Music/Society Modern Wrld (W2)

Cardozo School of Law

Performance as a Force for Change: The Case of Billie Holiday and "Strange Fruit" Author(s): David Margolick Source: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer, 1999), pp. 91-109 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27670205 . Accessed: 23/09/2011 14:36

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Performance as a Force for Change: The Case ofBillie Holiday

and "Strange Fruit"*

David Margolick

When Richard Weisberg first approached me about speaking here, I told him I had no business participating in a seminar on Law and

Literature. I dont write about the former much these days and I'm no

authority on the latter. And when I looked over the day's program, I was only fortified in that belief. He then asked what I was working on,

and when I told him that I was completing a short book on Billie

Holiday and the famous anti4ynching anthem "Strange Fruit," a

topic

Fd recently written about for Vanity Fair, he said something like

"Perfect!" Which goes to prove one or two

things: first? that even a

law professor can be a great advocate; and second, that the Law and

Literature movement, like the Republican Party, is indeed a

big tent.

If I struggle a bit I can find a few connections between the story I

will tell and the world lawyers inhabit. One is that songwriters and

singers, like lawyers, wield the mighty force of words, and that when a

few choice words are put together and presented in a compelling fash

ion, they can be enormously powerful. Sometimes,

as is the case here,

a song can anticipate a

legal revolution. Also, songwriters and per

formers, like lawyers ? or

journalists, for that matter ? tell stories.

They must communicate quickly, succinctly, directly. If they dawdle,

they fail. When a composer and a performer

? in this case an. obscure

New York City schoolteacher and perhaps the most famous female

vocalist of the century -?

combine to tell a truth that needs telling,

they can move mountains. Then, too, I seem to recall that "story

telling" is a great topic of discussion among Law and Literature types.

And the story of "Strange Fruit" is, at least to me, a great one,

A "historic document," the famed songwriter "Yip" Harburg once

* This article is a shortened version of a book called Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Caf? Society, and Americas First Protest Song,

to be published bv Running Press in early 2000.

91

called "Strange Fruit." The late jazz writer Leonard Feather called it

"the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry

against racism." To Bobby Short, the song was

"very, very pivotal,"

helping to move the tragedy of lynching from the black newspapers

into the white consciousness. "When you think of the South and Jim

Crow, you naturally think of the song, not of 'We Shall Overcome,'"

said Studs Terkel. Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary record producer, has

called "Strange Fruit," which dates from 1939, "a declaration of war...

the beginning of the Civil Rights movement."

Coming out the same year as Gone With the Wind, a film that

embodied contemporary condescension toward blacks and black per

formers, the song "almost single-handedly changed the politics of

American black culture and put the elements of protest and resistance

back at the center of contemporary black musical culture," Angela Davis has written. Sixty years after it

was first sung, jazz musicians still

speak of "Strange Fruit" with a mixture of awe and fear. "When she

recorded it, it was more than revolutionary," the drummer Max Roach

said of Holiday. "She made a statement that we all felt as black folks.

No one was speaking out. She became one of the fighters, this beauti

ful lady who could sing and make you feel things. She became a voice

of black people and they loved this woman." Such is "Strange Fruits"

enduring power, though, that to this day it is performed almost ginger

ly. "It's like rubbing people s noses in their own shit," Mal Waldron, the

pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years, has said.

Like any revolutionary act, "Strange Fruit" encountered great resis

tance. Holiday (like the black folksinger Josh White, who also per formed it) was abused, sometimes physically, by irate nightclub

patrons. Columbia Records, Holidays label in the late 30s, refused to

record it; even progressive radio stations would not

play it. And, again like revolutionary acts, the song has generated its fair share of mythol

ogy, none more enduring than Holiday's oft-uttered claim that she

partly wrote it herself or had it written for her.

"Strange Fruit" marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by

others, in Holiday's evolution from exuberant jazz singer to chanteuse

of lovelorn pain and loneliness. Once she began to

sing it, some of the

92

song's sadness seemed to

cling to her. In its own small way, it might

have helped propel her along the downward spiral her life became.

Surely it did not win her any friends in high places who might have

helped when her life fell into a pit of substance abuse and brushes with the law. "I've made lots of enemies, too," she told Down Beat m 1947.

