And yet “Strange Fruit,” both as a song and a historical phenomenon, seems surprisingly unknown today. No doubt in large part because of its subject matter, it's not one of the many, many Holiday standards one encounters continually, whether on radio stations or piped in over speakers in the ubiquitous Starbucks, like “God Bless the Child,” “Lover Man,” “Miss Brown to You,” or “I Cover the Waterfront.” It is an anomaly, both inside and outside Holiday's body of work.
“Strange Fruit” defies easy musical categorization and has slipped between the cracks of academic study. It is too artsy to be folk music, too explicitly political and polemical to be jazz. Surely no song in American history has ever been so guaranteed to silence an audience or to generate such discomfort. Joe Segal has run the Jazz Show case in Chicago, the second oldest jazz club in America, for fifty years, but he still won't listen to it when it comes on the radio. “It's too stark,” he told me. “I can't handle it.”
Coming out in 1939—the same year as Gone With the Wind, a film that embodied contemporary condescension toward blacks and black performers—and around the time that Ella Fitzgerald's “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” was more what people expected from black “girl singers”—“Strange Fruit” “put the elements of protest and resistance back at the center of contemporary black musical culture,” Angela Davis wrote in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Sixty years after it was first sung, jazz musicians still speak of the song with a mixture of awe and fear. “When she recorded it, it was more than revolutionary,” the drummer Max Roach said of Holiday. “She made a statement that we all felt as black folks. No one was speaking out. She became one of the fighters, this beautiful lady who could sing and make you feel things. She became a voice of black people and they loved this woman.” When the song appeared, most radio stations found it too sensitive to put on the air; to this day even the most progressive disc jockeys play it only occasionally. “It's pretty intense and I'm trying to be entertaining,” said Michael Bourne, who runs one of the most popular jazz programs in metropolitan New York. Those who perform the song do so almost gingerly (“It's like rubbing people's noses in their own shit,” said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years) and, often, only when they have to;sometimes it's just too much to take.
A few years back, Q, a British music publication, named “Strange Fruit” one of “ten songs that actually changed the world.” Like any revolutionary act, the song initially encountered great resistanc Holiday and the black folksinger Josh White, who began performing it a few years after Holiday first did, were abused, sometimes physically, by irate nightclub patrons—“crackers” as Holiday called them. Columbia Records, Holiday's label in the late 1930s, refused to record it. And, again like revolutionary acts, the song has generated its own share of mythology, none more enduring than Holiday's oftuttered claim that she partly wrote it herself or had it written for her. “Strange Fruit” marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by others, in Holiday's evolution from exuberant jazz singer to chanteuse of lovelorn pain and loneliness. Once Holiday added it to her repertoire, some of its sadness seemed to cling to her; as she deteriorated physically, the song took on new poignancy and immediacy. The jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason even saw it as a metaphor for her entire life. “She really was happy only when she sang,” he once wrote. “The rest of the time she was a sort of living lyric to the song ‘Strange Fruit,’ hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself.”
In its own small way, “Strange Fruit” might even have accelerated Holiday's decline. Surely a song that forced a nation to confront its darkest impulses, a song that maligned an entire portion of the country, did not win her any friends in high places who might have cut her some slack as she degenerated into substance abuse and assorted scrapes with the law. “I've made lots of enemies, too,” she told Down Beat in 1947, shortly after she was busted for drugs in Philadelphia. “Singing that [‘Strange Fruit’ ] hasn't helped any. I was doing it at the Earle [Theater in Philadelphia] ‘til they made me stop.” William Dufty, the man who cowrote Holiday's autobiography, is convinced that Holiday shortchanged the creator of “Strange Fruit” because she felt the song only brought her grief—even leading her at one point to be hauled before red-baiting federal investigators.
After its initial run of popularity, “Strange Fruit” fell into disuse for many years—the victim of the conservatism of one era, the idealism and hopefulness of another, and the disillusionment of a third. Josh White and Nina Simone were among the few artists to attempt it in the 1950s and 1960s. But recently many other musicians—from Sting to Dee Dee Bridgewater to Tori Amos to Cassandra Wilson to UB40 to Siouxsie and the Banshees—have recorded “Strange Fruit,” each cut an act of courage given Holiday's continuing hold over the song. (That might not apply to 101 Strings, which recorded an orchestral version.) Sidney Bechet did an instrumental version shortly after Holiday's own record appeared; though it contained no words, Victor chose not to release it for many years.
The song now pops up in many places. Leon Litwack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, uses it in his classes at the University of California at Berkeley, and Stephen Bright cites it in “Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty and Disadvantage,” a class he teaches in the law schools of Harvard, Yale, and Emory. Don Ricco, a teacher in Novato, California, plays it for his eighth-graders when they're studying the Civil War; while they review the tortured saga of American race relations, they can also learn about the power of metaphor. “Strange Fruit” is what Mickey Rourke inexplicably puts on his turntable to seduce Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks (predictably, it fails miserably as mood music). A federal appeals court judge cited it a few years ago to show that execution by hanging was inherently “cruel and unusual.” It was banned from South African radio during the apartheid era. Khallil Abdul Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan's notoriously anti-Semitic disciple and maestro of the “Million Man March,” has quoted it in speeches assailing American racism—unaware, apparently, that the song was written by a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City.
That schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name “Lewis Allan,” had not written the song for Holiday; several others, including Meeropol's wife, Anne, had sung it before her. And yet, so completely did Holiday come to own “Strange Fruit” that Meeropol—who is better remembered nowadays for adopting the orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg following their parents’ execution than for his thousands of other songs and poems—spent half a lifetime, starting with the moment the song became famous, reminding people that it was really his creation, and his alone.
It didn't always work; no one could seem to accept that so potent a song could come from so prosaic a source. Various articles saddled Meeropol with a wide range of purported collaborators. One French magazine described him as the headmaster of a school for blacks somewhere along the Mississippi. “One Lewis Allen [sic] is cited as the author of ‘Strange Fruit,’ but did he compose both words and music?” the composer and diarist Ned Rorem, a passionate Holiday devotee, wrote in the New York Times in 1995, nine years after Meeropol's death. “Indeed, who was he? Was he black?”(To the organizers of a celebration of music by black composers at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1999, the answer was yes, for they included “Strange Fruit” on the program.)
In a way, Meeropol sealed his particular fate, his status as a historical footnote, when he decided that it was Billie Holiday to whom he'd bring the song: she, more than any other artist ever could have, effectively made it her own. “When you listen to her, it's almost like an audio tape of her autobiography,” saidTony Bennett, who called “Strange Fruit” a “magnificent” song. “She didn't sing anything unless she had lived it.”
I wrote “Strange Fruit”
I wrote “Strange Fruit” because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.
—Abel Meeropol,