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The famous person i most admire - Legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday
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THE FAMOUS FIGURE I MOST ADMIRE... English GCSE speech/presentation Legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan Cough in 1915 Baltimore, the direct descendant of a slave (her grandmother) and a plantation owner (her grandfather). Born to a 13-year-old mother and a father who abandoned the family shortly after she was born, her childhood was far from stable. After being raped when she was 10, she was abandoned by her mother, and left to live with uncaring relatives. To support herself she began running errands and scrubbing floors in a brothel - it was there that she first heard jazz, scratchy recordings of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith played on the house phonograph. At age 12 she moved to New York, where she became trapped in the brutal and bitter world of prostitution. By 1930 she had convinced a club owner to let her sing on an open mic night, taking...
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