Mom and Dad married very young….

“Dad was eighteen, Mom was sixteen, I was three”. The unforgettable opening lines of Billie Holiday’s autobiography “Lady Sings The Blues”. What follows is a grim story of poverty, tragedy and degradation. Billie was a prostitute at 14 before being sent to prison and then to the workhouse. Through talent and hard work, she became one of the most famous singers in the world. Even then her life was never easy and her premature death at the age of 44 was not unconnected with years of drug abuse. Billie Holliday would have been 100 years old today and that made me think. Doesn’t her story put the “journeys” of those dreadful, talentless, self-pitying, “I’m doing it for me nanna” X-Factor contestants into sober perspective?