"Singing that ["Strange Fruit"] hasn't helped any." After many years in which musicians were either too intimidated by

Holiday's lengthy shadow or too

politically timid to try the song, many

have recorded it. The song continues to pop up elsewhere, too. The

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of African Americans in the postbel lum South, Leon Litwack, uses it in his classes. Its what Mickey

Rourke puts on the turntable to seduce Kim Basinger a few days into

the film 9^2 Weeks (predictably, it failed miserably as mood music). Khalil Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan's notoriously anti-Semitic disci

ple, likes to quote it in speeches cataloguing Americas racist past

?

unaware, apparently, that it was written by

a Bronx Jew named Abel

Meeropol, a.k.a., Lewis Allan, better remembered today for raising, with his wife Anne, the two orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius

Rosenberg.

* * #

Billie Holiday was only 24 years old in 1939 but had already expe rienced enough racism

to call herself a "race woman." Though her

hard knocks helped her infuse a

unique mixture of resilience, defiance,

and shrewdness into the often banal lyrics she sang, they had never

influenced her choice of material, at least until "Strange Fruit" came

along.

Holidays "autobiography" ? written by William Dufty and

known, like the later film biography, as Lady Sings the Blues ? offers

an account of "Strange Fruit's" origins that may set a new record for

most misinformation per column inch. I count four or five mistakes.

("Shit, man, I never read that book," she later said.) But in fairness to

Dufty ?

who insists that Holiday read every page, in part to placate the anxious libel lawyers

at Doubleday, publishers of the book

?

93

Holiday herself had been peddling much of the mythology for years. "The germ of the song was in a poem by Lewis Allen [sic]," claims

the book. "When he showed me that poem, I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop. [As Holiday told the story, her father, exposed

to poison gas

as a soldier during World

War I, died of pneumonia in 1937 after several segregated Southern

hospitals refused to treat him.] Allen had heard how Pop died and of course was interested in my singing. He suggested that Sonny White,

who had been my accompanist, and I turn it into music. So the three

of us got together and did the job in about three weeks."

Meeropol recalled things very differently. An English teacher at

DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 27 years, he had led two

other, parallel lives. One was as a

political activist: he and his wife

were closet Communists. The F.B.I, maintained that he had belonged to the Party until 1947, though Hoover's men followed him for 23

years after that. The other was as a poet and songwriter. Meeropol had

what Earl Robinson, the man who wrote "Ballad for Americans" and

"Joe Hill," called "an inexhaustible ability to turn out topical lyrics." He wrote incessantly

? poems, ballads, musicals, plays, all using the

nom de plume "Lewis Allan," the names of his two natural-born chil

dren, neither of whom survived infancy. Most of his work was quick

ly forgotten and now sits in dusty heaps

at Boston University. Apart from "Strange Fruit," he is best known for writing the lyrics

to "The

House I Live In," a paean to tolerance sung by Frank Sinatra in an

Oscar-winning short subject in 1945.

Lynchings ? which saw blacks murdered with unspeakable brutal

ity, often in a carnival-like atmosphere, then hung from trees for all to

see ? were rampant in the South following the Civil War and for

many years afterwards. According to

figures kept by the Tuskegee Institute

? conservative figures

? between 1882 and 1950 3,436

blacks were lynched. The numbers gradually declined; only three

lynchings took place in 1939. Still, a survey taken that year revealed

that more than six in ten Southerners thought lynchings justified in

cases of sexual assault. That same year saw the NAACP continuing its

long campaign for a Federal anti-lynching law, something it

never

94

managed to procure. Though

most lynchings took place in the South,

by no means all of them did. Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that

what inspired Meeropol to write "Strange Fruit"

was a double lynch

ing in 1930 that took place north of the Mason-Dixon line, in Marion,

Indiana, which was immortalized in a particularly horrific and widely

reprinted photograph. In any case, Meeropol,

a man of about 30 at the time, came across

such a photograph. "It haunted me for days," he later recalled. So he

wrote a poem about it:

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.

Bastoral 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.

The poem was originally to have appeared in the Communist journal

The New Masses but first saw print as "Bitter Fruit" in the January

1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union publication.

