Billie Holiday

I never knew that Billie Holiday left the stage midway through the song and allegedly slashed the heckler with a knife -- then resumed singing. The song? Strange Fruit, a song about the lynching of a black man in the American South.

You can find more here, at PCL. (The link they direct us to, the Walter Gordon Collection, is not working now... I keep my fingers crossed for its return. Meanwhile, use the Google cache.)

You can also find a press release on the collection here.

Also via Google cache, I found this image:

The text reads: John Levy (left) and Walter Gordon stand in the court hallway before Billie Holiday’s criminal assault trial. Levy was Holiday's manager and boyfriend for much of her turbulent career.