FEATURE:
Groovelines
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
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I am not going to put too much…
PHOTO CREDIT: Atlantic Records
of my own words into this Groovelines, as Strange Fruit is a song that has been written about my various different sources. I am just about to bring in a feature that mentions how the song plays a pivotal role in a film that has just earned its lead, Andra Day, a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Billie Holiday. I am a huge fan of the Jazz icon, and many consider Strange Fruit to be her finest moment and most haunting song. Holiday was imbued with such range as a singer; I don’t think she managed to strike such a chord as she did with Strange Fruit. I will quote from USA Today and their feature about a song that, eighty-two years after its release, remains relevant and stirring:
“In March 1939, a then-23-year-old Billie Holiday closed out her set at New York's Cafe Society with a song she hadn't performed before: "Strange Fruit."
Written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, the song was a mournful dirge for Black victims of lynchings in the Jim Crow-era South, vividly likening their bodies to fruit "hanging from the poplar trees."
"The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth," she sung slowly and deliberately. "Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh / then the sudden smell of burning flesh."
At first, Holiday was worried about how it'd be received. "As she should have been – audiences out for an evening of fun suddenly found themselves confronted by a highly dramatic performance of a song that was by all accounts shocking and painful," says John Szwed, author of "Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth." "As time went by, she came to see the song as a test for her audiences."
'United States vs. Billie Holiday': Andra Day tapped into jazz legend's 'trauma'
"Strange Fruit" is central to Lee Daniels' new drama "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (now streaming on Hulu), which traces the FBI's efforts to silence Holiday (Andra Day) because of the song. For more than a decade, Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund) targeted her with drug arrests and effectively barred her from the nightclub circuit after an 18-month prison term. She died of liver disease in 1959 at age 44.
"Jazz already had a reputation for being incendiary but then you have this incredible singer who is performing a song that makes people leave the club shaken, where people were either bursting into rapturous applause or into racist heckling," says arts and culture writer Aida Amoako. "The potential to be a powerful song that highlighted racial injustice was a potential recognized both by Holiday and the authorities, so whereas Holiday wanted to grow that potential, the FBI wanted to squash it."
"Strange Fruit" struck a chord with the singer, says music journalist J'na Jefferson. "A few years before recording the song, her father died after being denied medical care for a serious illness. It could have been prevented had he been white. So for her to sing about Black people being killed for being who they are adds another layer of personal context to the song as a whole. I’m sure it was incredibly cathartic in addition to being brave."
Weeks after she first played the song live, Holiday approached her label, Columbia Records, about recording it. Fearing backlash, they declined, but she soon found a home for it at independent label Commodore Records.
"For mainstream institutions – record labels, radio stations – the song was too hot to touch," says David Margolick, author of "Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Biography of a Song." "Beyond a group of left-wing progressives, largely white, most people wouldn't have known the song. The Black press barely mentioned it: It was too radioactive even for them."
And the song continues to resonate today. "We may not be witnessing 'Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,' but we have camera phones that prove that Black people are still dying for simply existing," Jefferson says. "We still have to march and protest in order to make a point that things are still unfair for people who look like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain and Nina Pop and Tony McDade. The issue remains the same and it’s unfortunate that this is still the reality of our country, but hopefully with greater awareness of social and racial injustices, we can move toward a more tolerant future.
"I hope to one day live in a world where I can listen to 'Strange Fruit' and say, 'I’m glad this doesn’t keep happening”.
I want to source from another feature that cover similar ground in a second. It must have been very odd for radio stations and listeners to hear a song like Strange Fruit in 1939. I can understand why radio stations felt the song was a bit shocking. In many ways, Strange Fruit is as powerful as any speech by civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s. Not to take anything away from Dr. Martin Luther King or any the key figures from the movement; Strange Fruit has this staggering resonance and emotional hit that affects everyone who hears it.
It is interesting hearing about the inspiration behind the Billie Holiday classic. In this interesting feature, we hear about the song’s humble beginning and how there was some mixed reaction to Strange Fruit in some sectors:
“Holiday may have popularized "Strange Fruit" and turned it into a work of art, but it was a Jewish communist teacher and civil rights activist from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol, who wrote it, first as a poem, then later as a song.
His inspiration? Meeropol came across a 1930 photo that captured the lynching of two Black men in Indiana. The visceral image haunted him for days and prompted him to put pen to paper.
After he published "Strange Fruit" in a teachers union publication, Meeropol composed it into a song and passed it onto a nightclub owner, who then introduced it to Holiday.
