Days after she was released from prison in 1948, jazz legend Billie Holiday played a sold-out concert at New York's famous Carnegie Hall.

The Cabaret Identification Card was required for all performers in New York nightclubs that served liquor. After her arrest and yearlong imprisonment, the New York Police Department revoked Billie Holiday's card, making it extremely difficult for her to earn money. The video features contemporary jazz musician Christian McBride breaking down the history of cabaret cards and how the ban affected Holiday.

Record players were rarities in the 1920s, but Holiday had access to one at Alice Dean's, the brothel in Baltimore where she scrubbed floors. It was there that she listened to her heroes, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.

Louis McKay—who was Holiday's manager and abusive husband—worked with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to ensure Holiday was caught with drugs. She was eventually put on trial and sentenced to a year in prison, where she briefly got sober.

In the song's earliest performances at Cafe Society in New York, one of a few truly integrated nightclubs in the society, the song was always performed last, after bar service had stopped, with a single spotlight on Holiday so audiences would pay close attention to the lyrics. Later, Holiday included her ability to perform the song in her concert contracts, allowing her to sing it even if venue owners were nervous about its protest message.

In her final days, Holiday was still performing—often at clubs outside of New York—though she was struggling with cirrhosis, an effect of her alcoholism. This excerpt from Paul Anderson's "Bitter Crop: the Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Final Year" details her final show in Lowell, Massachusetts, offering a tragic portrait of the singer running out of steam.

At 10 years old, the jazz singer was raped and then returned to House of the Good Shepard under protective custody. Her rapist was eventually convicted, but the court still sent her to an all-girls Catholic reform school. Jake Brennan, the host of the Disgraceland podcast, believes those early events led Holiday to the transcendent world of performing, but that it also led her to the escape of drugs.

The 1957 CBS special, part of its series "The Seven Lively Arts," was a landmark broadcast that brought some of jazz's biggest names—including Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Count Basie—to a national audience. Watch Holiday offer a stirring rendition of "Fine and Mellow" below.

After the success of "Strange Fruit," the Federal Bureau of Narcotics began surveilling Holiday on suspicion that she was using heroin. Jimmy Fletcher, an agent tasked with following her to clubs and parties, later said that they became quite close. "She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type," he was reported as saying.

The singer appeared alongside Duke Ellington in Paramount's "Symphony in Black," a musical short released by Paramount Pictures in September 1935, when Holiday was just 20 years old.

The 1947 film wasn't known for its sophisticated plot, which mainly centers on a white opera singer who learns about the beauty of blues and jazz. It's more notable for featuring some of those genre's biggest stars, including Holiday, who played a singing maid and the love interest of Louis Armstrong. You can see her first scene around the 11-minute mark.

Holiday was posthumously inducted into the Hall in 2000 for her influence on the generations that followed her. Fittingly, Diana Ross, who played Holiday in a 1972 biopic, did the honors. She took the opportunity to sing an acapella verse of "Strange Fruit" and then offer some honorific poetry: "In this, a lesson: Artist, handle with care. Don't lose yourself in the music, beware stardom's glare."

Singer and bandleader Cab Calloway was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene. He was also one of the biggest names in jazz's swing era and would go on to be the first Black American to have a nationally syndicated radio show and the first to sell a million copies of a record. In this 1934 short film, "Cab Calloway's Hi-De-Ho," he reenacts his upbeat performances at Harlem's Cotton Club.

Music writer Lewis Porter disputes the events of "The United States vs. Billie Holiday," a 2022 film that dramatized the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' pursuit of the jazz legend. Porter notes that the FBN did indeed target Holiday, but believes it's important to note that it wasn't necessarily for the release of the protest song.

This primer from NPR breaks down some of the best entry points for newcomers to the jazz legend. From iconic tracks like "Strange Fruit" to deeper but essential late-era songs, the list offers a blueprint for appreciating Holiday before jumping into the deep end of her sprawling discography.

Although Holiday is sometimes associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the Black cultural movement of the 1920s and '30s, scholar Whit Frazier Peterson argues that her real impact in poetry was on the Black Arts Movement, the more radical Black literary movement of the '60s and '70s that featured writers like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.

Bossa nova was still largely under the radar when João Gilberto, Luiz Bonfa, Sergio Mendes, and others performed at the storied Carnegie Hall in New York. Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil noted that the showcase's success was surprising to both the musicians and Brazilians, who began taking the music more seriously as a cultural export.

In a 1958 essay for Ebony magazine, Sinatra wrote about the impact that Black music had on him, writing that "it is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early 1930s, who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence, and I am very proud to acknowledge it."

Winehouse, who became popular in the 2000s, was known for her jazz style, which was indebted to the vocal technique Holiday had innovated decades earlier. In 2003, Winehouse paid homage to Holiday by covering "(There Is) No Greater Love," a standard that Holiday had recorded in 1947.

