APRIL 20, 1939: BILLIE HOLIDAY

Based on more research, this essay, first posted in 2024, has been revised and expanded.

Marian Anderson was not the only iconic Black singer to draw attention to racial inequality in April 1939. Blues singer Billie Holiday recorded the disturbing anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit.” Inspired by a photograph of a lynching, the haunting song was an indictment of racial violence.

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.

Under the pen name Lewis Allan, it was written by Abel Meeropol (1903-1986), a Russian-Jewish, Harvard-educated poet, who taught English at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for seventeen years. Among his students was James Baldwin. A member of the Communist Party from 1932 to 1947, he and his wife adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed for espionage. In June 2023, Michael and Robert Meeropol, who were ten- and six-years-old in 1953, renewed efforts to clear their mother’s name.

“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, Columbia Records refused to produce it, but released her to record it elsewhere. It 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 Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, on April 7, 1915, the child of unmarried teenagers, she grew up poor in Baltimore’s Fells Point. She ran 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 together 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. 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 jacket. Tallulah Bankhead was another lover.

Billie Holiday (Credit: National Archives)

Lady Day’s “look” was elegant. Wearing white gardenias in her hair became her hallmark. She used clothes to contradict negative press coverage. 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 wore a $18,000 full-length mink coat to her booking.

Holiday’s 1949 arrest (Credit: FoundSF)

More than her glamorous stage presence, Holiday was America’s preeminent 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 was a noted songwriter. She co-wrote fifteen compositions, including “Lady Sings the Blues” and “God Bless the Child (that’s got his own).” That lyric was a response to abandonment, by her mother, two husbands and sundry lovers – a recurring theme.

An earlier anti-lynching song, “Supper Time,” was a collaboration between two other outsiders, Irving Berlin (1888-1989), a Jewish immigrant born in Russia, and Ethel Waters, who had become a sensation at Harlem’s Cotton Club, singing “Stormy Weather” with Duke Ellington’s band. Berlin cast Waters in “As Thousands Cheer,” which opened on Broadway on September 30, 1933. It was the first show to give an African American star equal billing with white performers. When her co-stars refused to take curtain calls with her, Berlin refused to raise the curtain..

Berlin and Moss Hart wrote based their musical revue on headlines, gossip columns and weather reports. In the first act, Waters sang “Heat Wave” (“She started a heat wave, by making her seat wave. . . “). “Harlem on My Mind” and “The Easter Parade” were also hits from the musical.

In the second act, the headline “Unknown Negro Lynched by Frenzied Mob” introduced Waters, portraying the widow of the victim, living in a shack, wearing a headwrap, singing “Supper Time.”

Supper time

I should set the table

‘Cause it’s supper time

Somehow I’m not able

‘Cause that man o’mine

Ain’t comin’ home no more

Supper time

Kids will soon be yellin’

For their supper time

How’ll I keep from tellin’

Them that man o’mine

Ain’t comin’ home no more?

How’ll I keep explainin’ when they ask me where he’s gone?

How’ll I keep from cryin’ when I bring their supper on?

How can I remind them to pray at their humble board?

How can I be thankful when they start to thank the Lord?

Lord!

Supper time

I should set the table

‘Cause it’s supper time

Somehow I’m not able

‘Cause that man o’mine

Ain’t comin’ home no more

Berlin does not mention lynching, just haunting grief and devastating pain. In her memoir, Waters recalled having escaped being lynched in Atlanta, after a dispute with a white theater owner. “In singing [“Supper Time”], I was telling my comfortable, well-dressed listeners about my people.”

Ethel Waters (Credit: America Comes Alive)

Her background was not comfortable. Born on October 31, 1896, she was the daughter of teenager Louise Anderson and a rapist, a middle-class family acquaintance, John Waters, a light-skinned Black man. Waters grew up in poverty in a Philadelphia slum, raised by her grandmother who worked as a maid. Waters married and divorced three, possibly four times. Her first marriage, at age thirteen, was to an abusive man. Escaping him, she worked as a hotel maid. She had no children. The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture asserts that Waters identified as bisexual, with a female partner when she lived in Harlem in the 1920s.

