About Strange Fruit
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Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
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Snally G
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David Margolick, Strange Fruit:
Billy Holiday, Cafe Society, and
an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Running
Press)
Jack Foley
"It wasn't a pop hit," we learn in
David Margolick's book about the song, "Strange Fruit,"
"but black intellectuals were very much affected by it."
In this riveting account of a song which cut
across all sorts of boundaries (was it art? was it pop? was it
jazz? was it folk?) Margolick tells us that "Strange Fruit"
was honored at a celebration of music by black composers at the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1999. In addition, writes Margolick,
"Khallil Abdul Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan's notoriously anti-Semitic
disciple and maestro of the 'Million Man March,' has quoted it
in speeches assailing American racism--unaware, apparently, that
the song was written by a white Jewish schoolteacher from New
York City":
That schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, who wrote
under the pen name "Lewis Allan," had not written the
song for [Billie] Holiday; several others, including Meeropol's
wife, Anne, had sung it before her. And yet, so completely did
Holiday come to own "Strange Fruit" that Meeropol--who
is better remembered nowadays for adopting the orphaned sons of
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg following their parents' execution
than for his thousands of other songs and poems--spent half a
lifetime, starting with the moment the song became famous, reminding
people that it was really his creation, and his alone.
"I wrote 'Strange Fruit' because I hate
lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate
it," Meeropol--a political activist whom Margolick calls
a "closet Communist"-- said in 1971. Meeropol's occasional
collaborator, Earl Robinson--who himself wrote "Ballad for
Americans" and "Joe Hill"--admired Meeropol's "inexhaustible
ability to turn out topical lyrics." Meeropol "wrote
incessantly--poems, ballads, musicals, plays--all using the nom
de plume 'Lewis Allan,' the names of his two natural-born children,
neither of whom survived infancy." Apart from "Strange
Fruit," he is also known for his lyrics to "'The House
I Live In' (a paean to tolerance co-written by Earl Robinson and
sung by Frank Sinatra in a short film that won a special Oscar
in 1945)."
Meeropol produced "Strange Fruit"
in 1939, when Gone with the Wind was delighting American audiences
and when Billie Holiday--born April 7, 1915--was only twenty-four
years old. "But," cautions Margolick, "she had
already experienced enough prejudice and despair by then--including
time in a home for wayward black children, then in a whorehouse,
where she first heard the recordings of Bessie Smith and Louis
Armstrong--to call herself a 'race woman.'" In her autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday tries to foist off various bits
of misinformation about the song, including the assertion that
it was written for her. Challenged at one point, she is said to
have remarked, "Shit, man, I ain't never read that book"--though
her publisher apparently insisted that she "read and
sign every page of the manuscript."
When Meeropol first played the song for Holiday
at the progressive night club, Cafe Society, she was not overly
impressed. "I feel quite sure," Meeropol wrote later,
"that if Barney Josephson and Bob Gordon had not been so
impressed by the song, it may never have been sung by Billie Holiday
because it was so different from the usual genre of songs to which
she lent her unique voice." The Holiday whom Meeropol remembered
"was 'not communicative at all'...and...asked only one question
about the song: what did 'pastoral' mean?" Much later, Holiday
is asked the same question by Maya Angelou's son, Guy. Her answer
is searing:
It means when the crackers are killing the
niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and
snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That's
what it means.
Margolick's book is a short but wonderfully
complex evocation of the many contexts and lives Abel Meeropol's
song touched. Not everyone "liked" "Strange Fruit":
Paul Robeson felt the song portrayed blacks as victims, record
producer Jerry Wexler thought that "a lot of people who had
tin ears and who wouldn't know a melody if it hit them in the
head embraced the song only because of its politics." But
those who felt its power never forgot it. Strange Fruit is full
of wonderful descriptions of Holiday singing the song:
"The words told the story but her face
never reflected any emotion," he said. "You listened
to every word; it was like watching water drop slowly from a faucet.
It was as if she was singing 'Ave Maria' or 'Amazing Grace.'"
But perhaps the best way to end this paper
is simply to quote Meeropol's lyrics--words whose complexities
went further than their author ever envisioned. What the author
wrote is a little clunky, a little too "poetic." His
words lack wit; they are a little over the top. The rhymes are
obvious; no one would mistake them for Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter.
Indeed, Margolick points out that by the time the song was written
lynchings were no longer a major issue in the South.
Yet "Strange Fruit" thrusts us into
a reality which it seems barely possible for a mere "popular
song" to encompass. "The first phonograph recording
in America of a popular song that has lynching as its theme."
Was there ever a second such "popular song"? "Strange
Fruit" bent and stretched so many categories one can scarcely
keep count. A song with a line like "Black body swinging
in the Southern breeze" is almost impossible to sentimentalize.
Especially as it was sung by the incomparable, self-destructive
Billie Holiday, it acted upon its audiences with all the complexity
and enigma of disturbing, innovative, genuine art:
Billie Holiday, buxom blues singer at New York's
swank Cafe Society night club in Sheridan Square, is now heard
in what is believed to be the first phonograph recording in America
of a popular song that has lynching as its theme.
--The New York Age, a black-owned weekly, June,
1939
She didn't sing anything unless she had lived
it.
--Tony Bennett on Billie Holiday
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