The New York Times reported last month, “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 local sheriff said the man “was hanging by a bedsheet (but) it had not yet been determined” whether this was the cause of death, or whether it was a case of homicide or suicide. 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 Colored People, a key component of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 60s, still finds a raison d’etre in a nation that elected an African American president seven years ago, and then re-elected him four years later.
The bedsheet, 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 very lines, a young New York-based teacher by the name of Abel Meeropol was moved to compose an excoriating poem. He called it Strange Fruit and put it to music. His wife and a few other people occasionally performed it at teachers’ union functions and suchlike.
Then someone suggested that he should take it to Cafe Society, an unusual nightclub where a young singer by the name of Billie Holiday was making waves, albeit on a small scale, with her uniquely arresting vocal style, even though her repertoire at that point consisted largely of Tin Pan Alley standards. She was capable of imbuing even relatively mundane material with a degree of heartbreak that elevated it to a different level. Her unusual delivery had sufficiently 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 Cafe 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 unmoved by the song, but agreed to sing it on Josephson’s request. 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. Once it ended, there was nothing more to be said. No more songs. And there’s plenty of evidence that to Holiday it was something more than a political comment. It also channeled her personal angst. And her life gave her much to be upset about, from familial dysfunction both as a child and an adult to racial discrimination that was back then the norm in the US.
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 her, however, allowing her to record it for a left-field label called Commodore, which put it out on a 78rpm single in 1939, with Fine and Mellow, which became another classic, on the reverse side of the disc.
It wasn’t a hit, but no one who listened to the song could be failed to be moved by its starkly contrasting 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 — and arguably the most moving — protest song in mainstream popular music.
Billie Holiday, born 100 years ago this week, died prematurely in 1959 at the age of just 44. Her final recording of Strange Fruit dates back to that very year, from a London concert in February, an almost unbearably poignant rendition, (available on YouTube) 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 in general but of the performer herself.
Many years after he chanced upon Holiday, Hammond came across various other artists of note, including 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.
One day it’ll be just an artifact. For the time being, though, it retains plenty of power, and it’s certainly not too late to appreciate the reaction after Holiday sang it at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. As one eyewitness noted, an unfamiliar sound rang through the auditorium once she had finished. The applause came later, if at all. The initial, almost involuntary reaction was a monumental collective sigh.
