By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
LOWELL – Despite discrepancies as to where jazz great Billie Holiday last performed, New York or at Storyville in Boston, it’s clear that her last intimate club gig was at the long-gone Flamingo Lounge in Lowell prior to her death on July 17, 1959. Lady Day performed at the tiny club, which was located at 535 Merrimack Street, for a week-long engagement from May 5 to May 11, 1959.
Photo/Wikimedia Commons/William Gottlieb
Physical decline
Warned by her doctor that she was too sick to perform, the 44-year-old was in obvious decline physically but needed the money. Jimmy Makris, The Flamingo’s managing director, saw her struggling before shows and offered to pay her the full contract amount if she would just go home and rest, even suggesting she could come back once she felt better. Holiday refused. According to a May 1959 article in The Lowell Sun by legendary journalist Mary Sampas, Holiday insisted that she “absolutely did not want to cut short” her engagement and would do “whatever it took to carry on.”
Sampas noted that Holiday was “walking like a dreamer over a carpet of eggshells” when she took the stage, obviously depleted from years of self-abuse. In her review, she wrote: “Before the microphone, as the celebrated voice lifts and pours, she is alive again, as though all the long, long road leads always and only to this moment in the lights.” Sampas’ husband, Charles, also worked at The Lowell Sun as the executive news editor and was a brother-in-law of Lowell native, novelist and Beat Generation pioneer Jack Kerouac.
Mary Sampas covered Holiday’s Flamingo shows and published a daily column in The Lowell Sun under the pseudonym Pertinax. The general public was still not used to women holding prominent roles in the newspaper business, so she relied upon pseudonyms throughout her career. During her last interview with Holiday, the singer told Sampas her next gig was to be in Montreal.
Many regional performances
Holiday had other musical connections to the region. Besides engagements in Boston at The Hi-Hat and Wally’s Paradise, she also performed at The Music Inn in Lenox, The Celebrity Club in Providence, The Commodore Ballroom in Lowell, the North Shore Jazz Festival in Lynn and the Newport Jazz Festival as well as other venues including concert halls and nightclubs in cities such as Springfield and Worcester.
Reportedly, Holiday gave a charity performance at the 1,000-seat Phoenix Theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village on May 25, 1959. The “Strange Fruit” (song produced by comedic actor Billy Crystal’s uncle Milt Gabler) singer’s next engagement was scheduled for Montreal’s swanky Chez Parée supper club in early June for a one-week run, with an option to extend to two weeks if ticket sales were strong. This would have been a huge financial lifeline for the troubled songstress.
Final illness
Sadly, it would be a trip she would never make. She was due to leave for Canada on May 31 but collapsed in her New York City apartment. Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital Center, where she was placed under police guard for drug possession while on her deathbed.
Billie Holiday was given her last rites on July 15, 1959, and died two days later of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis. According to hospital records at the time of her death, the singer’s life savings amounted to just $0.70 in the bank and around $750 in cash (about $8,350 in 2026). Holiday was posthumously nominated for 23 Grammy awards, winning four and inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
One of her famous sayings was, “If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” She sang like no one else and no one else sang like Billie Holiday.
RELATED CONTENT:
A lifetime in music: jazz singer Ron Murphy
