65 years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at New York's Metropolitan Hospital. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a close-by charity hospital for drug abuse after which lay on a stretcher within the hallway for hours. undetected and unsupervisedHer assets amounted to 70 cents within the bank and a roll of banknotes hidden with them, their share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed.
Today, Holiday is revered as one of the crucial influential musicians of all time. Time Magazine called their 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” the song of the twentieth century. “In this sad, somber song about lynching in the South,” wrote Time in 1999, “the greatest jazz singer in history grapples with history itself.”
Abel Meeropola New York teacher and songwriter who used the pseudonym Lewis Allan, wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and persecuted him: “Black body sways in the southern breeze / Strange fruits hang from the poplars.”
Holiday's interpretation of Meeropol's song is as stunning – and haunting – today because it was when it was first recorded. “It hits hard,” wrote columnist Samuel Grafton shortly after the record's release in 1939. “It's like a game of “Let's pretend” has come to an end.”
I’m a scholar of American religion, literatureAnd The artsand I'm involved in the way in which that even powerful secular works draw their energy from religious narratives of justice, injustice, truth-telling, and redemption. Strange Fruit is example for me.
Unflinching Translation of texts
Like so many composers whose songs Holiday has recorded – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving-Berlin, Jerome Kern – Meeropol got here from a family of Jewish immigrants in America who fled anti-Semitic violence in Europe.
Two major migrations shaped America within the early twentieth century: from the agricultural south to the economic northAnd From the Old World to the New. Both were drivenpartly by the will leave racial terror behind.
Together, these migrations enabled a few of the most enduring musical collaborations of the twentieth century. Thematically, the joint productions of black and Jewish musicians – Broadway productions of “Show boat” And “Porgy and Bess”, Holiday’s performances with Benny Goodman And Artie Shaw – tended to avoid the brutal reality of prejudice and as a substitute deal with the luxuries of unusual happiness and unhappiness.
“Strange Fruit” was different. The song looks unflinchingly on the “strange fruit” of the title: hanged, burned and mutilated flesh rotting on a tree.
Until the twentieth century, there have been white vigilante groups Thousands of black Americans were murdered with impunity: Lynching after which displaying their bodies as a terrorist spectacle.
Lawrence Beitler/von Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Seapol first wrote down the lyrics and music of the song on the back of a cabaret programme from 13 November 1938 – 4 days after Kristallnacht, the night of the murderous anti-Jewish rampages throughout Nazi Germany, which became the turning point for the Holocaust.
For Meeropol, a labor activist and secular Jew, Black and Jewish Americans marched shoulder to shoulder for freedom from injustice. In one other poem He linked violence against blacks with the persecution of Jews:
I’m Jewish.
How can I determine that?
The lynched Negro
Reminds me well
I’m Jewish.
Black Christ
Just as Meeropol linked prejudices against blacks and Jews, many black Christians also linked their very own suffering to that of the Hebrew slaves within the Bible – and to the suffering of Jesus.
Accordingly Theologian James Cone“Black ministers preached more about the death of Jesus than any other subject because they saw in Jesus’ suffering and persecution a parallel to their own experience of slavery, racial segregation, and the lynch tree.”
In the last decade wherein Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” WEB Du Bois, Count Cullen And Langston Hughes all works focus on the figure of crucified black Christ.
Most African-American Christians belong to Protestant churchesbut Holiday didn’t. As a baby she was baptized Catholic in a convent reform school, Baltimore's Good Shepherd House for Colored Girlswhere she was sent twice by the court. She remained an ambivalent Catholic throughout her life.
The filled cross
Protestant churches often display the “empty” cross, which shows Jesus' instrument of execution, but not his body. The message of the empty cross is resurrection and latest life. According to Christian history, Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead to redeem humanity from sin.
In the Catholic world, one is more prone to find the “filled” cross: the body of Jesus nailed to the wood with outstretched arms, hands and feet. The crucifix emphasizes the agony of Jesus' death and his solidarity with all who are suffering.
Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
The accomplished cross also conveys the message that the crucifixion of Christ – God in human form – just isn’t a one-time event.
“When [Meeropol] showed me this poem,” Holiday said of “Strange Fruit,” “I dug it out immediately” because it “seemed to explain everything that had killed Pop.” Her father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, died on the age of 39 while on tour in Texas. She believed he was denied life-saving treatment due to his race.
Holiday's “Strange Fruit” evokes the finished cross and is a testament to the continued reality of lynching. “It still depresses me every time I sing it,” Holiday said. in her autobiography“But I have to keep singing it… the things that killed him are still happening in the South.”
Journalist Vernon Jarrett remembered seeing Holiday perform in 1947. She “sang this song as if it were reallike she'd just witnessed a lynching,” Jarrett said of “Strange Fruit.” “There was a sense of resignation, like, 'these people are going to be in power for a long time and there's nothing I can do about it except put it in a song.'”
Current will
Dealing with brokenness fairly than overcoming or overcoming it also describes Holiday's way of coping with others in precarious situations. Her apartment in Harlem, she saidwas a “combination of a YMCA, a boarding house for poor musicians, a soup kitchen for anyone with a bad story, a community center and an after-hours bar.”
A papal encyclical from 1943 described the Church itself similarly: a spot of shared pain, comfort and nourishment. Anyone who had no money “could go there and eat”, poets and jazz singers Babs Gonzales is recalled to Holiday's place“She fed everyone in New York for four years.”
Holiday ended her live shows with “Strange Fruit” from 1939 until the last months of her life. By making the song her signature, she offered solidarity and a faithful testimony to racial violence and injustice, not a cure. But her testament had extraordinary power.
Shortly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Bruce Springsteen, a Fellow Catholic with “concerns,” made a playlist for America. At the top of his list was “Strange Fruit.”
When asked if he was optimistic concerning the future, Springsteen responded within the spirit of Holiday: to witness, to not triumph. “I don't think anyone really knows where we're going from here,” He told author David BrooksBut everyone “can already see that the status quo is not right. And that is progress.”
image credit : theconversation.com