hockydad 2
Strange Fruit : A Poem
Southern trees bear 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.
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.
Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
billie holiday "strange fruit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
Strange Fruit Meaning
How deep is your love for this song? Go
deeper.
The scene was New York City, 1939. The
popular new integrated cabaret club, Café
Society, had a hot new performer on stage
three nights a week. Her name was Billie
Holiday.
The club's founder had heard a powerful new
protest song written by Lewis Allan, the pen
name of Jewish high school teacher and left-
wing activist named Abel Meeropol. The
song was "Strange Fruit," a haunting critique
of lynching and race terrorism in the
American South.
With some hesitation, perhaps because of
the gravity of the song's content, Billie
agreed to close her set with it. As she
prepared to sing this final number, service in
the club stopped completely and the room
went black except for a single spotlight
trained on the singer. When she was done,
Holiday walked off the stage without even
performing an encore, leaving the audience
with the strained, gaping and unresolved
line, "Here is a strange and bitter crop."
In her autobiography, Holiday later recalled
the audience's stunned reaction: "There
wasn't even a patter of applause when I
finished. Then a lone person began clapping
nervously. Then suddenly everyone was
clapping."
Though no one at the time knew it, when
Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" at
Café Society, she was singing America into
the beginning of the Civil Rights Era. As New
York Post columnist Samuel Grafton wrote,
her performance, full of subtle contempt and
rage, "reversed the usual relationship
between a black entertainer and her white
audience: 'I have been entertaining you,' she
seem[ed] to say, 'now you just listen to me.'
The polite conventions between race and
race are gone. It is as if [they] heard what
was spoken in the cabins, after the night
riders had clattered by." "Strange Fruit"
transformed the usual relationship between
black performer and white audience, forcing
them both to confront the grim realities of
racism in America in the pre-Civil Rights Era.
The key players of this story were all
drastically affected by racism in America.
Billie Holiday was only performing at Café
Society at all because she hadn't been able
to take the endless racist insults she'd
encountered while touring with the popular
Artie Shaw band. As poet Amina Barka put it,
Holiday's experience with the touring band
taught her that "she could play at the clubs
but she couldn't sit at the tables." Because
the venues were mostly upper-class, "high
society" white venues, Holiday wasn't
allowed into the front of the house. Author
David Margolick observed that she even had
to enter through the back door to get into the
Hotel Lincoln—a place named after, of all
people, Abraham Lincoln. It has been
suggested that the last straw, with the Artie
Shaw band, came when Holiday had to take a
freight elevator up to the stage because she
was not allowed to share the normal elevator
with the white patrons. Long before she ever
reached the stage at Café Society, Billie
Holiday understood American racism in her
bones.
Then there was Abel Meeropol. Perhaps
surprisingly (or perhaps not), the writer of
"Strange Fruit" was not a Southern black
man. He was, instead, a Jewish-American
schoolteacher from New York City. Meeropol
was a representative a long tradition in
America of left-wing Jewish political
activism; perhaps inspired by their own
experience of enduring centuries of anti-
Semitic violence and discrimination, Jews in
the early played a disproportionately large
role in early twentieth-century American
social reform movements—especially
fighting against racism. Meeropol was
inspired to write "Strange Fruit" after seeing
a shocking photograph of a lynching in a
magazine. (Most historians believe the
specific image Meeropol saw was this
graphic and disturbing photo of the 1930
double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram
Smith in Marion, Indiana.) The picture
haunted Meeropol for days, inspiring him to
compose "Strange Fruit" as a poem,
published in 1937 in both The New York
Teacher and in the Marxist journal The New
Masses under Meeropol's nom de plume
Lewis Allan. (Meeropol was a member of the
Communist Party, not uncommon for
antiracist activists in the 1930s. Decades
later, Meeropol would return to public
prominence after adopting the orphaned
children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the
married couple of American communists
executed after being tried and convicted of
espionage against the United States during
the 1950s.) "I wrote 'Strange Fruit,'"
Meeropol said, "because I hate lynching and
I hate injustice and I hate the people who
perpetuate it." Fighting racism was central to
Meeorpol's belief system; it was perfectly
appropriate that he wrote what might be
considered the antiracist movement's theme
song.
And Café Society was a perfectly appropriate
venue for the song's debut. The club, which
opened in December of 1938, made a name
for itself by offering a kind of antiracist satire
of "high society." Black customers were
given the best seats, the waiters greeted
patrons while dressed in rags, and signs and
slogans like "Café Society: the wrong place
for Right people" were posted on the walls.
Café Society was a progressive club for
progressive people, a place to enjoy good
music, good drinks, and good company
while striking a blow against racism.
And yet there was a certain racial irony in the
story of how "Strange Fruit" made it to the
stage. There was a long tradition in
American culture—a tradition not necessarily
"progressive" in its racial dynamics—of
white audiences enjoying forms of "black
music" that had been filtered, through the
work of a "middleman" (often a Jewish-
American songwriter or publisher), to sound
more appealing to mainstream white tastes.
The dominant musical genre of the
1930s—swing—had morphed out of African-
American jazz in exactly this fashion, and an
entire New York music-publishing industry
(known as Tin Pan Alley) grew out of the
practice. Some of the most famous
composers of the era—Irving Berlin, George
Gershwin—became known for their wildly
popular compositions that captured
elements of the "black sound" without
necessarily challenging white audiences or
the Jim Crow racial order of the day. And
other, less respectful forms of popular
entertainment—most infamously, blackface
minstrelsy—bowdlerized the African-
American musical tradition into crudely
racist stereotypes that mocked and
demeaned blacks for the entertainment of
whites.
In some ways, the story behind "Strange
Fruit" followed the same old plot (not
blackface minstrelsy, certainly, but the
broader tradition embodied by swing and Tin
Pan Alley). The audience at Café Society was
mostly white; the music was mostly black;
Meeropol was the Jewish "middleman"
bringing the two together.
But "Strange Fruit" began to turn the power
dynamics of that old relationship upside
down. Rather than softening black music for
white ears, Meeropol made it harder; there
was a militancy and anger in "Strange Fruit"
that would have been difficult for a black
songwriter in Jim Crow America to produce
without fear of violent retribution. Meeropol
was still a middleman, but he was a
middleman who helped Billie Holiday
challenge her audience rather than helping
her avoid threatening them. In the words of
composer Don Byron, "what this Jewish
American is being a middleman for is quite
militant. [...] It is the first step away from
entertainment and towards something harder
edged and true to the negative side of being
black in America." Indeed, in the decades
since "Strange Fruit," it has become
common for black music to incorporate
political statements, challenge social norms,
and express frustration with the state of race
relations.
"Strange Fruit" was an early cry for civil
rights—some might even say it was the
beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
Record producer Ahmet Ertegun called the
song "a declaration of war," and jazz writer
Leonard Feather said it was "the first
significant protest in words and music, the
first unmuted cry against racism." That is
true in the popular American consciousness.
While other artists had sung about lynching,
it was typically done through a veil of
euphemism. While the NAACP had put on an
art show about lynching in 1936, and ten
plays had been written about lynching in the
quarter century before "Strange Fruit," none
of them proved to be popular enough to stir
the consciousness of the American public.
Billie Holiday's haunting song, though, broke
through.
This is not to say that "Strange Fruit" stood
alone. Though it was recorded in 1939,
sixteen years before Rosa Parks, it was also
recorded seventeen years after the first anti-
lynching bill was filibustered by Southern
senators. The song was an early cry for civil
rights, but one that ultimately rested on an
existing anger shared by progressives,
blacks, and artists about the state of race in
america.