Iconic jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald is known as the "First Lady of Song" for her timeless performances and major contributions to jazz. Decades later, her songs have more than 100 million plays on Spotify. She collaborated with celebrated photographer Yale Joel, who left behind iconic picture galleries and films of the singer.

In the 1970s, some of the world's biggest stars would flock to the New York City club to dance and socialize during the disco era. See photos of Liza Minnelli accompanied by other celebrities like Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Robert De Niro, and James Spader.

In the film "Cabaret," Minnelli performs the show tune as Sally Bowles, a protagonist embarking on a new love affair in 1930s Berlin. Minnelli's emotive performance and belting vocals helped land her the prestigious acting award.

The Great Migration transformed New York City's Harlem neighborhood into the epicenter of Black American art, with artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith regularly performing. The music not only provided the backbeat to the cultural scene—it often influenced it, with Harlem Renaissance poets, in particular, inspired by jazz's approach to rhythm and improvisation.

In 1942, the publication introduced the Harlem Hit Parade chart, listing the top 10 records sold at select record stores in the majority-Black borough of New York. In 1945, it changed the chart’s name to Most Played Juke Box Race Records, using the music industry term (“race record”) that identified recordings by Black artists, even if they played music markedly similar to the white artists on the other charts.

When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at their Washington hall in 1939 because she was Black, Roosevelt publicly cut ties with the group. She worked to arrange an alternative outdoor concert for Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, which drew a crowd of 75,000.

Carroll cut her teeth in vaudeville alongside Buddy Howe, her husband, who later became her manager. Despite operating in a male-dominated field, she became a popular headliner and was a mainstay as a stand-up on "The Ed Sullivan Show," which led to her own sitcom.

Songs like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," which portrayed the grim brutality of lynching, and John Coltrane's "Alabama," which was modeled on the rhythm of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., were the backbeat of the movement.

Black musicians and comedians regularly toured the Chitlin Circuit, an informal entertainment network that developed performers like Tina Turner and Redd Foxx during the Jim Crow era.

The original American girl group, the Boswell Sisters, toyed with jazz standards by experimenting with challenging renditions. The group became a popular radio act during the 1920s and 1930s, with few of their fans aware that group leader Connee Boswell used a wheelchair.

Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, and many other bands got their start at CBGB. But its owner, Hillel “Hilly” Kristal, didn’t intend for it to be a punk rock venue. CBGB stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues,” though he included “OMFUG” (for “Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers”) on the venue’s marquee.

Alternative pop star Billie Eilish had a fascinating rise to fame. She cemented her album "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" in Grammys history by becoming the first woman and youngest person to win all the Big Four awards in the same night.

The song was No. 1 on Billboard’s Best Selling Retail Records chart, the predecessor to the Hot 100. The chart only measured record copies sold, excluding other indicators of popularity, like sheet music sales or jukebox plays, that were used on other charts.

The singer-songwriter released only two albums in her lifetime: 1971's self-titled and 1973's "Heart Food." Critics and contemporaries (including Graham Nash and David Crosby) praised both, though they were commercial flops. She died of a drug overdose in 1979 and had grown so obscure by then that no obituary was published. In the early 2000s, her recordings were reissued and found a new generation of fans.

The first was in 1961, after performing at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. Subsequent arrests were in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. He died of a morphine overdose in 1966, a year and a half after being found guilty of his New York charge.

Many of the Harlem Renaissance's greatest performances happened after hours, in one of the neighborhood's many nightclubs. This 1932 map, illustrated by Elmer Simms Campbell, highlights key hotspots, with insider tips on when to arrive, who to see, and how to fit in.

When jazz exploded in the 1920s, some believed the music's sudden popularity was the sign of a rotten nation, with one 1920 address at the University of Wisconsin proclaiming, "We are in deadly fear of the Jazz Devil, the demon which is consuming the country." Often, the connections were racialized, with columnists and preachers suggesting that jazz's Black artists were attempting to degrade white America.

The New Orleans cornetist was a legend in the city, sometimes referred to as "king," for his electrifying performances, which captivated local dance halls by blending ragtime, blues, and gospel music. Unfortunately, recording technology was limited at the time, so there are no recordings of Bolden, though the song "Buddy Bolden's Blues" remains a standard to this day.

Although jazz was once a popular art form, it has largely been confined to the margins of pop culture, with many of the genre's current bestselling albums from previous decades. Some critics argue that this is because the music betrayed its position as dance music and focused instead on musical proficiency.

The 1917 song by the Original Dixieland Jass Band was the first jazz recording to be issued and put the New Orleans sound on the national stage, along with inspiring several soundalikes.