In the face of addiction and declining health, Holiday continued to capture the public imagination. She published her autobiography in 1956, which despite containing factual errors and exaggerations, is a captivating read. Her concert at Carnegie Hall in November of that year was released on Verve as Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall: The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. 6. Short readings from her autobiography were interspersed between performances of songs; the concert was a complete presentation of the Lady Day persona. Television networks were hesitant to book her, but in a rare appearance, she was reunited with Lester Young in 1957 for CBS’s Sound of Jazz. During Young’s solo on “Fine and Mellow,” the camera cut to Holiday, who was in a state of pure bliss as he blew a divine blues chorus.

In 1958 Holiday recorded Lady in Satin, which is one of her final recordings, and perhaps the best known. Backed by an orchestra with luscious and sweeping string arrangements, her performance is powerful and heart-wrenching — one hears all the pain, and bittersweet love and loss she experienced. Above all, one hears a mature artist who has the power to move her listeners. After recording Lady in Satin, her health continued to decline, and on May 31, 1959 Holiday was admitted to Metropolitan Hospital in Manhattan suffering from numerous ailments. She died there on July 17 at the age of 44.

Given her artistry, incalculable influence on jazz, and the sensational construction of her life story, it has been impossible to forget Holiday. Much of the talk falls into the “troubled and tragic artistic genius” category. In her book In Search of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin explains that “we think of [Holiday] in tragic terms because there are elements of her life that reinforce our own sense of tragedy and that allow us to confront and explore our own despair without losing ourselves in it.”

Diana Ross as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings The Blues

Griffin also points out that the recollections and perceptions of Holiday as a tragic figure were due to the press coverage of her addiction and arrests, her autobiography, and the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues. These contributed to characterizations of Holiday, Griffin explains, as a “weak-willed child-woman led astray by pimp-like bad men.” This narrative overshadowed Holiday’s complex character, strength, musical importance, and her refusal to take crap from anybody.

Holiday’s story, or at least an interpretation of it, is perhaps most widely known to those listeners who were born after she died by way of Lady Sings the Blues. Produced by Motown Records founder Berry Gordy and starring Diana Ross in the lead role, it was loosely based on her autobiography. While it received several Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress nomination for Ross, the movie emphasized Holiday’s struggle with drug addiction and portrayed her as almost childlike, lacking strength and maturity. Holiday’s husband, Louis McKay served as an adviser to the film and was played by Billy Dee Williams. The caring efforts of Williams’ McKay to keep Holiday clean are quite well removed from reality.

Even if the film’s music had been stylistically correct, if Ross had been more convincing as a jazz singer, and if the fictional musicians had been replaced by historical ones who Holiday had played with such as Artie Shaw (Richard Pryor’s character was simply called Piano Man), the movie’s focus on the tragic aspects of her life did a disservice to her music. Despite the movie’s problematic elements, many of Holiday’s recordings were reissued in its wake, thereby creating new generations of fans. The film also became the catalyst for an effort by critics and historians, such as Griffin, Stuart Nicholson, and Robert O’Meally, to correct the inaccuracies and to provide a more balanced account of her life. This work has been key to ensuring that Holiday’s artistic contributions are acknowledged and not eclipsed by tabloid sensationalism.

Since her death, the trend of celebrating Holiday’s music and life with tribute albums, concerts, documentaries, and books continues Singers from Tony Bennett and Etta James to Rosemary Clooney and Abbey Lincoln, and saxophonists such as Johnny Griffin, James Carter, and Archie Shepp have all recorded albums dedicated to Holiday. In 1979, a star-studded cast of singers including Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, Esther Phillips, Morgana King, and Maxine Weldon gave a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Recent years have seen the production of two high-profile musicals. Lady Day, from 2013, starred jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, while Audra McDonald, who sounds eerily similar to Holiday, won a 2014 Tony award for her performance in the one person Broadway play Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Holiday’s influences reach beyond jazz as well — she has been covered and sampled by diverse musicians such as singer-songwriter Cat Power and MC/producer Blu.

The centennial of Holiday’s birth will be celebrated with the release of two new vocal albums dedicated to Holiday, a new Holiday compilation album, and a new biography. José James released Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday on Blue Note Records on March 31, while Cassandra Wilson’s Coming Forth by Day appears on April 7, Holiday’s birthday. Also appearing on her birthday are a career-spanning compilation from Sony Legacy entitled The Centennial Collection, and John Szwed’s new biography Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, which focuses primarily on her music.