Strange Fruit A Jazz Sound Of Protest.
Billie Holiday Sings A Haunting Song About The Evils Of Lynching.
Aug 28, 2009
Billie Holiday first performed the song Strange Fruit at New York’s fabled Café Society in 1939. It was reported that everything stopped. The place went dark and quiet except for the spotlight on Miss Holiday.
When she finished there was a moment of silence that grew slightly awkward until a lone person hesitantly began to clap; the clap grew to thunderous applause. She would continue to get that thunderous applause night after night as she sang what many historians and writers would claim to be the first song that made America, white America, take into account the evils of lynching.
The Power Of A Song
Strange Fruit is know too many today as the first protest song. Most people mistakenly thought for many years that Billie had written the song. This could be attributed to how personal she made the song as she sang it throughout the years.
In the 1972 movie Lady Sings The Blues, the biopic which starred Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday; the song was introduced after a very harrowing scene where Billie actually saw black bodies swinging from the trees.
Because of this scene in the movie many people mistakenly believed that she did see the results of a lynching first hand and then wrote the song. But it was a school teacher and writer Abel Meeropol who had seen a picture of lynching and was moved to write a poem under the name Lewis Allan.
The Writer Teacher And Activist
Abel Meeropol was a Jewish school teacher, writer Union activist and a member Of the American Communist party, from the Bronx New York.
He was also the man who along with his wife Anne adopted Robert and Michael Rosenberg after their parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted of spying.
He first published his Poem Bitter Fruit in 1937, in the January edition of the New York Teacher. This was a few years before he met Billie Holiday.
He composed the music for the poem and it was performed at a New York Teacher’s Union meeting and caught the attention of the manager of Café Society, a new popular liberal club. Billie Holiday by then was a regular performer at the club and the manager introduced her to Abel after one of her performances.
Recording Strange Fruit.
Getting the song recorded was not easy, not even for Billie who was by then a rising star. Her record company Columbia refused to record it so she had to find a smaller independent label to put it to wax.
The song was released on Commodore Records in 1939 and managed to become a hit despite not being played on major radio stations. The song for many months could be heard only on late night radio.
Of course Strange Fruit had its many detractors and more supporters and throughout the forties it becomes the anthem for the anti-lynching movement.
Many great singers have covered the song, people like Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Cassandra Wilson and Diana Ross. It is a song that is still as haunting today as it was when it was first recorded.
After many years of protest lynching was banned in the US. It is believed that Strange Fruit with its haunting lyrics by Abel Meeropol and the powerful personal touch and voice of the great Billie Holiday was the song that motivated the change.
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