A letter on Associated Booking Corporation letterhead signed by Billie Holiday, acknowledging a loan of $150, dated January 14, 1958.

The letter reads in full: This is to acknowledge receipt of $250.00 as an advance to be charged. to my account. This advance and all others previously made are to be repaid from deposits and deductions on future engagements.  [Signed] Billie Holiday

This letter was signed just five weeks after Holiday had appeared on the landmark television program “The Sound of Jazz,” one of the first major programs featuring jazz to air on American network television.  The program also featured Count Basie, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, and Thelonious Monk.

From Wikipedia: ‘The show’s performance of “Fine and Mellow” reunited Holiday with her friend Lester Young for the final time. Jazz critic Nat Hentoff recalled that during rehearsals Holiday and Young kept to opposite sides of the room. Young was very weak, and Hentoff told him to skip the big band section of the show and that he could sit while performing in the group with Holiday.’

During the performance of “Fine and Mellow”, Webster played the first solo. ‘Then,’ Hentoff remembered ‘Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.’ Within two years, both Young and Holiday had died.

And a month after this letter was signed, Holiday entered the studio with Ray Ellis and his Orchestra to record her penultimate album, Lady in Satin.

Associated Booking Corporation was formed in 1940 by Joe Glaser and Louis Armstrong. Known for representing the biggest Jazz musicians of the century, including Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, and Billie Holiday.

With a modern 8″ x 10″ photograph of Holiday, and Recordmecca’s written lifetime guarantee of authenticity.