Billie Holiday (19 page)

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Abel Meeropol, a New York City high school teacher who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, published a poem titled “Bitter Fruit” in the union magazine
New York Teacher
in January 1937. For years there had been efforts to make lynching a federal crime, but Congress and the president had refused to act on the matter. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to support the only bill that stood a chance of passing.) Meeropol wanted to do something to raise public awareness of these acts of violence, and in late 1938 he set the poem to music. After his wife and others sang it publicly, the New Theatre League published it under the title “Strange Fruit” in 1939. A choral arrangement was then made by Earl Robinson (the composer of “The House I Live In,” a song that Frank Sinatra later made famous), with alterations in the melody and harmony and with a line added from the Negro spiritual “Go Down, Moses.” It went through further musical changes by the Edward B. Marks Music Company when Allan published it with them in 1939.

The newly hired floor show director of Café Society, Robert Gordon, had heard it sung at a union meeting and showed it to Barney Josephson and Billie Holiday. Josephson claimed that she was initially not enthusiastic about adding it to her songlist, and when he heard her sing it with little emotion in one of its first performances, he assumed she didn't comprehend its meaning. Later, when she cried during one of her renditions of it, he concluded that she had finally come to understand it. It seems very strange that he assumed that any person of color in the United States in 1939 would not know the song's meaning. Billie certainly understood it on
the night in 1958 that she sang it for Maya
Angelou and her little son, and then explained its lyrics graphically to the child, upsetting the boy and Angelou. In
Lady Sings the Blues
Billie wrote that when she was first shown the song, she “dug it right off. It seemed to
spell out all the things that had killed Pop,” drawing attention to the death of her father, Clarence Holiday, whom she believed had died when he returned from World War I and was refused treatment at a white veterans hospital in Dallas.
She undoubtedly also knew the widely told account of Bessie Smith, who was believed at the time to have died under similar circumstances. Billie's only concern about the song, she said, was that audiences might hate it.

She had reason to worry, as nothing like this piece had ever been attempted in popular music. It was an adult song, one that could not be counted on to appeal to the key demographic of teenage fans, or even to most mature audiences. The genre that was to be called protest songs was not recognized until the late 1950s, so the shock of hearing such words and sentiments in pop ballad form was all the greater when she sang it in 1939. As Ralph Ellison wrote in
Going to the Territory
in 1986, “The ultimate goal of lynchers is that of achieving ritual purification through destroying the lynchers' identification with the basic humanity of their victims. Hence their deafness to cries of pain, their stoniness before the sight and stench of burning flesh . . .” Holiday's intention was to disrupt that ritual, but she also feared that if she interpreted a song in too emotional a manner, she would be accused of sentimentality, or worse. (
A few years later James Baldwin would write, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.”) She was changing the rules by which songs were presented to audiences, and more pointedly breaking the pop social contract, such as it was, between black singers and white audiences. She would not just be entertaining them, but instead bringing to light a subject scarcely even mentioned in song before, and one that could evoke powerful emotions. Café Society was one of the few nightclubs, white or black, where a song like this could be performed without potential for trouble.

Josephson made very sure that the audience got it. He programmed “Strange Fruit” at the end of every one of the three nightly sets, ensuring that it would be the final encore; he ordered the club's entire staff to cease activities while Billie sang; and he turned out all the house lights, with the exception of a small spotlight on her face. When the song ended, there was always a long silence, followed by a huge ovation. She then left the room without comment or acknowledgment, after which the musicians began playing in a lighter mood to help the audience resume normal club behavior.

The usual reaction to the song was sheer shock. Some in the audience were confused by the song, thinking in some way or another that it was a love song. Others, understanding it all too well, found it too painful to contemplate. Then there were those who walked out in disgust. Some clubs she later performed in asked her not to sing it. At times she chose to withhold it from the audience. “It has a way of
separating the straight people from the squares and the cripples,” she remarked.

There were songs before and after this one that protested many things, but if they lacked memorable or singable melodies they were quickly forgotten. The melody of “Strange Fruit” is not especially distinguished, but the shock of its words and its imagery make up for any deficiencies in the tune. The song even drew the attention of the FBI, who wanted to know if the Communist Party had prompted Lewis Allan to write it.

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When Allan read an
interview that Holiday gave to
PM
newspaper in 1945 in which she said that he had suggested that Sonny White, her piano accompanist boyfriend, “turn it into music,” and that with the help of music arranger Danny Mendelsohn they finished it in three weeks, he wrote a letter to the editor attempting to publicly claim his role as composer and lyricist, the first of many he would submit to publications for years to come. Allan always received royalties for both the words and the music, but what he was objecting to was what he considered the public slighting of his role as composer because Holiday claimed a
contribution to the song.
PM
's editors printed a response from Billie in which she explained that what she was talking about in the interview “was the interpretation of the song that she had worked on . . .”

When
Lady Sings the Blues
was published eleven years later and the same words from the
PM
interview appeared again, Allan demanded that Doubleday change the misattribution of “Strange Fruit” or he might take legal action. His claim was that when he proposed that Billie sing the song, the only thing she asked him about it was the meaning of the word “pastoral” (not a bad question, given the ambiguity of the term). Barney Josephson further supported Allan's claim when he repeated that at first Billie didn't understand the meaning of the song. When Arthur
Herzog Jr., a publicist and writer of song lyrics who had shared copyrights with Billie for “Don't Explain” and “God Bless the Child,” also began to ask for more credit for
his
work, Doubleday's lawyers feared the possibility of even more litigation. Although it was not an uncommon practice at the time for songwriters to give singers and bandleaders publishing credits to get them to record their songs, the lawyers were still concerned about these new claims.

