'Strange Fruit': Still Haunting at 80

(cross posting from Editorials Forum)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016231283

There have been many works of art protesting America’s troubled history of race relations. Few are more powerful than “Strange Fruit.” One of the most haunting songs emanating from the heinous Jim Crow era, it was recorded 80 years ago by Billie Holiday and remains potent and piercing today. By the late 1930s, white mobs had lynched more than 3,000 African-Americans, murdering them with monstrous brutality before crowds of onlookers, terrorizing one community after another. This barbarity was so entrenched in the political life of the South that repeated attempts to pass a bill outlawing it were scuttled by Southern senators. (Despite the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, it wasn’t until 2018 that the Senate voted to make lynching a federal crime. The bill awaits action by the House of Representatives and the president.)

“Strange Fruit” wasn’t the first anti-lynching song. In 1933, Irving Berlin penned “Supper Time” for Ethel Waters to sing in his Broadway revue “As Thousands Cheer.” Stretching across gender and color lines, he wrote guarded lyrics voicing the feelings of a black wife and mother who has just lost her husband to a lynching. About this same time, Lawrence Gellert, an ex-New Yorker, was quietly making field recordings in the South of African-Americans singing protest songs, some of which decried lynching. So incendiary were these songs that the singers needed anonymity. A collection was published in 1936 as “Negro Songs of Protest,” and eventually, in the 1970s, Rounder Records issued his recordings. In 1937, a Bronx high-school teacher, Abel Meeropol, a Communist, wrote a graphic, disturbing poem against the continuing evil of lynching, and it was published in a teachers union magazine under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. After he added music, he and some associates performed it around New York.

(snip)

Then left-leaning Barney Josephson, who ran a Greenwich Village nightclub called Café Society—dedicated to racially integrating both performers and audiences—helped bring the song to 23-year-old jazz singer Billie Holiday, who was performing there. She began closing her show with it, the room blacking out at her last note, the audience gasping at its graphic imagery, then, after a moment of stunned silence, bursting into applause. Holiday’s label, Columbia Records, rejected “Strange Fruit,” fearful of offending its Southern market. Milt Gabler, who ran the upstart Commodore Records, stepped in and captured her rendition. It was too explosive for radio airplay, but created a stir in intellectual circles. Not all the whites who championed the cause of black people were Jewish, but Berlin, Gellert, Meeropol, Josephson and Gabler were. Jews and blacks found common cause in the shared pain of prejudice, discrimination and marginalization by mainstream society.

(snip)

The song had a powerful impact on younger musicians; drummer Max Roach said that Holiday “made a statement that we all felt as black folks.” But not all African-Americans liked it: Singer Paul Robeson objected to the portrayal of black people as victims, and writer Albert Murray asked: “Who the hell wants to go hear something that reminds them of a lynching?” Nonetheless, in 1999, Time magazine named it the “best song of the century,” and in 2000 David Margolick wrote a revealing book about the song. Holiday’s 1939 rendition has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the prestigious National Recording Registry. More than a hundred performers—from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Dee Dee Bridgewater to Sting—have recorded it. Nina Simone’s 1965 stark, stinging, goosebump-inducing interpretation ranks among the best. But Holiday still owns the song.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strange-fruit-still-haunting-at-80-11556654252 (paid subscription)

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I shudder just reading the lyrics:

Southern trees bear a 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.