April 20, 1939: BILLIE HOLIDAY
Marian Anderson was not the only iconic Black singer to draw attention to racial inequity in April 1939. Blues singer Billie Holiday recorded the disturbing anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit.” Inspired by a photograph, the haunting song was an indictment of racial violence. Under the pen name Lewis Allen, it was written by Abel Meeropol, a Russian-Jewish communist high school teacher from the Bronx.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood on 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 run to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
“Lady Day” Billie Holiday (photo credit: National Archives)
Extrajudicial killings or “death by mobs” were celebrated with picnics and postcards. Documenting lynchings remains a challenge. Groundbreaking investigations by Black journalist Ida B. Wells, in 1892, resulted in the destruction of her newspaper press. The NAACP continued the effort, concluding that there had been 4745 lynchings between 1882 and 1969, principally in the South; 72.7% of the victims were African Americans.
Congressman Leonidas Dyer (R-Missouri) introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill in 1918, following race riots in his East St. Louis district. His bill passed with large margins in the House but was consistently defeated by Southerners in the Senate, despite broad national support. President Roosevelt refused to endorse a bill punishing sheriffs who did not protect prisoners, because he depended on Southern support to pass his New Deal agenda. The Senate did not pass an anti-lynching bill until 2018, when the House failed to act. In 2022, both chambers passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which President Biden signed.
In 1930, Atlanta suffragist Jessie Daniel Ames organized the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching. Asserting that lynching had nothing to do with protecting Southern womanhood, she recruited white members in every county in the South, because “only white women could influence other white women.” Together with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the ASWPL challenged public norms and published data. For one twelve-month period from 1939-1940, no lynchings were reported. Two years later the ASWPL disbanded.
Jessie Daniel Ames, ASWPL (photo credit: Wikipedia)
Racial violence reemerged after World War II, in response to Black activism. Recently, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, created a national memorial to lynching victims and partnered with communities to collect soil and erect signs at the sites of past murders.
Bryan Stevenson, jars of soil from lynching sites (photo: Equal Justice Initiative)
“Strange Fruit” became Holiday’s signature song. Where it was safe to perform, it ended her set, sung under a single spotlight. Afraid of backlash from Southern radio stations and record stores, her label, Columbia Records, refused to produce it, but released her to record it elsewhere. The song sold one million copies in 1939. At twenty-four, Holiday became a symbol of resistance to lynching, a civil rights icon, and the subject of harassment for the rest of her life.
Born in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, the child of unmarried teenagers, Eleanora Fagan grew up poor in Baltimore’s Fells Point. She worked running errands for a local madam, who let her play Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records on the brothel’s gramophone. She sang for tips in waterfront dives and spent a year in a Catholic home for truants. At some point, she and her mother were arrested for prostitution. Eleanora credited the brothel with introducing her to jazz, fashionable women, drugs and alcohol.
In 1931 she created her Billie Holiday persona. Still in her teens, she performed in Harlem nightclubs and at the Apollo Theater, making records with Duke Ellington and headlining with Count Basie. In 1939, she joined Artie Shaw’s all-white orchestra, the first time a Black woman had toured with a white band. When she was forced to use a hotel service elevator, because of guest complaints, she quit.
At Café Society, New York City’s only mixed-race club, she met Louise Crane, whose family owned the stationery company. The wealthy white arts-patron bought Billie a silver fox. Tallulah Bankhead was another lover.
Lady Day’s “look” was elegant. Wearing white gardenias in her hair became her hallmark. She used clothes to contradict often negative press coverage of her erratic behavior, drug issues, and legal troubles. Alcohol and heroin addiction ravaged her career. Three weeks after being discharged from a rehab clinic in 1947, she was arrested for narcotics possession and served almost a year at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia (where Martha Stewart served time in 2004-05).
Holiday lost her record label and her cabaret license, which barred her from performing in local clubs. But days after her 1948 release, she appeared at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert, in white sequins and chiffon. Arrested again in 1949, she donned a $18,000 full-length mink and sunglasses for her booking.
Holiday was more than her glamorous stage presence. Without a big voice or a wide vocal range, she used slow tempos to emphasize particular words and lush arrangements to produce nuanced and compelling solos. She was America’s pre-eminent jazz singer. Frank Sinatra called her his biggest influence. Tony Bennett described her as a “goddess of musicians.”
Although she could not read or write music, she became a noted songwriter. Beginning in 1936, she co-authored fifteen compositions, including the classics “Lady Sings the Blues” and “God Bless the Child.” That lyric was a response to her mother’s refusal to loan her money. The theme of abandonment, by her mother, sundry lovers, and two husbands, resonated. Depicted by biographers as a victim of racism, sexism, and addiction, friends found her resourceful and resilient.
As she lay dying of cirrhosis in 1959, age forty-four, she was arrested and handcuffed to her hospital bed for drug possession. Coverage of her funeral included a description of her burial clothes: a rose lace gown, pink gloves, five strands of pearls, and a halo of gardenias.
Holiday’s musical legacy and regal style are evident in the careers of Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross, who starred in Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Two more movies, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill (1986) and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), perpetuated the sordid elements of her biography rather than her contributions to jazz and civil rights history.
In 1999, Time named “Strange Fruit” the Song of the Century. Holiday was awarded four posthumous Grammys and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
SOURCES:
“Billie Holiday Dies Here at 44; Jazz Singer Had Wide Influence,” New York Times (July 18, 1959), https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0407.html
Frank Jacobs, April 16, 2018, https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/chilling-maps-of-lynchings-in-1930s-america/
Paul Alexander, Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Trump of Billie Holiday’s Last Year (Knopf, 2023).
Paul Alexander, “For Billie Holiday, Dressing Elegantly Was a Powerful Assertion of Dignity,” Washngton Post (March 31, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/03/28/billie-holiday-fashion-legacy-racism/
Ethan Iverson, “How Many Movies About Billie Holiday Does It Take . . . ?” The Nation (March 11, 2021), https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/billie-holiday-movie-jazz/
Emily Lordi, “The Lady’s Last Songs,” Wall Street Journal (March 9-10, 2024), review of Bitter Crop by Paul Alexander, https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/bitter-crop-review-billie-holidays-swan-song-c36ed64f
David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Running Press, 2000), https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/margolick-fruit.html?TB_iframe=true&width=921.6&height=921.6
Robert G. O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Arcade, 1991).
Note re ABEL MEEROPOL: The author of “Strange Fruit” was a Harvard-educated poet, lyricist, and high school English teacher at DeWitt Clinton HS in the Bronx for seventeen years. Among his students was James Baldwin. A member of the Communist Party from 1932 to 1947, Meeropol and his wife adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed for espionage in 1953.