Meeropol often asked others to set his poems to music. But with

"Strange Fruit," he insisted on

doing the task himself. In the late 30s

the song was regularly performed in left wing circles: by MeeropoPs

wife, by left wing friends at gatherings in Catskills hotels and bunga low colonies, by members of the Teachers Union arts committee, by

a

black singer named Laura Duncan (once at Madison Square Garden),

by a quartet of black singers

at a fundraiser for the anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, Holiday's version

was very different

from the one originally offered by Meeropol's left wing confreres. One

95

of the more unusual critiques of "Strange Fruit" that I heard came

from an elderly man named Martin Brin, who had actually performed

the song before Holiday had. To him, Holiday's version was too lan

guid, too deliberate, sounding,

as he put it, slightly negatively, "too

much like jazz." "We sang it with a sort of a zip, with punch," he said.

As it happened, the co-producer of the show at Madison Square

Garden, Robert Gordon, was also directing the first floor show at the

new Caf? Society, which had opened in December 1938. The featured

attraction: Billie Holiday, who had just quit Artie Shaw's band in part

because she'd been forced to take the freight elevator during a

gig at a

New York hotel. And not just any hotel, but one named Abraham

Lincoln.

* * *

Caf? Society ?

"a nightclub to take the stuffing

out of stuffed

shirts," where left wing W.P.A. types did the murals and a simian-look

ing Hitler hung from the ceiling by the coat check

? was unusual

even for New York City. Dubbing itself "the wrong place for the Right

people," it mocked the empty celebrity worship, right wing politics, and racial discrimination of popular hangouts like the Stork Club. It

was a place where the doormen

wore rags and ragged white gloves. It

was also New York's only integrated nightclub, where blacks and white

fraternized on stage and off. Its politics were somewhere left of the

New Deal; when Eleanor Roosevelt made what might have been her

only foray into a New York nightclub, it

was to Caf? Society she went.

Located off Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village and commemo

rated in mosaic murals in the Sheridan Square subway stop, it was the

brainchild of Barney Josephson, a shoe salesman with leftist sympa

thies; its patrons, the historian David Stowe has written, consisted of

"labor leaders, intellectuals, writers, jazz lovers, celebrities, students,

and assorted leftists." As Michael Denning of Yale has put it, Caf?

Society represented a

unique synthesis of cultures, blending the polit

ically radical cabarets of Weimar-era Berlin and Paris with the jazz clubs and revues of Harlem. Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin,

96

Errol Flynn, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, and

Paul Robeson hung out there; Lena Home, Teddy Wilson, Sarah

Vaughan, Imogene Coca, Carol Channing, and Zero Mostel per

formed there. It was probably the only place in America where

"Strange Fruit" could have been sung and savored.

According to

Meeropol ?

who had never met Holiday and appar

ently knew nothing about her father ?

Josephson and Gordon had

asked him in early 1939 to bring "Strange Fruit" to the new nightclub. "A young man came in one evening with

a song and he showed it to

me," Josephson told British documentary filmmaker John Jeremy in

1983. "So I read the lyrics, and I was just floored by them. I said, 'What do you want to do with this?' He said, T would love to have

Billie do this song.'"

Shortly thereafter Meeropol sat down at Caf? Society's piano and

played Holiday the song. Neither Tin Pan Alley

nor jazz, it

was utter

ly alien to her, and she appeared unimpressed. "To be perfectly frank,

I didn't think she felt comfortable with the song," Meeropol later

wrote. Holiday

was "not communicative at all," he remembered, and

had asked only one

question: what did the word "pastoral" mean?

Josephson too maintains that Holiday "didn't know what the hell

the song meant" and sang it originally only as a favor to him. "She

looked at me after she'd finished and said 'What do you want me to do

with that, man?' and I said, 'It would be wonderful if you'd sing it. If

you care to. You don't have to.' And she said, 'You wants me to sing it? I sings it.' And she sang it." Only several months later, Josephson

recalled, when he spotted a tear

running down her cheek during one

performance, did he feel she had really grasped its meaning. "I gotta

tell you the truth," he liked to tell people years after, "she sang it just

as well when she didn't know what it was about."

That seems harsh and patronizing. To be sure, Holiday was in some

ways unsophisticated, famous for reading nothing more serious than

comic books. But as Meeropol later described it, Holiday sang

"Strange Fruit" with conviction and understanding from the very

beginning. "She gave a

startling, most dramatic and effective inter

pretation, which could jolt an audience out of its complacency any

97

wheres," he wrote of her debut. "Billie Holiday's styling of the song was incomparable and fulfilled the bitterness and shocking quality I had hoped the song would have. The audience gave her

a tremendous

ovation."

