It has been argued that popular song rather than cinema is the great 20th-century art form, and it is certainly the case that the lives of many westerners are soundtracked with memories of songs, from Chevalier and Dietrich to Andy Williams and the Stones. While it is true that many of these songs may remind you of young and happy moments, it is also fair to add that most of them have nothing terribly profound to say. There are some magnificent exceptions, however, and ‘Strange Fruit’, first recorded by Billie Holliday in 1939, is one such exception.
It is still a common assumption that Billie Holliday wrote the song, or perhaps adapted an original text, but this is not the case and the story of the song’s creation is now undisputed. (Holliday’s authorship is asserted in her 1956 ghostwritten autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, but the work was ghostwritten to the extent that she would later claim ‘I ain’t never read that book’).
The original source is a poem called ‘Strange Fruit’, written by the young Jewish poet and communist Abel Meeropol (who also wrote under the name of Lewis Allan, the first names given to his still-born children). The poem was inspired by a 1930 photograph of the lynching of two young black men in Indiana. Copies of such photographs from the 1920s and 1930s were very popular in the American south, and the images can be easily found on the web. One particularly disturbing example shows a mother and her child hanging from a bridge. In many cases, the hanged victims are surrounded by happy whites, smiling and waving at the camera. They sometimes have their children with them. The horrible truth is that in large parts of the US the hanging of black people in public was a family occasion; lynching was part of the social fabric of the American south in the early 20th century. ‘I wrote "Strange Fruit", said Meeropol, ‘because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and i hate the people who perpetuate it’.
Meeropol recognized that he had written something that could make his fellow white citizens more aware, and decided he had to turn it into a song, which quickly became a popular protest song in New York (and was sung at Madison Square Gardens by Laura Duncan), prior to Meeropol turning up in April 1939 at a New York club frequented by Holliday called Cafe Society. This club, founded by another Jewish socialist, Barney Josephson, has been described as a ‘milestone’ in American integration between black and white, a brave attempt at creating an environment in which white and black could mix socially.
It was Josephson who introduced the two: Meeropol sang the song for Holliday who, Josephson would later say, seems at first not to have understood ‘what the hell the song was about’, with its ironic reference to ‘pastoral’ and the ‘gallant south’. A few days later, Meeropol returned to the club to hear Holliday sing his masterwork: ‘She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation of the song which could jolt the audience out of its complacency anywhere. This was exactly what I wanted the song to do and why I wrote it. Billie Holliday’s styling fulfilled the bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have. The audience gave a tremendous ovation’.
What Happened Next
Released in 1939, the record eventually sold over a million copies and became one of the most influential protest songs ever written, thanks to its exceptionally rare combination of potent lyrics, a decent melodic line and a beautiful voice. Protest song became commercial as well as an expression of idealism: the song is thus arguably the first major popular blow for civil rights, a song that previously non-political citizens could find themselves humming: just what Meeropol hoped would happen.
Meeropol also wrote (with Earl Robinson) the civil rights anthem ‘The House I Live In’ in 1943, which was used for a 1945 11-minute movie of the same name, which consisted largely of Frank Sinatra singing about religious tolerance to (white) children. The effect of Meeropol’s song in this brief movie – the song enjoyed a brief resurgence in the US after 9/11 – was somewhat lessened by the removal of a stanza celebrating racial harmony (the reference to white and black living side by side was also cut from Sinatra’s first recording of the song). The movie’s distributor felt that America was not yet ready for an explicit message on racial harmony. A furious Meeropol had to be escorted from the cinema when he saw what been done to his song.
In 1953, Meeropol and his wife Anne adopted Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two children after their parents’ execution for treason. Meeropol’s significance to the American civil rights movement has been largely underplayed in the US, perhaps because it remains too embarrassing to give due credit to a communist.