The Best Bill(ie)

Bill Murray is great, but Billie Holiday is at the top of the Bill(ie) charts. Steve, aka "secret agent man," Schwartz, my tech gumba at my current school, made arrangements for a group of middle schoolers to do a phone interview with a friend of his who knew Billie pretty well. This gave me an opportunity to delve deeply into Billie's digital biography. What do the TC clones say, "Dig deep?" Or do they search for a teachable moment? Too bad I'm no longer friends with Kyle, aka the the shovel master of bs edujargon. One jewel that I found online was her 1930 Harlem census listing from ancestry.com (She's Eleanor Fagan, her mother is Sadie). I bought a DVD about her at the well stocked B&N in Yonkers (on sale no less for about $12). I used the images from the DVD to put together a couple of poster resources so the kids can familiarize themselves more about her. The image above is early Billie. Dig the pants on tenor great Ben Webster on the left. I also bought a beautifully illustrated (Jerry Pinkney) book about her song "God Bless The Child." It came with a CD of the song as well. I scanned the images and did my best to create a karoke version of it as a slide show.