Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Douglas Henry Daniels

David Margolick. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Running P, 2000. 160 pp. $18.95.

David Margolick has written a remarkable history of a unique song, its genesis, its recordings, the unusual emotions it stirred, and its legacy. The author meticulously analyzes the motivations of the singers and responses of listeners to "Strange Fruit," as well as its powerful impact upon both from the late 1930s. Of course, many myths surround the song, including Holiday's taking credit for writing it or claiming it was composed especially for her. Actually the history of the song started when a left-wing political activist, composer, and school teacher, Abel Meeropol (using the nom de plume Lewis Allan), saw a photo of a lynching, an image which "haunted him for days."

Meeropol wrote a poem, "Bitter Fruit," which first saw light in a teachers' union publication in early 1937. He then composed the melody, it was performed, and he introduced it to Billie Holiday, who in 1939 was appearing at Cafe Society, a Greenwich Village nightclub that was politically left wing and celebrated the unconventional. Margolick discusses the various accounts of her response, including the oft-stated belief that she did not really understand its implications. He shows that the opposite is true, by revealing the degree to which the singer was a "race woman," dedicated in her own way to furthering the Civil Rights struggle. While critic John Hammond believed that this song "was the worst thing that ever happened" to her, Holiday responded to his condescension with, "'Aw, John's square, John's just rich, John wants to run my life, tries to tell me and everybody else what to do.'"

One can question the author's statement that "Strange Fruit" is "too explicitly political and polemical to be jazz." (One wonders what he thinks of "Tears for Johannesburg," or "Freedom Suite," or "Alabama," or, for that matter, "Sixteen Tons.") In any case, Holiday's racial pride and motivation are well-known to readers of the contemporary newspapers or recent biographies of the singer. Perhaps it is more accurate to view her as an evangelist, for, as labor organizer Warren Morse suggested, devout fans invariably carried the song with them wherever they went.

"Strange Fruit" was one of the few tools in Holiday's political arsenal, other than a willingness to brawl to defend herself, and she used it both to reward the faithful who requested it and to punish rude and inattentive listeners. As her pianist Mal Waldron recalled, "'There was a certain willful purpose when she sang that song.'" It was always performed at the end of her set, even when, irritated one night in Los Angeles by an obnoxious Hollywood audience, she sang only this one song and exited.

The strength of the work is to be found in the comments of the cast of characters who witnessed her performances and in the variety of their responses--from writer Maya Angelou to disc jockey Holmes "Daddy O' Daylie," to critic Leonard Feather. Some singers regularly included it in their repertoire Gosh White, Nina Simone, and Cassandra Wilson), while others sang it only once (Eartha Kitt); some avoided it altogether (Lena Home). Margolick's book is a superb work which does justice to a powerful song that penetrated deeply into the psyche of a nation which continues to deny and repress its memories of its genocidal practices.