The House of the Good Shepherd was a reform school for Catholics. A friend of the family helped her out of there a couple of years later. She then went to New York to live with her mother. A year later, her mother discovered a neighbor was raping Billie, the man spent three months in jail.

Things seemed to go from bad to worse. Billie had said a brothel claimed her where she worked as a prostitute , and then was in prison for awhile. She started singing for tips in the Harlem night clubs in the 1930′s. It was said when she had not a dime to her name and was about to be evicted, she sang “Travelin All Alone” at a club and had the audience crying. She kept singing for tips until she ended up at a popular jazz club called Pod’s and Jerry’s in Harlem which would make great Los Angeles Music News at West LA Music. A lot of her performing cannot be discovered, but it is said she was working at Monette’s, another club in 1933 when John Hammond, a talent scout found her.