Barry Ulanov, a

jazz scholar who heard Holiday sing "Strange Fruit"

while he was a student at Columbia, suggested a third alternative,

somewhere between the other two: Holiday understood the song but

was uncomfortable with it, and was uncomfortable that others were

pressuring her to

sing something that made her uncomfortable. That

she sang it with such ferocity, he speculated, reflected both what the

song said and what she wanted to say herself: if you want to hear

about lynching, I'm really going to

give it to you. "She was not out

there simply making a social or political plea," Ulanov said, "she

was

saying something in her own

complex way." Caf? Society supposedly catered

to progressive types with open

minds. But as Holiday wrote in her autobiography,

even there she was

afraid to sing "Strange Fruit" and regretted it ? at least momentarily

? when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I

finished," she later said. "Then a lone person began to

clap nervous

ly. Then suddenly everybody was

clapping." Whatever her initial discomfort, she quickly laid claim to the song,

telling audiences that it had been written especially for her, and resent

ing anyone else ?

like Josh White ?

who dared to sing it. White once

wrote that Holiday wanted "to cut my throat" for performing it, and at

least according to one story, that was literally true: it is said that Holiday

came by Caf? Society one night looking for him, and charged into his

dressing room with a knife, which she held to his throat. "Billie, we

should be singing this song until we never have to be singing it again,"

he told her. "We shouldn't be fighting about it." She agreed.

Josephson, who called the song "agitprop," decreed elaborate stage directions for each performance of "Strange Fruit." Holiday

was to

close each of her three nightly sets with it. Before she began, all service

was to cease. Waiters, cashiers, busboys ? all were immobilized. The

room went completely dark,

save for a pin spot on

Holidays face. No

matter how thunderous the ovation, she was never to return for a bow.

98

"My instruction was to walk off, period," Josephson later said. "People

had to remember 'Strange Fruit,5 get their insides burned with it."

I should note parenthetically that as often as Josephson recounted

this story, it is not beyond dispute. Haywood Hale Broun, then a stu

dent at Swarthmore, later the longtime reporter at CBS News, insists

that Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" in the middle of the set. "After we'd

ooed and ahed in our kind of liberal way, the band would hit a sharp chord and then go into 'Them There Eyes,'" he told me. "This always broke the mood. I thought this

was weak of him ? to come back to

'hey, we're really just a nightclub and this is one of those happy black

songs.' There's no doubt of Barneys radicalism, but there's consider

able doubt of his heroism." But this seems to be the minority view.

To many, Andy Razaf s "Black and Blue," written in 1929 and

immortalized by Louis Armstrong, was the first black protest song

aimed at a largely white audience. White songwriters approached civil

rights tentatively; Irving Berlin referred obliquely to lynching in

"Suppertime" (a song Ethel Waters made famous) but before Meeropol and Holiday

came along,

no one had ever confronted the subject so

directly.

People began requesting the song, and it became part of Holiday's

routine, even though she said it made her sick to

perform it. Soon,

Caf? Society began advertising not

just Holiday ?

referred to in con

temporary press accounts as the "buxom, colored songstress" or "the

sepian songstress" ? but the song itself. "HAVE YOU HEARD

'Strange Fruit growing on Southern trees' sung by Billie Holiday?",

an

advertisement in The New Yorker asked in March 1939. Harper's Bazaar heralded Holiday

as "a high priestess of swing" and touted "a

new song in her repertoire that has to do with lynching, 'Strange Fruit

Grows on Tropical Trees.'"

But Holiday's longtime producer, John Hammond, didn't much like

the song and Columbia, apparently fearful of antagonizing Southern

customers, wanted no part of recording it. So Holiday convinced Milt

Gabler of Commodore Records, a small left wing company run out of

a music store on East 42nd Street, to do it instead. This they did, on

April 20, 1939, in a studio at 5th Avenue and 55th Street in Midtown

99

Manhattan. "Fine and Mellow" went on the flipside and became

another of Holiday's most famous songs. (But for a quirk of fate, the

flipside might have been a song called "Swing, Black Man, Swing"

?

surely a poor complement

to an anti-lynching song.)

At a dollar a piece, Commodore's 10 inch records went for three

times the going rate of most other records. Concerned that customers

would feel cheated by too short a cut, Gabler had the pianist Sonny

White improvise his now familiar, haunting overture; given the song's

climactic verse, one could hardly tack on

anything at the end.

