Image Billie Holiday / Public Domain - Picryl

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Her stint in a convent reform school gave Holiday bad-girl cred and an ambitious spiritual discipline, and both went lastingly to her style and her sound. Whatever assaults and privations were dealt to her there, the House of the Good Shepherd was where Billie Holiday learned to arrange the jagged pieces of her life into a coherent persona, where her battered spirit was made the subject of confessional performance and where, in the course of this project of self-fashioning, she received dedicated practice and instruction in singing.

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Read Billie Holiday At The House Of The Good Shepherd : NPR on npr.