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“FEDERAL, state and local law-enforcement agencies are investigating the death of a black man who was found hanging from a tree in a small Mississippi town,” The New York Times reported recently.
The local sheriff said the man “was hanging by a bed sheet [but] it had not yet been determined” whether this was the cause of death. The local chapter of the NAACP identified the man as someone who had been reported missing a couple of weeks earlier.
It is both telling and alarming that the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a key component of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 60s, still finds a raison d’être in a nation that elected an African American president seven years ago, and then re-elected him four years later.
Holiday made waves with her arresting vocal style.
The bed sheet, meanwhile, is highly symbolic, not as an aid to suicide, but as a form of attire. The Ku Klux Klan, a racist entity whose ideology and modus operandi bear comparison to the predilections of Islamic State, emerged in the years following the American Civil War and, despite its substantially diminished support base and clout, continues to exist.
The KKK and its associates were key instigators of the lynching phenomenon, whereby ‘liberated’ black Americans were subjected to excruciating forms of torture, invariably extended to its logical conclusion, whereafter their lifeless bodies were strung up on trees — and all too often the non-black community gathered around this display in a demonstration of white pride.
About 80 years ago, confronted with a photograph of an atrocity along these lines, a New York teacher, Abel Meeropol, was moved to compose an excoriating poem. He called it Strange Fruit and put it to music.
Then someone suggested that he should take it to Café Society, a nightclub where a young singer by the name of Billie Holiday was making waves with her arresting vocal style. Her unusual delivery had adequately impressed the impresario John Hammond to sign her up as a Columbia recording artist while she was still in her teens.
Meeropol, who wrote under the name of Lewis Allan — thereby concealing both his Jewish identity and his communist affiliation — took the chance. Barney Josephson, who ran Café Society — a venue that was not only integrated, which was uncommon enough for the 1930s, but reserved its best places for African American patrons — was sufficiently moved by the lyrics to persuade Holiday to give it a try.
By most accounts, the singer was initially nonplussed by the song, but agreed to sing it. If Holiday was indeed at sixes and sevens about Strange Fruit to start with, she soon enough found her métier. It entered her repertoire as a coda. The last word. And there’s plenty of evidence that to Holiday it was something more than a political comment. It also channelled her personal angst. And her life gave her much to be upset about, from familial dysfunction to racial discrimination.
Once the significance of the song had sunk in, Holiday was keen to preserve it for posterity, but Columbia wasn’t interested. The recording company temporarily released her from her obligations, however, allowing her to record it for a left-field label called Commodore, which put it out on a 78rpm single in 1939.
No one who listened to the song could be failed to be moved by its stark imagery. Take the middle stanza: “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.” Holiday extends the final syllable of the last line, “Here is a strange and bitter crop”, as far as it will go. It’s a suitably abrupt conclusion to what has been described as the first protest song in mainstream American popular music.
Billie Holiday, born 100 years ago this week, died prematurely in 1959 at 44. Her final recording of Strange Fruit dates back to that very year from a London concert: it’s an almost unbearably poignant rendition, (with Holiday looking much older than her years), her vocal cords shot but still sounding profoundly eloquent, the lyrics evoking the lifelong angst not just of black America but of the performer herself.
Many years later, Hammond signed up the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. He also signed, in his prime, the folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger. Six years ago, at a Madison Square Garden celebration marking Seeger’s 90th birthday, Springsteen described the elderly honoree as “a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself”.
The same could be said about Holiday’s Strange Fruit, which stands out in her repertoire like a sore thumb, exquisitely painful yet impossible to ignore, or to extricate once it gets under your skin. It’s a shocker — and one that may have done its bit to change America, even though its relevance, sadly, has not entirely been exhausted.
Published in Dawn, April 8th, 2015
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