Billie Holiday might have been only 24 years old at the time she

made the record, but hers is the voice of wisdom and experience. She

is grim and purposeful, yet still with a lovely lightness to her. The

overt editorializing is minimal; there is no

weepiness, no histrionics.

Her elocution is superb, with a hint of a Southern accent; her tone is

somehow languorous but unflinching, raw yet smooth, youthful yet

worldly. The prevailing sentiment is not

grief but contempt,

detectable as she spits out references to Southern gallantry and the

sweet scent of the magnolias. But the intensity mounts until she

reaches the word "crop," which dangles for a time back and forth on a

strangely unresolved note like the dead man on the branch. "It never

slobbers," G?nther Schuller has written. Or, as Ned Rorem put it,

"She just sings it. She doesn't make grand opera out of it, the way

Barbara Streisand would."

Gabler gave Holiday $500 for the four sides, plus a thousand dol

lars later. How much she eventually earned for the songs he could not

say. "We used to give her cash, especially when she was in trouble,

right out of the cash register in the store," he said. "We

never really

kept a record of it."

Meeropol, who had failed to

copyright "Strange Fruit" because he

"never thought it was a commercial song," learned it had been record

ed only when a friend brought him

a disc. After protesting, he ulti

mately got standard royalties: two cents per record, one for the words,

another for the music. At least initially, Meeropol collected more

grief from "Strange Fruit" than receipts. During

a 1941 state probe of

Communist "subversion" in New York's public schools, he was asked

100

whether the Communist Party had ever paid him for the song or if he'd donated the song to the Party. He denied any connection. The pen

nies mounted: over six decades the Meeropols, father and sons, even

tually earned more than $300,000 from it.

"Strange Fruit" made it to number 16 on the charts in July 1939,

and was widely publicized, particularly in the left wing press; The New

Masses called it "the first successful attempt of white men to write

blues." But remarkably, it made it into the mainstream press, too. In

a piece entitled "Strange Record," Time described "Strange Fruit"

as "a

prime piece of musical propaganda for the NAACP," and printed the

first verse of what it called "Allans grim and gripping lyrics." ("Billie

Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her

voice," the article began. "She does not care

enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.") Josephson later claimed that

the picture of Holiday that accompanied the piece was one of the first

of an African-American ever to run in the magazine. But surely the

most extravagant praise came from Samuel Grafton,

a columnist for The New York Post. He called it "a fantastically perfect work of art, one which reversed the usual relationship between

a black

entertainer and her white audience: '"I have been entertaining you,' she seems to say, now you just listen

to me.' The polite conversation

between race and race are gone. It is as if we heard what was spoken in the cabins, after the night riders had clattered by."

"If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the

South," he concluded, "it now has its Marseillaise."

Proponents of Federal anti-lynching legislation urged that copies of

the song be sent to Congress. And within a few years "Strange Fruit"

became the title of Lillian Smith's famous 1944 anti-segregation novel.

By October 1939, The New York Sun was describing Holiday and the

song as "practically inseparable." Still, jazz purists never liked "Strange

Fruit," nor what they thought it did to Holiday. More famously, John Hammond, who discovered Holiday

as a teenager and produced her

records at Columbia, called the song "artistically the worst thing that

ever happened

to her" and "the beginning of the end for Billie... when

she had become the darling of the left wing intellectuals." To him,

101

Holiday has simply gone too serious, mannered, self-important.

Holiday normally sang "Strange Fruit" only in politically congenial

places. These were

largely certain neighborhoods in New York:

Greenwich Village, Harlem, Union Square, where she sang it on May

Day, 1941. Occasionally she took it on the road. But even in ostensi

bly safe locales, the song wasn't always well received. Josephson recalled

a time when a Southern woman, traumatized by memories of a

lynch

ing she once witnessed, followed Billie into her dressing

room and tried

to tear off her dress. Some other New York clubs refused to let Holiday

sing the song, prompting her to

specify by contract that she could per

form it if she chose. A patron at Jimmy Ryan's on West 52nd Street

once requested it, only

to see Holiday come back afterwards almost in

tears. "Did you hear that bartender ringing the cash register all

through?", she asked him. "He always does that when I sing." In her autobiography, Holiday recalled the time

a woman in Los

Angeles asked her to

sing "that sexy song she was so famous for

? you

know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees." Another

time, at a club outside Los Angeles (where Lana Turner regularly asked

her to perform it), a young white man hurled racial epithets

at her.

