When Billie Holiday (1915-1959) started popularizing Strange Fruit , her mother asked her, "Why do you mean that way?" The daughter replied: "Because it can improve things." "But it will kill you," Sarah warned her. To which the singer sentenced: “Yes, but I can feel it. In my grave I will know. " The first time singing it almost cost her life was in 1944, when a military man called her a nigger ( nigger , in slang) after a performance. The artist, red with anger and with tears in her eyes, smashed a beer bottle against a table and pounced on him with the sharp remains of glass at the ready. Dorian Lynskey recounts it in 33 revolutions per minute. History of the protest song(Misstep). On another occasion it may well be said that it cost him prison: "Singing that song has not helped me in the least," Holiday lamented in Down Beat magazine in 1947. "I sang it at the Earle Theater until I was forced to stop." . The following day, the FBI Federal Narcotics Office detained her on charges that led to a year in prison. She never believed it was a fluke.
PODCAST: The anti-racist song that cost Billie Holiday prison
But what was it about that song that made white people so uncomfortable? The letter did not insult the dominant supremacy nor did it make any protest about the oppression in which blacks lived. She did something worse: she crudely described the vomiting scene that remained after the lynching of two colored men, to the point of exciting the smells of the scene and drawing the wild grimace of the corpses: “From the trees in the south hangs a strange fruit. / Blood on the leaves and blood on the root. / Black bodies swaying in the southern breeze. / (…) The bulging eyes and the crooked mouth. / Aroma of magnolias, sweet and fresh, / and the sudden smell of burned meat. / Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, / (...) for the sun to rot, for the trees to release it. / This is a strange and bitter harvest ”.
Not that the text looked like a photograph, it was. The song had been created in 1938 by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high school teacher, and was limited to reproducing a press snapshot of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 90 years ago. In those days, lynchings did not occur, but were celebrated. These were premeditated events and not the result of an outburst by one or several offended parties who, clandestinely, took justice into their own hands. This and many other details of the historical context are read in With Billie Holiday. A choral biography by Julia Blackburn, which quotes journalist and writer HL Mencken: "[In the southern United States] lynchings took the place of merry-go-round, theater, symphony orchestra, and other common entertainment." Such was the savagery that buses were chartered to provide the public, sets were encouraged and even postcards of the result were edited as souvenirs.
Meeropol first popularized his composition in his microworld of almost clandestine meetings with philo-communists, where his wife was in charge of singing it. But one day in 1939 the author saw the opportunity to show it to Barney Josephson, owner of the Café Society in New York where Billie Holiday began to reign; The latter asked him to try it out on the piano in private with the teacher and the artist agreed, not without initial misgivings, since the subject is especially dull. But he understood the profound message and made it his own to the point of releasing it a few days later. Those who first heard her sing Strange Fruit on that night in March 1939 were petrified. And then applaud with the zeal imprinted by rage.
Many promoters preferred that she skip the song in favor of the more conventional part of her jazz repertoire, but she defended herself against the veto by including the right to sing it in her contracts. In fact, being a chilling theme and not suitable for a party finale, I used to interpret it to close the show, just as Josephson devised. That first night he sang it in his cafe, the businessman arranged a ritual at the height of the chill he was looking for: the waiters stopped serving between the tables, all the lights in the room went out and only she was seen, under a cold overhead focus, with her magnolia in her hair and singing undaunted. In other gambling dens they removed the tobacco packs from the tables to avoid the glare of the cigarettes.
Rewinding: The Other Lynching
- Side B of the single: Fine And Mellow (Commodore Records).
- Year: 1939.
- United States Sales Lists: Number 4.
- Billie Holiday never attended a lynching, but surely her own was enough. Before becoming famous, she sang in the Artie Shaw Orchestra, made up of whites. On the 1938 southern tour, the singer couldn't sleep in her peers' hotel — if there was no black hotel, she slept in the car — and she couldn't use public toilets in bars, either. In New York it did not fare any better: she went in and out through the kitchen of the Lincoln Hotel, and during breaks she could not stay in the living room, but had to wait in a crack until the next pass arrived. Plus? A radio show hired Shaw's orchestra to liven up the hours, but the sponsoring brand refused to let her sing because she was black. Holiday had to hand that job over to Helen Forrest, a mellow white voice.
She always continued singing Strange Fruit - although less and less - until on July 17, 1959 the complaining voice singer died young (due to cirrhosis), at the age of 44, as her mother had warned her. But the daughter was also correct: 61 years later, her fetish theme has reemerged as the anthem of America's racial protests. And Billie Holiday has been able to feel it from her grave. —Eps