was arrested on her deathbed for heroin possession.
  • The French play Gringoire by Théodore de Banville (1866) has a scene where the protagonist says a poem based on a metaphor similar to "Strange Fruit": hanged corpses described as fruits in a tree.^note In 1960, Georges Brassens made "Le Verger du roi Louis", a song based on Bainville's poem. In 2021, French comedian François Morel made an album of Brassens covers and his version of "Le Verger du roi Louis" contains samples from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit".
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: Her legend has been accelerated by her early death.
• Retroactive Recognition: Of a boy Billie occasionally babysat. He was a nephew of the man who ran her first record company, Commodore Records, and his name also happened to be Billy. He was a funny kid who grew up to be one Billy Crystal (of When Harry Met Sally... fame). Billy's uncle, Milt Gabler, later became famous himself as the producer of Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock".
• Signature Song: "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sunday".