Billie Holiday
A tenor saxophonist called Lester Young often accompanied Holiday. He had been a boarder at her mother's house in 1934 and she got on well with him. Young gave her a nickname, "Lady Day" and she called him "Prez." She spent three months working at Clark Monroe's Uptown House in New York in 1937. In the late 1930s, she also worked as a big band singer with Count Basie and Artie Shaw. She was one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra (Artie Shaw's).