When Holiday heard the lyrics, she was deeply moved by them — not only because she was a Black American but also because the song reminded her of her father, who died at 39 from a fatal lung disorder, after being turned away from a hospital because he was a Black man.
Because of the painful memories it conjured, Holiday didn't enjoy performing "Strange Fruit," but knew she had to. “It reminds me of how Pop died,” she said of the song in her autobiography. “But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because 20 years after Pop died, the things that killed him are still happening in the South.”
While civil rights activists and Black America embraced "Strange Fruit," the nightclub scene, which was primarily composed of white patrons, had mixed reactions. At witnessing Holiday's performance, audience members would applaud until their hands hurt, while those less sympathetic would bitterly walk out the door”.
It is not only amazing to read what impact Strange Fruit had when its release. Think about the ensuing years and decades, and the song’s messages and performance is still being discussed. In a deep article from 2019, the BBC talked about the legacy of Strange Fruit:
“Strange Fruit was not the first popular song to deal with race. Fats Waller’s Black and Blue had come out 10 years earlier, and Lead Belly recorded The Bourgeois Blues in the same month Holiday recorded Strange Fruit. But Strange Fruit stands out among protest songs for its graphic content and subsequent commercial success. Tad Hershorn, an archivist at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, tells BBC Culture: “It was such an in-your-face type of protest song [that it] really gained her fame outside of Harlem … it did really leave both the singer and the audience no place to hide.”
This bold confrontation helped galvanise a movement that would eventually alter the course of US history. Anti-lynching campaigners sent Strange Fruit to congressmen to encourage them to propose a viable anti-lynching bill. A review in Time Magazine referred to the song as “a prime piece of musical propaganda for the NAACP”. Ahmet Ertegun, who later co-founded Atlantic Records, called it “a declaration of war … the beginning of the civil rights movement”. Strange Fruit also brought its creators unwanted attention. In 1940 Meeropol, a socialist, was called to testify before a committee investigating communism and asked whether the US Communist Party had paid him to write Strange Fruit. Journalist Johann Hari suggests that while stories of Holiday’s drug use had already been circling, her first performance of Strange Fruit put her firmly on the radar of Harry Anslinger, the notorious head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
For some, Strange Fruit and Holiday’s personal life are inextricable: the aspects of her biography that made her the embodiment of a tragic jazz heroine are the source of the haunting quality of her voice. Despite the fact that Holiday never witnessed a lynching (contrary to what the 1972 Diana Ross film Lady Sings the Blues shows), Strange Fruit still evoked the racial injustice that she felt killed her father, Clarence, who was refused medical treatment at a Texas hospital.
But as Strange Fruit has become separated from Holiday’s personal life over the decades, it has also become distanced from the specific horror of lynching. “It's come to sort of represent racism generally,” Margolick tells BBC Culture. “Every once in a while there’s some horrific moment but lynching has become kind of a metaphor and, in that sense, the song has become more metaphorical than literal over the decades.”
Many musicians have covered, sampled, adapted Strange Fruit, the most famous being Nina Simone in 1965, while Kanye West sampled Simone’s cover for his 2013 track Blood on the Leaves. In 2017, British singer Rebecca Ferguson announced she would only accept the invitation to sing at then President-elect Trump’s inauguration if she could sing Strange Fruit. For Lordi, its unending power lies in the way it “distills the fact of racial violence so unmistakably. It’s shorthand for ‘What is a song I can think of that most powerfully indicts the ongoing legacy of racial violence in this country and across the world?’”
In 2002, Strange Fruit was added to the National Registry of the Library of Congress, immortalising it as a song of great significance to the musical heritage of the US. Holiday died in 1959 and Meeropol in 1986 – but their collaboration has endured, its capacity to shock never waning. It has inspired musicians since to sing about injustice with candour and the awareness that a song can be a timeless impetus for social change.
“There’s something that’s still very radioactive about the song.” says Margolick. “It’s still relevant because race is still relevant. It’s on the front pages of our newspapers every day. The impulses that [Meeropol] was talking about are still very much with us”.
From its beginnings with Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to Billie Holiday translating the incredible work into this civil rights anthem, Strange Fruit is such a fascinating and hugely impactful song. Given the fact that Holiday has just been portrayed on screen by Andra Day and Strange Fruit plays an important part, I had to include it in this feature. Maybe there was some mixed reception to the song in the late-1950s/early-1960s, but I think we can all agree now that Strange Fruit is…
A mesmeric work of genius.