"After two shows of this I was ready to

quit," she later recalled. "I

knew if I didn't, the third time round I might bounce something off

that cracker and land in some San Fernando ranch-type jail." Instead

Bob Hope, who was at the club with Judy Garland, badgered the heck

ler until he left.

Holiday told one newspaper that she was driven out of Mobile,

Alabama, for trying to

sing it. That may be true ? Holiday did, in

fact, sing in Mobile ?

but she made few Southern tours and there's

little evidence she sang "Strange Fruit" very often when she did.

Stories of jukeboxes carrying "Strange Fruit" down South being smashed seem fanciful, if only because Commodore records didn't

cir

culate that far, though the song did make it into Southern PX's patron

ized by black G.I.'s during World War II. But claims that "Strange Fruit" was banned on the radio are not hard to believe. Radio stations

played few records then, and rarely anything controversial. "WNEW

[in New York] has been trying to get up the courage to allow Billie

102

Holiday, singing at Caf? Society, to render the anti-lynching song

?

'Strange Fruit Growing on the Trees Down South'

? on one of the

night spot's regular broadcasts," The New York Post reported

in

November 1939. "Station turned thumbs down a week ago, but

approved the number for last night's airing. Then it said 'no' again,

but has agreed to let Billie sing it tonight

at 1 o'clock." The song was

also banned on the BBC.

One must not exaggerate the reach "Strange Fruit" originally had,

at least outside Greenwich Village left wing literati. "Most Middle

American white swing fans never heard it and went on discovering

Glenn Miller instead," Schuller has written. Among blacks too the

song reverberated mostly among the intelligentsia. In the black news

papers, even in Harlem, references to the song were rare, muted,

strangely off key. "By all means get a load of [Holiday's] recording of

'Strange Fruit,'" The Amsterdam News urged in July 1939, "and

although you'd never guess from the title, it is a swell bit of propagan

da against lynching." To Albert Murray, the eminent historian of the

blues, the song was principally a

phenomenon among white "do-good ers." "You don't celebrate New Year's over chittlins and Champagne

with 'Strange Fruit,'" he said. "You don't get next to someone

playing

'Strange Fruit.' Who the hell wants to go hear something that reminds

them of a lynching?" But Holiday did sing the song for black audi ences. Several times, she sang it at the famed Apollo Theater in

Harlem. Jack Schiffman, whose family ran the Apollo said his father

did not want Holiday to

perform it there, fearing disturbances. But in

his memoirs, Schiffman described what happened when she finally did. "When she wrenched the final words from her lips, there

was not

a soul in that audience, black or white, who did not feel half-stran

gled," he wrote. "A moment of oppressively heavy silence followed,

and then a kind of rustling sound I had never heard before. It was the

sound of almost two thousand people sighing." For a time, with every indignity Holiday suffered, her passion for

the song seemed to grow. In 1944, for instance, she lost a

gig in St.

Louis for fraternizing with a white man. The Amsterdam News report

ed that the experience highlighted "why [Holiday] sings 'Strange Fruit'

103

with so much fervor and smoldering hatred in her eyes." Actress Billie

Allen Henderson recalled how, during the singers appearance at

Birdland in 1952, the maitre'd actually confiscated all cigarettes before

Holiday began. "I was trying to be sophisticated and all of a sudden

something stabs me in the solar plexus and I

was gasping for air," she

told me. "It was so deeply felt. I understood it. I understood it. I

could smell the burning flesh; I felt it. She was... 'unrelenting' is

a

good word for it. Some didn't know how to react.

They weren't quite sure. Nobody stirred. It

was startling, and I'll

never forget it. I

thought, 'that's what art can do.'"

Dempsey Travis, a former jazz musician and author of several books,

heard a decrepit, dissipated Holiday sing it several times on

Chicago's South Side. "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.'"

The song's popularity extended to

Europe, where she performed it

several times. "It was appreciated much more abroad than in the

United States," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied

Holiday toward the end of her life and now lives in Belgium. "Everyone

was very angry with the Americans for treating blacks like

that." But "Strange Fruit" proved just as

unsettling overseas, at least if

Meeropol's attempt at

recording a version of the song in French is any

indication. "Although I have shown 'Etrange Fruit' to many French

performers, it has not been possible

to have a recording scheduled on

your tune," a Parisian song publisher wrote

Meeropol. For one

thing, he explained, the song

was "frankly anti-American." Moreover, the

man continued, "with all the troubles the French are currently having with colored people in Indochina and North Africa, I do not think it

will be possible to get a major recording."

