Originally a poem called Bitter Fruit, it was written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in response to lynching in US southern states.
Soon after publication, Meeropol set the song to music. It was performed at union meetings and even at Madison Square Garden by the jazz singer Laura Duncan. To ensure that it was indeed savoured, Holiday and Josephson created specific conditions for the performances. Then a lone person began to clap nervously.
As the song became a feature of her sets, Holiday witnessed a range of reactions, from tears to walkouts and racist hecklers. When she toured the song, some proprietors tried discouraging her from singing it for fear of alienating or angering their patrons. Holiday combined rage and sadness in her rendition of the song Credit: Alamy.
Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century. During the musical introduction to the song, Holiday stood with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer. Holiday recorded two major sessions of the song at Commodore, one in and one in In , the Library of Congress honored the song as one of 50 recordings chosen that year to add to the National Recording Registry.
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Arrow Created with Sketch. Calendar Created with Sketch. Path Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Or do you shift awkwardly in your seat, shudder at the strange vibrations in the air, and think to yourself: call this entertainment? This is the question that will throb at the heart of the vexed relationship between politics and pop for decades to come, and this is the first time it has demanded to be asked. Written by a Jewish communist called Abel Meeropol , Strange Fruit was not by any means the first protest song, but it was the first to shoulder an explicit political message into the arena of entertainment.
Unlike the robust workers' anthems of the union movement, it did not stir the blood; it chilled it. Up to this point, protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit proved they could be art.
It is a song so good that dozens of singers have since tried to put their stamp on it, and Holiday's performance is so strong that none of them have come close to outclassing her — in , Time magazine named her first studio version the "song of the century". Although lynching was already on the decline by the time of Strange Fruit — the grotesque photograph of a double hanging which moved Meeropol to pick up his pen had been taken in Indiana in — it remained the most vivid symbol of American racism, a stand-in for all the more subtle forms of discrimination affecting the black population.
Perhaps only the visceral horror that lynching inspired gave Meeropol the necessary conviction to write a song with no precedent, one that required a new songwriting vocabulary. Meeropol, who taught at a high school in the Bronx and churned out reams of topical songs, poems and plays under the gentle alias Lewis Allan, published a poem under the title Bitter Fruit in the union-run New York Teacher magazine in The later name change was inspired. It puts the listener in the shoes of a curious observer spying the hanging shapes from afar and moving closer towards a sickening realisation.
Meeropol worked out a tune and Strange Fruit quickly became a fixture at leftwing gatherings during , sung by his wife and various friends. In the crowd was one Robert Gordon, who had recently taken on a job at Cafe Society, directing the headlining show by Billie Holiday. The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: a pithy antidote to the snooty, often racist elitism of other New York nightspots.
Opening the night before New Year's Eve , it owed much of its instant success to Holiday. In her 23 years, Holiday had already seen plenty, although her notoriously unreliable autobiography Lady Sings the Blues obscures as much as it reveals. Born in Philadelphia, she spent some time running errands in a Baltimore whorehouse, "just about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way", where she first discovered jazz.
After she accused a neighbour of attempting to rape her, the year-old Holiday, an incorrigible truant, was sent to a Catholic reform school until her mother secured her release. Moving with her mother to New York, she worked in another brothel, this time doing more than errands, and was jailed for solicitation.
Upon her release she began singing in Harlem jazz clubs, where she caught the eye of producer John Hammond, who made her one of the swing era's hottest stars. Meeropol played Josephson his song and asked if he could bring it to Holiday. The singer later insisted she fell in love with it right away.
Meeropol remembered it differently, believing that she performed it only as a favour to Josephson and Gordon: "To be perfectly frank, I don't think she felt comfortable with the song.
Arthur Herzog, one of Holiday's regular songwriters, claimed that arranger Danny Mendelsohn rewrote Meeropol's tune, which he uncharitably dubbed "something or other alleged to be music", which might have made the difference to Holiday.
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