Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit'
PUSSSYKATT
Strange Fruit
By David Margolick
Running Press
144 pp.
List price: $16.95
__________________
More than 60 years after Billie Holiday's plaintive voice first exposed this
outcry against lynching, the song still stirs outrage and revulsion with its
stark depiction of horrific death spoiling a bucolic scene. The song, which
became Holiday's signature, is still approached with trepidation because of the
ugly feelings it evokes.
Yet the song Time named best of the 20th century has had a life of its own
without losing its dark power.
"There really is no other song like it," says David Margolick, who chronicles
it in Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil
Rights (Running Press, $16.95). "It still packs a punch because it hasn't been
worn down by repeated use. The Star-Spangled Banner is a very powerful song
when you consider its words, but people have mouthed them for so long that
nobody thinks about what they really mean. "
Holiday died in 1959, and the book's release this week coincides with what
would have been her 85th birthday Friday.
Strange Fruit was written by Abel Meeropool, a white, Jewish New York
schoolteacher with Communist leanings, under the name Lewis Allan. He wrote
thousands of other songs, the most famous being The House I Live In for a 1945
Oscar-winning short promoting racial tolerance and starring Frank Sinatra.
Meeropool and his wife, Anne, are best remembered for adopting the two orphaned
sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their executions in 1953.
Robert Meeropool says his adoptive father was a quiet man but an ardent
believer in social justice and civil rights. Many people assumed, sometimes
with Holiday's help, that she wrote Strange Fruit or had it written for her.
But Meeropool says that the song was his adoptive father's proudest achievement
.
Others sang Strange Fruit, including the songwriter's wife , but once the
24-year-old Holiday sang it one night in 1939 at Café Society - then the only
fully integrated nightclub in New York - the jazz singer made the song her own.
It was popular music's first real protest song and, as Margolick points out,
was released about the same time as the sweeping Civil War film Gone With the
Wind and Ella Fitzgerald's lighthearted and more socially palatable A
Tisket-A-Tasket.
Initially, the song was favored mainly by the left-wing crowd , but its
popularity soon spread . Still, it was despised by many blacks (including Paul
Robeson) and whites , though for opposite reasons. Many jazz critics hated it
for the impact it had on Holiday, who Margolick says "had a kind of buoyancy,
and that song took away from that. There's a real poignancy and sadness in her
stuff after that."
Because of Holiday's well-documented addictions and apparent lack of interest
in politics, it has been argued that she didn't truly understand what she was
singing.
"You've got conflicting interpretations about how she actually felt about the
song," Margolick says. He says that at times she regretted being unable to
escape the song, but it also became a personal statement that "expressed all of
her anger and bitterness about the way she had been treated."
Though the number of reported lynchings in 1939 was small compared with earlier
years , the crimes were imbedded in the nation's psyche and gave Holiday's
version an urgency overshadowing all others.
So much so that in 1972, the makers of Lady Sings the Blues edited the song
when Diana Ross sang it for the film. Ross sang it at Holiday's Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame induction this year.
Margolick devotes a good chunk of the book to public and private figures
discussing how the song's symbolism has been embraced by causes as diverse as
ending apartheid and protecting gay rights. He also talks to and about many of
the song's notable singers, including Nina Simone, Tori Amos, Dee Dee
Bridgewater, Natalie Merchant, Abbey Lincoln and Josh White.
Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson says she became aware of the song while growing up
in Mississippi, but it was many years before she felt ready "to deal with it."
She says Holiday's legacy was intimidating, but also a challenge, and by
singing it she explored her own emotions while paying tribute to Holiday.
Holiday always saved the song to end her show because it left the audience in
stunned silence.
That also has been Wilson's experience. "There really is no other place for
it," she says. "There is nothing else that can come after it."
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Jay H.
"DepressedGrl" <jewishpunkroc...@my-deja.com.invalid> wrote
in message news:2056a55c...@usw-ex0102-084.remarq.com...
STRANGE FRUIT
Lewis Allen
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Snapper
is so powerful it's absolutely haunting. You can hear it on the Verve Jazz
Masters #17.
GO8GO <go...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20000405231239...@ng-fw1.aol.com...
> Although the lyrics have been reproduced, nothing can do them justice like
> Billie Holliday's masterful performance. Her phrasings are crisp, her
> musicality extraordinary. The spareness in her interpetation is chilling
and
> when she sings the last word "crop", she makes it a howl of rage and pain.
GO8GO
Hedda Lice
>STRANGE FRUIT
>Lewis Allen
>
>Southern trees bear strange fruit,
>Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
>Black bodies 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh,
>Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
>
>Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
>For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
>For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
>Here is a strange and bitter crop.
>
Beautiful song, who has a problem with it and why do people think it is
controversial?
Have you ever seen the photos of a lynching? White people standing around a
burning black corpse, smiling like morons.
with <scratch> all <scratch> my <scratch> love,
Hedda