I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music…

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning,…

— Tori Amos

With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is…

— Frank Sinatra

Billie Holiday's voice was the voice of living intensity of soul in the true sense of that greatly abused word.

— Leonard Feather

I love to sing old Motown songs to myself, or some Patti Smith Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. That gets me in the mood…

— Siobhan Fahey

The other songs [of Billie Holiday] - "Body and Soul" is like the standard - I also wanted some songs that I knew I…

— Jose James

“Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it,…

— Carmen Maria Machado

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I…

— Jose James

My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and…

— Yael Naim

“He died at forty-two. I was there to collect his talent. I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just…

— Mitch Albom

I know I idolise someone like Billie Holiday, but I don't look at her and think I have to imitate her lifestyle, to try…

— Lisa Stansfield

I feel like, in many ways, Billie Holiday's still very under-appreciated as an artist. People focus on her voice, and all of the very…

— Jose James

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared…

— Tony Bennett

If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel…

— Jose James

I also tried to focus on songs that Billie Holiday wrote, songs that she had a hand in shaping, like "Strange Fruit"; songs that…

— Jose James

I've made my own music, and the way I've always described it is Peggy Lee with an electric guitar, or Billie Holiday with some…

— Evan Rachel Wood