The beautiful, incomparable jazz vocalist Billie Holiday lived perhaps one of the saddest, hardest lives in all of music history. Born to a thirteen-year-old unwed mother in 1915, a rape victim at ten, working as a prostitute by the age of sixteen, she found her true calling as a jazz singer in clubs in Harlem in the early 1930s. Her career, which ended with her death in 1959, was a nightmare of abusive relationships and drug addiction, the last of which drastically affected her voice. Through it all, though, she sang. Oh, how she sang!
There are those who believe that much of the misery in her life was caused, not by bad choices and hard luck, but by a curse attached to one song in particular: “Gloomy Sunday”, which she recorded in 1941.
“Gloomy Sunday” has a rather peculiar history itself. Its composer, a self-taught Hungarian pianist named Rezso Seress, wrote the song in a fit of despair after breaking up with his fiancee. It took him some time to get the song published; it was only after lyrics by the poet Laszlo Javor were substituted for the original ones Seress wrote that the song gained favor and was recorded. The song’s legend, which claims it was responsible for a rash of suicides across Europe in the years immediately following its initial release, says that Seress, in the wake of its success, made arrangements to rekindle his relationship with his erstwhile fiancee, only to learn that she had committed suicide by poison, allegedly leaving a suicide note consisting of two words: “Gloomy Sunday.” From there, it mushroomed into a genuine urban legend as “the Hungarian suicide song.”
Most of the tales of suicides associated with the song are similarly anecdotal, the most poignant being that of a fourteen year old paper boy in Rome who merely overheard a beggar in the street humming the tune; the boy gave the beggar all the money he had in his pockets at the time, then flung himself into the Tiber and drowned.
And that’s all they are: anecdotes. None of the suicide stories can be verified save one, and it had nothing to do with the song and everything to do with age and illness. But that was far in the future; let us return to Billie Holiday and “Gloomy Sunday.”
Lady Day recorded the song in 1941, and, suggest at least two writers on the paranormal (Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn Ishmael), her life went into a dangerous spiral thereafter that only ended with her death. That was also the year she married a trombonist named Jimmy Monroe, a drug addict who got her hooked on heroin. Within a year, she left Monroe for a trumpeter who became her drug dealer. In 1947, things seemed to be looking up for her; she divorced Monroe and broke up with the trumpeter, only to be arrested in her New York apartment in May of the same year on narcotics possession. She pleaded guilty and served a ten-month sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. Because of that conviction, she lost her “cabaret card” and was unable to perform in New York nightclubs for the years that remained of her life, save for a short stint at the Ebony Club in 1948. She did, however, do a single outstanding concert at Carnegie Hall, ten days after her March 1948 release from prison.
In 1952 she married a man named Louis McKay, allegedly a Mafia enforcer. Like the other men who had come and gone in her life, he beat her and exploited her, but he did try to get her off drugs, which was more than the others had done.
But the drugs ultimately won. Hospitalized in July 1959 with pneumonia, she was arrested for drug possession yet again while she lay in a semi-comatose state. On July 17th, she died of liver failure. She was only forty-four.
Cursed by a song? Not from where I stand. The poverty and abuse that began in her childhood could not help but have an adverse effect on her adult life, and the choices she made haunted her till the day she died.
So we come full circle. If we view Billie Holiday’s sad life as a long suicide, it’s no wonder that some might feel she too fell victim to the “Hungarian suicide song.” Given that none of the alleged suicides caused by the song can be verified, it is an awfully long shot, and strains credulity till it screams.
In fact, the only suicide that can be definitively linked to “Gloomy Sunday” is that of its composer, and even he didn’t commit suicide under the influence of the song. Rezso Seress lived through beatings and internment in Nazi labor camps during the Second World War, lived through the 1956 attempted revolution against Soviet rule that left Hungary brutally repressed yet again. What he could not live through was illness and old age. He died in January 1968 by throwing himself out the window of his Budapest apartment.
He—and Billie Holiday—gave us a strangely haunting song, and urban legend has done the rest.