In her short life, Billie Holiday performed with a type of genius that is still imitated by singers today. She was best known for sad songs about heartache and pain from losing love. One thing people don’t say about Billie Holiday was that she was a protest singer. While there was plenty to sing about, these weren’t the kind of songs Billie Holiday was known to sing. In 1939, though, she made a recording of a song that brought out into the light one of America’s dirtiest secrets, what experts have called the “window to the soul of white supremacy and African American life in the South”—lynching.
It’s difficult today to imagine what life was like during the years when lynching was popular in the South. Black men lived in constant terror that someone might accuse them of a crime, and that a white mob would grab them, take them against their will to a tree, and lynch them. Lynching wasn’t just a way for white people to keep Black people in line. In some places, it was treated like a sport. Often at a lynching, photographers would take pictures and then sell them door to door. There were collectable post cards showing Black men hanging from trees with white people standing around and smiling. They sold for a dime or a dollar a piece in drugs stores and pharmacies. This is the kind of horrific behavior that Billie Holiday hoped to stop with her new song. And she felt that it wasn’t enough just to sing it for liberals in New York.
“Strange Fruit” originated as a protest poem against lynchings by Abel Meeropol and published under the title “Bitter Fruit” in January 1937. It was inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana.
Holiday said that singing it made her fearful of retaliation but, she did so because its imagery reminded her of her musician father Clarence Halliday, who fell ill with a lung disorder while on tour in Texas and was refused treatment at a local hospital. He was treated in the colored ward of the Veterans Hospital, but by then pneumonia had set in and without antibiotics, the illness was fatal. Because of the power of the song, Josephson drew up some rules: Holiday would close with it; the waiters would stop all service in advance; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday’s face; and there would be no encore. During the musical introduction to the song, Holiday stood with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer.
Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about the song, but the company feared reaction by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of its co-owned radio network, CBS. When Holiday’s producer John Hammond also refused to record it, she turned to her friend Milt Gabler, owner of the Commodore label. Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” for him a cappella and moved him to tears. Columbia gave Holiday a one-session release from her contract so she could record it; Frankie Newton’s eight-piece Café Society Band was used for the session in an arrangement by Newton. Because Gabler worried the song was too short, he asked pianist Sonny White to improvise an introduction. It was recorded on April 20, 1939. The 1939 recording eventually sold a million copies, becoming the biggest-selling recording of Holiday’s career.
Music: From 1939, Billie Holliday sings “Strange Fruit.”
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