At this point Bill Dufty rose in defense of his cowriter. First, he told the lawyers that songwriters were always offering her their songs, and when she agreed to sing them she and her musicians altered lyrics and/or music to suit her style. “Holiday doesn't sing Cole Porter, or George Gershwin or anybody else's melodies like they wrote them. She does her own variations.
If Allan wants to come into court with his sheet music, I'll bet we could play the Holiday record and if the melody was the same I'd eat the record. . . . The point . . . is that
nothing happened until Miss Holiday did the song, and did it her way, applying her own very formidable talents to it. Holiday doesn't sing songs; she transforms them.”

The question of the ownership of jazz musicians' variations on copyrighted melodies is part of a long-running debate. But at the time, there were other questions about the originality of “Strange Fruit.” Some saw similarities to “Sistren an' Brethren,” a song that had some currency in leftist circles:

When black face is lifted, Lord turnin' way . . .

Yo' Head 'tain' no apple fo' danglin' from a tree

Yo' Head 'tain' no apple fo' danglin' from a tree

Yo' body no carcass for barbacuin' on a spree

“Sistren an' Brethren” was published several times between 1931 and 1936, and it had also been sung and played by Sonny Terry in Jane Dudley's solo dance performance of
Harmonica Breakdown
in the mid-1930s. French listeners thought they heard other sources for “Strange Fruit” in the fifteenth-century poet François Villon's best-known work, “La ballade des pendus” (The Ballad of the Hanged) or in Théodore de Banville's nineteenth-century “Le verger du Roi Louis” (The Orchard of King Louis).

But Dufty felt there was something bigger and more malevolent at work in the questioning of Billie Holiday's role in the shaping of her recording of “Strange Fruit”:

For years both American fellow travelers and the FBI have been agreed on the myth that Allan wrote a song about lynching and Miss Holiday was Svengalied into singing it by certain operators. Herzog gets at this with most frankness when he says . . . that he heard that Josephson tried to get Holiday to do the song and “she didn't want to.” I have even heard it said that she sang this song for about a year before she really understood what she was doing.

This is what they seem to be getting at, one and all. And this is what enrages me. It gets to the point of the book (
Lady Sings the Blues
), and disputes all of it and its reason for being written—to bury exactly this kind of picture of her as a simple little barefoot girl.

Billie Holiday has been kicked around and harassed for years by the authorities. One of the reasons is that this song “Strange Fruit” made her well known and politically controversial. . . . It would have been so easy for Billie to please the authorities by telling them she didn't know what she had been doing, drop the song from her repertory . . . and start folding her hands in prayer and
singing one of Marian Anderson's non controversial hymns. She might even have gotten her police card . . .

But she didn't. She wouldn't. She knew more about lynching in her bones than any Communist could tell her from any books. She knew all about it and knew how a song about it should be sung. That's why I believe her version of the episode as it appears in the book. . . .

I know of no law which requires that a singer give any writer credit for holding the copyright on any song she sings or mentions.

Yet at the urging of Doubleday's attorneys on July 22, 1957, Billie and Dufty signed a cautiously worded statement that may have at least partially satisfied all parties:

We give this statement to clarify the facts about “Strange Fruit.” “Strange Fruit” is an original composition by Lewis Allan who is the sole author of “Strange Fruit.”

It was introduced to Miss Holiday by Barney Josephson and Mr. Allan in February of 1939. This is the first time she had heard it or seen it. She introduced it later at Café Society.

Aggrieved though Allan was about what he saw as Holiday's claims, he was also backhandedly sympathetic later on: “
I can understand the psychological reasons why the peripheral truths and actual facts surrounding her life were unimportant to her and why she took liberties with them or invented some of them out of whole cloth. . . . I did not hold any empathy toward Billie Holiday for her lapses into fancy nor would I want the fact that she made untrue statements bruited about now that she is dead.”

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The idea of recording “Strange Fruit” was raised by Billie at a recording session for Vocalion Records in 1939 when they found they still had
time left over after they'd finished the planned songs. But the producer felt the song was too radical, and allowed the musicians to leave the session early rather than record it. John Hammond has also been blamed for turning the song down, but he would never have objected to the subject as such, especially since as a reporter for the
New Masses
he had gone to Alabama to cover the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial that involved fabricated accusations of rape against a group of young black men. He did, however, think the poem the song was based on was third-rate, and that the song itself was wrong for Billie. Later he said that, though its success had helped her reach a white audience, it had turned her from a jazz singer into a mannered chanteuse.

It was that rejection that led her to drop by the Commodore Music Shop after the recording session and complain to Milt Gabler, the store's owner. Gabler was well known among jazz musicians who regularly gathered at the store to talk and listen to new recordings. (
Time
magazine called them “loafers.”) Gabler had set up his own small recording company, Commodore Records, while he was running the music shop. Later he was hired by Decca Records, where he produced a long list of hits by Lionel Hampton, the Andrews Sisters, Red Foley, the Weavers, Peggy Lee, the Ink Spots, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Jordan, and Bill Haley. But his passion was always jazz, and he had seen Billie many times at Café Society. When she told him that Vocalion had declined “Strange Fruit,” he offered to record it for his own company. His decision was
not based on making a social statement; it was about getting a rising star on his own label: “I did it for kicks. . . . It was exciting.” Hammond got permission from Vocalion for Gabler to record her, because Gabler was a good customer of their record-pressing plant and presumably because Hammond approved it. Gabler hired the same musicians who backed her nightly at Café Society to accompany her.