Over time, Holiday seems to have performed the song with less fre

quency. Partly it was the climate of the times. In the 50s, the coun

try was no longer in the mood to hear shrill songs of social protest.

"Strange Fruit" seemed to live on only in recordings and in the

"People's Songbook," put together by Pete Seeger and others, from

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which a few thousand Red Diaper babies faithfully learned the lyrics. True, Josh White continued to sing it, but largely before sympa

thetic audiences of college students or left wing intellectuals. As

a

young man, Shelby Foote, later the famous Civil War historian, heard

him sing it at Caf? Society. Though he agreed with its sentiment, Foote, a son of the South, found the song a bit heavy-handed

? "I

resented the utter caricature of it," he recalled ?

and afterwards, when

he ran into White in the men's room, he poked fun at him a bit. "I

said, 'I enjoyed that. You ought to come down to Mississippi and sing

that.' It was a cruel thing to

say." White, he recalled, looked at him

as if he were crazy. "Man, you must be joking," the singer told him.

For his troubles, White was branded a Communist and forced to

explain himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

"Why shouldn't a

Negro artist ?

and for that matter any decent per son ? raise his voice against lynching?," he asked the Committee,

before reciting the song's lyrics. "My records of this song have sold

big," he said. "If they helped make my fellow Americans more aware

of the evil, I am pleased." But always, he said, he took

care to follow it with Meeropol's ode to

America, "The House I Live In." And when he went to Europe ?

for

instance, on a goodwill tour with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950

? he

refused to perform it ? even

though, to his amazement and annoy

ance, he'd discovered it was the only one of his records people seemed

to know or ever asked him to sing. "It's one

thing to

complain of

lynching in America, where your listeners know that it does not detract

from your loyalty and love for your country," he said. "It seemed to

me quite another to complain of it abroad, where the listeners might

think it's the whole story." At home ten years later, White still had trouble performing the

song. Indeed, the very prospect petrified the producers of the old folk

show "Hootenanny," as White discovered when he told them he

planned to

sing it. "They started coughing, sweating, and turning red,

and in unison said, 'No! You can't sing that! What else can you sing?'"

recalled one eyewitness. White realized he could go on the air, or he

could sing "Strange Fruit." He could not do both.

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Holiday's last lawyer, Earle Zaidins, watched her perform numerous

times in her final years, and said he never heard her sing it at all. By

then, he speculated, the fight had gone out of her; she had grown tired,

and was too busy holding herself together to wage any more crusades

for anybody else. At times, though, as in a famous televised concert in

London shortly before she died, she performed it. Haggard, largely wasted away, clearly

near the end she was, oddly enough, better suited

to capture the full grotesqueness of the imagery; by then she not only

sang of bulging eyes and twisted mouths, but embodied them.

Sometimes, she would sing the song to

punish audiences, to chas

ten them for their inattentiveness. "She would get herself together to

do that one," Mal Waldron told me. "The others were kind of natur

al tunes and she would spin them off the way she talked. This one was

special. She had to do preparation for this one."

One of Holiday's most unusual later renditions of the song is

described by Maya Angelou in "Heart of a Woman." Angelou

recounts how, during a visit to Los Angeles in 1958,

a year before her

death, Holiday, her voice by then dry and hoarse, sang it to her young

son, Guy. At one

point, the boy interrupted her. "What's a

pastoral scene, Miss Holiday?" he asked. Holiday, Angelou relates, "looked up

slowly and studied Guy for a second. Her face became cruel, and

when she spoke her voice was scornful. '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 goddamn throat.

That's what it mean.... That's what they do. That's a

goddamn pas

toral scene."

