- Billie Holiday. 100th anniversary of pain
- The death of George Floyd: a change of mind
From the southern trees hangs a strange fruit, / there is blood on its branches and blood on its roots, / black bodies that sway the southern breeze, / strange is the fruit that hangs from the poplars.
USA, first third of the 20th century. Black men sway bleeding and mutilated at the festive sight of whites. They have been guilty of "arrogance," answering loudly to a target, looking at a woman of superior race, or buying a car. The south of the country is a harvest of vertical corpses.
No one is too shocked. The southern states experience the crime of mobs as a spectacle and the northern states look the other way as thousands of black men and women die in the terror of a popular sport: lynching .
And then, a song begins to change everything.
Strange fruit.
And a voice, black and slow, shows it to the world with the tear of jazz.
Billie Holiday.
Seven decades later, the guts of the United States continue to twist racism. Blacks no longer hang from the poplars, now they die horizontally on the asphalt at the hands of the Police. Shot, tortured, beaten ... or suffocated. Racism around the neck. Again.
Perhaps, before dying under the knee of a white cop, George Floyd had heard Strange fruit many times in his life . And maybe he had read stories from the life of Billie Holiday. Now a book about the singer uncovers some of the song's secrets.
And vice versa.
It is titled With Billie Holiday, a Choral Biography (Books of the Kultrum) and is a deep investigation into the life and death of that throat. The writer, Julia Blackburn, has dived in unusual material, more than 150 interviews that journalist Linda Kuehl conducted in the 70s with friends, enemies, police, drug addicts, musicians, neighbors and scholars of Billie Holiday.
The material was overwhelming even for Kuehl herself, two shoe boxes filled with tape recorders, newspaper clippings, medical records, police files, legal documents, court records, letters, shopping lists, postcards, and even notes from the assistant by Billie Holiday. The journalist stitched together dozens of pages and faced herself and third parties for the responsibility of having to pronounce on the relevance and value of the sources. Even two editors, including the one who had commissioned the work, rejected the eclectic portrait because it was " a mess where the reader is easily lost." One night in 1979, Linda Kuehl sat on the windowsill of the third floor of the New York hotel she had traveled to see a performance by Count Basie and jumped into space .
After the suicide, Kuehl's family kept all the material she had accumulated and years later she sold it to a private collector. Julia Blackburn found him and managed to let him consult a mountain of folders and documents. And after hundreds of dives in that material, Blackburn has composed With Billie Holiday, a coral biography , a testament as acid as it is warm about that woman and her circumstances.
And among them is a song, just three minutes that changed Billie Holiday's life and helped improve the Story.
One day in 1935, Abel Meeropol, a Jewish teacher who taught English in the morning and wrote poems and did clandestine left-wing politics at night, saw the picture of a man hanging on a tree after lynching. He was so impressed with the image for so many days that he wrote three wounded stanzas, hot, angry and combative, an ink shot against the barbarians.
Julia Blackburn remembers in her book that Meeropol himself recounted that he set the poem to music and that his wife, Anne, sang it at family gatherings .
So probably a white person, Anne Meeropol (we're in the 30s, husband's last name, of course) was the first woman to sing Strange fruit . But no one found out. According to Opera Mundi magazine , two years later, the poem was published in The New York Teacher , a union newspaper, under the title Bitter Fruit . Lara Duncan, a black singer, incorporated her to the repertoire of the teachers' union choir , which organized shows where funds were raised for the anti-fascist struggle of the Spanish Civil War.
The co-producer of those concerts, Robert Gordon, was also the show manager of a New York club that was going to be key in the history of this song: the Café Society .
Run by Barney Josephson, a former shoe salesman, the Society was a peaceful meeting place for blacks and whites , a haven for jazz intellectuals, writers, artists, labor leaders, and lovers. Charles Chaplin, Errol Flyn or Lauren Bacall were seen at their tables. Lena Horne, Teddy Wilson or Sarah Vaugham were applauded on stage.
And obviously Billie Holiday.
One night in early April 1939 , someone invited Meeropol to the Café Society. Josephson wanted Billie to sing Strange fruit , and Meeropol sat at the piano with her. And they rehearsed it together.
Julia Blackburn's research tells that, at first, Billie Holiday did not feel very comfortable with the song because it did not resemble any of the ones she had performed in her life. He was 24 years old , but he already accumulated a repertoire of enormous music that did not correspond to his scars of abuse, violence, racism, prison and drugs .
However, a few days later, Meeropol coincided with Holiday again, and then something happened. "Billie did an amazing, dramatic and exciting performance. Her way of singing showed the bitterness and horror that I had wanted to express with the song ».
As soon as the performance ended, everything fell silent at the venue.
Silence.
Seconds later, someone began to applaud timidly and the rest of the room added to form an uncensored ovation.
A revolution was born in three stanzas.
Bucolic scene in the dashing South, / bulging eyes and a grimace in the mouth, / the smell of magnolias is fresh and sweet, / and the sudden smell of burned meat.
People started going to the Café Society only to hear Strange fruit sung by that trance black woman. Holiday herself would later say that the song reminded her of the death of her father, who "because of southern segregation laws" was denied medical care in a hospital occupied by white patients . Perhaps that is why some witnesses saw her cry more than once while singing this anti-racist hymn.
The song thrilled and encouraged Human Rights defenders, outraged supremacists and made the big record labels uncomfortable because they feared they would lose sales in the southern states. Columbia Records declined to record it and left the matter to an alternative jazz company, the Commodore label. On April 20, 1939, Billie and eight musicians displayed the pain of a piano, a trumpet, a alto sax, two tenor saxes, a guitar, a bass, and a drums, and recorded four minutes against a century of slavery.
From there, Billie Holiday and Strange fruit never separated. The artist closed her shows with that song. The waiters stopped serving, the audience was silent, the venue was completely dark and a spotlight illuminated Billie's face. The musicians made an introduction, she appeared, stood in front of the mike, began to sing and three minutes later she left the stage between absolute cheers.
But he never came back on stage.
Everything was dark and silent.
Black.
Some clubs were reluctant to the song, but Billie Holiday included a clause in their contracts to ensure that the climax of their nights would be that strange fruit. A court ruling prohibited her from singing Strange fruit at the Philadelphia Earle Theater, but Billie disobeyed her and sang it. The next day, she was arrested and sent to prison.
All the US senators received a copy of the disc as a protest against lynchings, but the sewers of power continued to mount anti-communist campaigns , closed clubs like the Café Society and complicated the life of Billie Holiday. " Strange Fruit was one of the reasons why the FBI lunged for me."
Some purists say that Strange fruit is not exactly a jazz piece.
Who knows.
Along the way, giants like Casandra Wilson, Carmen McRae, Nina Simone or Sting also made her their own. And the British magazine Q Magazine placed it among the 10 songs that changed the world.
In the late 1970s, sitting in an asylum ward, Meeropol was already prey to Alzheimer's. His son visited him frequently, but sometimes he got a little closer to his father and played some chords on the piano.
And then old Abel would react, look up and sing ... Strange fruit.
Fruit that will be the pasture of crows, / prey to the rain, toy of the wind, / fruit that the sun will rot, that will fall from the tree. / How strange and bitter is this harvest!
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