Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Taking a historical bite out of ‘Strange Fruit’

Friday, May 19, 2000 | 9:29 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Quiet now. She's about to sing that song. Cafe Society, the progressive jazz club in hip-lefty New York, goes dark. A single spotlight hits the stage, framing the face of Billie Holiday.

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit," she sings in a straightforward bluesy-jazz style. "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

It's that song, "Strange Fruit," the one about the lynching of Southern blacks. The song that has everyone talking. The lyrics are bitter and powerful, Holiday's performance understated and elegant, not disguising the horror of the subject in layers of ostentatious vocal artistry.

It's 1939, 1940. The country is decades from desegregation, decades from Rosa Parks and Selma, Ala., and "I have a dream." The Tuskegee Institute figures that 3,833 people were lynched in America from 1889 to 1940, most of them in the South, most of them black. Still, Congress refuses to pass an anti-lynching bill.

In the midst of this, a singer sang a song. And, as author David Margolick makes clear in "Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights" (Running Press, $16.95), his slim biography not of Holiday but of the song, things changed. Margolick cites a parade of jazz experts, political activists, historians and culturatti regarding the song's eye-opening impact.

One of the many subtle ironies, subplots and sidebars that surround the song -- an underbrush of myths, misunderstandings and outright lies cropped up around it almost immediately, some foisted by Holiday herself -- is that it was written not by a black musician or anyone else personally scarred by Jim Crow, but by that most maligned of creatures, a white New York liberal.

The late Abel Meeropol was a Jewish schoolteacher with a dual career as a songwriter and poet (for which he used the pseudonym Lewis Allan). He wrote numerous songs, most forgotten now. A political activist as well (he was a closet commie), Meeropol may have been inspired, in part, by outrage over a brutal double lynching in Marion, Ill., in 1930.

"I wrote 'Strange Fruit' because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetrate it," he once said. Holiday first sang it, at Cafe Society, in 1939.

There are numerous testimonials to Holiday's and the song's power, as a record, as a stage performance, even as an impromptu number at private parties, where it would hush the revelers. It was "the beginning of the civil rights movement," says legendary record producer Ahmet Ertegun.

Of course, such a song was bound to receive a mixed response, and Margolick resists any urge he may have had to play up his subject's importance by watering down the negativity. He quotes record producers dismissing the song as too polemical or melodically slight. He notes that Holiday was accosted, sometimes physically, by people who disagreed with its sentiment. One nightclub patron heckled her mercilessly until none other than Bob Hope shushed him.

Even Time magazine piled on. "Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice," the arbiter of Establishment values sniffed more than a half-century ago. "She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing." (She loved to shoot heroin, too, and had a penchant for hooking up with Mr. Wrong, and her tragic decline is a shadow story around the edges of Margolick's main tale.)

But this is more than a recounting of good and bad reviews, more than a writer ushering a song into the American pantheon, where it already resides anyway. It's a story about truth and falsehood (Holiday variously claimed that she'd partly written the song or that she'd had it written for her; Meeropol spent much of his life seeking proper recognition), cruel self-delusion (in the land of the free, many clubs wouldn't let Holiday sing "Strange Fruit"), a nation awakening to its own dark side, and the redemptive power of great art.

"In the 40 years since (Holiday's) death," Margolick writes, noting that the song has been covered by numerous artists, including Sting and Tori Amos, "audiences have continued to applaud, respect and be moved by this disturbing ballad ... as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians and other listeners, both black and white, in America and throughout the world."

See, times really do change. And so, even, does Time, which in December named "Strange Fruit" the song of the century.

Reading Matters

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That issue is also worth the cover price for a thumping good profile of Philadelphia's police commish, and for a touching essay by writer Alec Wilkinson about raising a son with a sensory disorder.