Thirteen years after Holiday's death came

Lady Sings the Blues, the

movie, whose fictions were far more egregious than anything Holiday ever

managed to cook up. The 1972 film shows Diana Ross as

Holiday encountering a

lynching while touring the South; stricken by what she sees, she adopts

a laser-like, all-knowing look ?

the look,

presumably, of lyrics taking shape. The chords of "Strange Fruit" then

sound. A song is born. Ross's take on the song is tinny and utterly

unconvincing. Its only virtue lies in illustrating the conviction with

which Holiday sang it. But far more

objectionable than Ross's limit

106

ed vocal gifts is the censorship. Ross, it turns out, sings only

a trun

cated version of the song, shorn of all its most powerful images; the

entire second verse and two lines of the third are cut. Nearly forty

years after the song was first performed, then, Hollywood evidently

thought that audiences were still not ready for it. Meeropol received

$4,500 for having his work raped. Meeropol developed Alzheimer's disease in the mid-80s; his eldest

son played "Strange Fruit" for him in the nursing home, and when the

record got too scratchy, he sang it to him. Even after the old man

stopped recognizing anyone, he seemed to recognize the song, and

perked up when he did. When Meeropol died in 1986, "Strange Fruit" was sung at the memorial service. But it was still too sensitive

to play

on the radio, at least in Durham, North Carolina. Around this

time, a disk jockey there came across a collection of Billie Holiday

standards in the station's library. "Strange Fruit" was circled, with the

admonitions "WATCH" and "DO NOT PLAY" printed nearby. This timidity pops up elsewhere. When Robert Meeropol, Abel's

younger son, flew on United Airlines a couple of years ago, he noticed

that Cassandra Wilson's album "New Moon Daughter" was among the

in-flight entertainment, but that its first cut ?

"Strange Fruit" ? was

conspicuously missing. Meantime, his father had been largely forgot ten. "One Lewis Allen [sic] is cited as the author of 'Strange Fruit,'

but did he compose both words and music?", Ned Rorem wrote in The

New York Times in 1995, nine years after Meeropol's death. "Indeed,

who was he? Was he black?" If "Strange Fruit"

was too political for the sleepy 50s, among

activists it proved too

sharp and pointed for the 60s. It seems that for

the young idealists of the civil rights era, the song was

simply too sour,

too depressing,

too bitter. I've yet to find any evidence that it mattered

much to Martin Luther King, for instance, or the volunteers of

S.N.C.C. Just as "Hair" fit the tenor of the times more than anything

by Odets or Blitzstein, it was "If I Had A Hammer" and "We Shall Overcome" and "This Little Light of Mine" that buoyed up the Freedom Riders and lunch counter protesters, not "Strange Fruit."

That, coupled with Holiday's hold over the song, was more than

107

enough to

discourage almost everyone else from performing it.

But in recent years, this has changed. Abbey Lincoln tackled

"Strange Fruit" on her 1987 album "Abbey Sings Billie." Eartha Kitt

performed it when she portrayed Billie Holiday in a one person show

in the 80s. Tori Amos recorded it a few years ago, taking care to do so

immediately after waking up at five thirty

one morning,

so that her

voice sounded appropriately raw. After shying away from it for many

years, Cassandra Wilson tackled it. So did Dee Dee Bridgewater, at

least for a time; the song soon proved simply too

emotionally taxing for her to sing.

In many ways, in many contexts, the song still carries a rhetorical

and metaphorical punch. Ward Connerly, a black member of the

University of California's board of regents who opposes racial prefer ences, took umbrage after Jesse Jackson described him as a "strange fruit." It even arose during the impeachment of President Clinton.

"It's a totally visceral reaction, but whenever I hear Trent Lott speak, I

immediately think of nooses

decorating trees," Karen Grigs by Bates

wrote in The Los Angeles Times. "Trent Lott speaks and those nooses

swing gently; Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' is a muted soundtrack."

The song's continuing potency explained why Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles cited it in

a dissenting opinion he

wrote in 1994.1

Reinhardt had tried unavailingly to convince his colleagues

on the

bench that execution by hanging did not meet

evolving societal stan

dards of decency, and was therefore unconstitutional. "To many

Americans, judicial hangings call forth the brutal images of Southern

justice immortalized in a song hauntingly sung by Billie Holiday," he wrote.

In small script, the number fourteen appears after that sentence, and

in that footnote, the full text of "Strange Fruit" appears. How many

songs make such appearances? That footnote reminds us of the power of words in the law, and how, on occasion, the law must reach outside

itself to convey its message most forcefully. Reinhardt realized that

nothing he or any other judge could have written would have the

impact of "Strange Fruit."

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"It's one of two or three songs that made the greatest impression on

me when I was young, and I never forgot it," Reinhardt told me. "If

I could have attached as an exhibit a recording of Billie Holiday

singing that song, I would have loved to have done it."

1 Campbell

v. Wood, 18 E3d 662, 701 (1994), dissenting opinion.

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