Maeve Dowd '23, Loomis Chaffee
Lifetime.
The United States was permanently shaken by Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, a slow blues song about lynchings and the sad, unjust fate of a black person’s life.
Billie Holiday was a black female artist popular in the mid 1930s-60s, and her songs hold a deep cultural significance. Most notably, her song Strange Fruit (1939) reflected the grim reality of black people in the United States. It paints a vivid picture of lynchings in the south, which were very prevalent at the time. Though the song was released before the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, it helped catalyze social justice and forced Americans to confront and recognize the widespread barbaric acts that plagued the U.S.
The song’s lyrics derive from Abel Meeropol’s poem Strange Fruit (initially Bitter Fruit) that he published in 1937. Meeropol was a jewish school teacher from the Bronx, and when he saw a photograph that depicted Thomas Shipp’s and Abraham Smith’s lynched bodies, he responded with a protest poem. Its sour tone, contrasting imagery, and comparison between rotting fruit and beaten bodies encapsulate the nature of lynchings in the South. “Pastoral scene of the gallant South / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,” depicts the dichotomy between the pleasant southern atmosphere experienced by white people and the brutality facing black people.
Billie Holiday partnered with the recording label “Commodore”, and when she released the song in 1939, it rocketed through the charts: about a million copies were sold. Despite censorship by numerous radio stations, enough of them played the piece so that Americans nationwide caught on to the lyrics. Holiday was already an established artist and performed regularly in nightclubs, where the song would be her closing. Her passionate voice and intense lyrics shocked those who heard it.
Initially, Holiday hesitated to sing Strange Fruit in a public setting, fearing the consequences as a black woman for the song’s intense, forceful descriptions. She did end up receiving criticism for her bold move, with even Times Magazine calling the song “a prime piece of propaganda.”
Though it was not mainly used in protest marches, Strange Fruit sparked more conversation in the Anti-Lynching Movement and inspired other artists, such as Nina Simone, to perform and spread the political piece. Its meaning still remains relevant to our world today, with artists like Rapsody continuing to reproduce the song onstage.
Sources
Comments