Her career included singing and dancing on the Black vaudeville circuit, with a carnival, in Harlem clubs, as a recording artist, Broadway actress, film and television star. The fifth Black woman in the country to make a record, in 1921, Waters appeared in three shorts and nine feature films. In 1949, she was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. Pinky was a controversial movie about a Black woman passing for white, played by a white woman. Waters was the protagonist’s grandmother, an illiterate Black laundress. Director Elia Kazan described Waters as a “combination of old-timey religiosity and free-flowing hatred.”

After As Thousands Cheer, Waters became the highest paid Black performer on Broadway. She won awards for playing the maid in A Member of the Wedding in 1950. When it was made a movie, she was nominated for another Academy Award. On television, she starred as Beulah, the first series featuring an African American. Finding the role “degrading,” Waters quit.

Waters preferred acting to singing. She recorded “Supper Time” in 1947. In 1969, she performed it on a television special hosted by Diana Ross. According to John Edward Hasse, curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, “her renditions still packed a gut punch.”

In 1957, Waters appeared with evangelist Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden, singing the gospel hymn, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Recalling the occasion, she testified, “I, Ethel Waters, a 380-pound decrepit old lady [she was sixty-one], rededicated my life to Jesus Christ . . . I can thank God for the chance to tell you His eye is on all of us sparrows.” She crusaded with Graham for twenty years and dedicated her second autobiography to him, “her precious child.”

(Credit: Billy Graham Library)

Lynchings were celebrated by white mobs with picnics and postcards. Documenting these deaths was a challenge. Groundbreaking investigations by Black journalist Ida B. Wells, in 1892, resulted in the destruction of her newspaper press. After 1909, the NAACP continued counting, concluding that there had been 4,745 lynchings between 1882 and 1969, principally in the South; 72.7% of the victims were African Americans.

Following race riots in 1916, in his East St. Louis district, Republican Congressman Leonidas Dyer (R-Missouri) introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill in 1918. It passed with large margins in the House in 1922, but was succumbed to a filibuster by Southern Senators. In 1934, Democratic Senators Robert Wagner (NY) and Edward Costigan (CO), working with the NAACP, drafted a bill prosecuting participants in lynch mobs and punishing law enforcement officers who failed to protect victims.

Map introduced into the Congressional Record by Leonidas Dyer in 1922 (Credit: congress.gov)

President Roosevelt refused to endorse it. 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 lynching data. For one twelve-month period, 1939-40, no lynchings were reported. Two years later, the ASWPL disbanded.

Jesse Daniel Ames, ASWPL (Credit: Wikipedia)

In response to Black activism, racial violence reemerged after World War II. 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 dirt from lynching sites (Credit: Equal Justice Initiative)

Both Holiday and Waters met racism and sexism with fierce resilience.

Holiday remained an addict. 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.

Waters died of cancer and kidney failure in 1977, age eighty. Neither she nor “Supper Time” is as well-known as Holiday or “Strange Fruit.”.

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 Triump of Billie Holiday’s Last Year (Knopf, 2023).

Paul Alexander, “For Billie Holiday, Dressing Elegantly Was a Powerful Assertion of Dignity,” Washington Post (March 31, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/03/28/billie-holiday-fashion-legacy-racism/

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).

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/

C. Gerald Fraser, “Ethel Waters Is Dead at 80,” New York Times (September 2, 1977), https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/02/archives/ethel-waters-is-dead-at-80-ethel-waters-singer-and-actress-on-stage.html

John Edward Hasse, “’Supper Time’ (1933), by Irving Berlin: A Searing Song of Grief,” Wall Street Journal (September 30, 2023), https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/music/supper-time-irving-berlins-searing-song-of-mourning-ethel-waters-22fae767

Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow: An Autobiography (Praeger, 1978).

Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (Harper Perennial , 2012).