Six on History: Music
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"Jazz singer Billie Holiday was unequivocally a Civil Rights icon, but history doesn’t remember her as such.
As the first person to perform “Strange Fruit” on stage, Holiday, a Black woman, bravely sang about the lynching of Black people in America. The song was first recorded in 1939, in the midst of the Jim Crow era when racial terrorism was rampant. The song’s lyrics said it all:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Billie Holiday was known to battle with a heroin addiction, which caused her to be tracked and vilified by the feds, leading to her untimely death. But during the same era, white actors in Hollywood, like Judy Garland, openly battled with addiction but did not receive the same treatment. No doubt, racial bias has impacted the war on drugs, even to this day.
Director Lee Daniels brings Holiday’s story to life in The United States vs. Billie Holiday
In it, Holiday is powerfully portrayed by singer-songwriter Andra Day. The cast also includes Trevante Rhodes who plays Jimmy Fletcher, the Black FBI agent who tracked Holiday; Tyler James Williams as jazz musician Lester Young; Miss Lawrence who portrays Miss Freddy; Da’Vine Joy Randolph who is Roslyn; and Evan Ross as FBI agent Williams.""The first notes of the samba and the tango instantly capture ones attention, transporting the listener to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the River Plate in Argentina. Seen as national symbols for their respective countries, the samba and the tango are more than just popular musical and dance genres. A deeper dive into the development of these musical genres reveals a conflict between African slaves, indigenous people, and European migrants over musical identity and Latin American state formation.
Andreia Menezes, a linguistics and literature professor at the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil, joins us to explain how the samba and the tango transformed from the music of the socially marginalized to an important issue for national intellectuals."
- Andreia dos Santos Menezes Department of Linguistics, Literature, and Art at the Federal University of Sao Paulo
- Marcelo Jose DomingosDoctoral Candidate, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin
