Background on STRANGE FRUIT
Background on STRANGE FRUIT
So horrific are the images conjured up by 'Strange Fruit' that Billie Holiday always performed it with her eyes closed. Caryl Phillips, who used the title for his first play, traces the song's dark history…
In late 1979, I finished writing my first stage play, but long before I put the final full stop in place, I had decided that I was going to call it Strange Fruit. The drama concerns the relationship between a single mother and her two rebellious sons, both of whom are in danger of "going off the rails". The mother is understandably worried, and she begins to question the nature of her relationship with her children. I took the title of the play from the Billie Holiday song of the same name, but at the time I knew very little about the full history of "Strange Fruit". I understood that the name of the song made reference to racially motivated American violence, but "Strange Fruit" also seemed to me to be evocative of the puzzling situation that many parents unwittingly find themselves in with their children and, this being the case, it seemed to me to be an apt title.
The play premiered at the Sheffield Crucible Studio Theatre in October 1980, and a year or so later it was produced in London. I don't remember doing any press interviews, so no journalist ever asked me what I intended by the name of the play. Perhaps more surprisingly, neither the director nor any of the actors ever questioned me about the significance of the title. Accordingly, I just assumed that everybody understood that the play's title made reference to the dilemma of intergenerational communication, and, this being the case, I was perfectly content.
Two years later, in early 1983, I was in Alabama, being driven the 130 miles from Birmingham to Tuskegee by the father of one of the four girls who had been killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963. Chris McNair is a gregarious and charismatic man who, at the time, was running for political office; he was scheduled to make a speech at the famous all-black college, Tuskegee Institute. That morning, as he was driving through the Alabama countryside, he took the opportunity to quiz me about my life and nascent career as a writer. He asked me if I had published any books yet, and I said no. But I quickly corrected myself and sheepishly admitted that my first play had just been published. When I told him the title he turned and stared at me, then he looked back to the road. "So what do you know about lynching?" I swallowed deeply and looked through the car windshield as the southern trees flashed by. I knew full well that "Strange Fruit" meant something very different in the US; in fact, something disturbingly specific in the south, particularly to African Americans. A pleasant, free-flowing conversation with my host now appeared to be shipwrecked on the rocks of cultural appropriation.
I had always assumed that Billie Holiday composed the music and lyrics to "Strange Fruit". She did not. The song began life as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a schoolteacher who was living in the Bronx and teaching English at the De Witt Clinton High School, where his students would have included the Academy award-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, the playwright Neil Simon, and the novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Meeropol was a trade union activist and a closet member of the Communist Party; his poem was first published in January 1937 as "Bitter Fruit", in a union magazine called the New York School Teacher. In common with many Jewish people in the US during this period, Meeropol was worried (with reason) about anti-semitism and chose to publish his poem under the pseudonym "Lewis Allan", the first names of his two stillborn children.
Meeropol was motivated to write the poem after seeing a photograph of two black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been lynched in Marion, Indiana on August 7 1930. Their bodies were hanging limply from a tree. The image greatly disturbed him, and his poem opens with the following lines:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Hoping to reach a wider audience, Meeropol set his poem to music, and the song "Strange Fruit" was first performed at a New York City Teachers Union meeting. It created an immediate stir. Meeropol sang it himself, but as "Strange Fruit" grew in popularity, his wife began to perform the song.
According to figures kept by Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, between 1889 and 1940, 3,833 people were lynched in the US - the overwhelming majority of the victims being in the southern states, and black. The brutality of this mob "justice" invariably went unpunished, and when Meeropol was asked, in 1971, why he wrote the song, he replied: "Because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it." Those who heard "Strange Fruit" in the late 30s were shocked, for the true barbarity of southern violence was generally only discussed in black newspapers. To be introduced to such realities by a song was unprecedented, and was considered by many, including leftwing supporters of Meeropol, to be in poor taste.
At this time, 24-year-old Billie Holiday was headlining at a recently opened Greenwich Village nightclub called Cafe Society. It was the only integrated nightclub in New York City, and a place that advertised itself as "the wrong place for the Right people". The manager of the club, Barney Josephson, introduced Billie Holiday to Meeropol and his new song, which had an immediate impact on her. She decided to sing it at Cafe Society, where it was received with perfect, haunting silence. Soon she was closing her shows with the song. It was understood that only when the waiters had stopped serving, and the lights dimmed to a single spotlight, would she begin singing, with her eyes closed. Once she had finished, she would walk off stage and never return to take a bow.
The song was revolutionary - not only because of the explicit nature of the lyrics, but because it effectively reversed the black singer's relationship with a white audience. Traditionally, singers such as Billie Holiday were expected to entertain and to "serve" their audiences. With this song, however, Holiday found a means by which she could demand that the audience stop and listen to her, and she was able to force them to take on board something with which they were not comfortable. She often used the song as a hammer with which to beat what she perceived to be ignorant audiences, and her insistence on singing the song with such gravitas meant that she was not always safe while performing "Strange Fruit". Some members of her audience did not fully appreciate her treating them to this particular song when they had stepped out for the evening to hear "Fine and Mellow" and other cocktail-lounge ditties.
Holiday was keen to record "Strange Fruit" on her label, Columbia, but her producer, John Hammond, was concerned that the song was too political and he refused to allow her to go into the studio with it. But the singer would not back down. In April 1939, she recorded "Strange Fruit" for a specialty label, Commodore Records. It became a bestseller and was thereafter forever associated with her.
When Josephson introduced her to Meeropol and his song, Holiday knew that she could sing this song like nobody else could, or would, ever sing it. She glimpsed truth in the song and that was enough. She, perhaps more than most artists, understood that if you live the truth, then you will pay a price, but without the truth there is no art. Whenever she performed the song, she could see the two teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, hanging from the tree - which is, of course, why she closed her eyes whenever she sang it.
Five years later, a southern writer published a novel called Strange Fruit. Lillian Smith was born in 1897 in Florida, the eighth of 10 children. Hers was a relatively comfortable, white, middle-class background, and her childhood was divided between Florida and a summerhouse in the mountains of Georgia, where her father ran a camp for girls called LaurelFalls. As a young woman, Smith travelled to Baltimore to study music, and she then spent a few years teaching in China. In 1925, she returned to the US and became principal of the Laurel Falls Camp, placing a great emphasis on the arts in the curriculum, and on music and drama in particular. In 1936, having grown increasingly aware of southern injustice and oppression, Smith founded a literary magazine, Pseudopodia, which the following year changed its name to the North Georgia Review, and in 1942 became South Today. Smith published writing by blacks and whites that agitated for social change in the south, and her politically progressive magazine quickly gained notoriety.
In 1944, she published Strange Fruit, which told the story of an interracial relationship in the south before the first world war. The narrative charts the mounting violence that eventually overtakes the relationship, and it thematically examines the same issues that inform Meeropol's lyrics. Despite being banned by many book stores, the novel was the nation's bestselling title in 1944 and sold over 1m copies. It was adapted for the Broadway stage, and by the time of Smith's death in 1966, it had sold 3m copies.
In the year of her death, while being honoured by the all-black FiskUniversity in Tennessee, Smith succinctly identified the enemy against which she had worked as both a teacher and a southern writer. "Segregation is evil," she declared. "There is no pattern of life which can dehumanise men as can the way of segregation." And segregation's natural corollary is, of course, violence.
On that hot southern morning, as Chris McNair drove us through the Alabama countryside, I knew little about the background to the Billie Holiday song, and I had never heard of Lillian Smith. After a few minutes of silence, McNair began to talk to me about the history of violence against African-American people in the southern states, particularly during the era of segregation. This was a painful conversation for a man who had lost his daughter to a Ku Klux Klan bomb. I had, by then, confessed to him that my play had nothing to do with the US, with African Americans, with racial violence, or even with Billie Holiday. And, being a generous man, he had nodded patiently, and then addressed himself to my education on these matters. However, I did have some knowledge of the realities of the south - not only from my reading, but from an incident a week earlier. While I was staying at a hotel in Atlanta, a young waiter had warned me against venturing out after dark because the Klan would be rallying on Stone Mountain that evening, and after their gathering they often came downtown for some "fun". However, as the Alabama countryside continued to flash by, I understood that this was not the time to do anything other than listen to McNair.
That afternoon, in a packed hall in Tuskegee Institute, McNair began what sounded to me like a typical campaign speech. He was preaching to the converted, and a light shower of applause began to punctuate his words as he hit his oratorical stride. But then he stopped abruptly, and he announced that today, for the first time, he was going to talk about his daughter. "I don't know why, because I've never done this before. But Denise is on my mind." He studiously avoided making eye contact with me, but, seated in the front row, I felt uneasily guilty. A hush fell over the audience. "You all know who my daughter is. Denise McNair. Today she would have been 31 years old." Indeed, strange fruit.
RESOURCE: order through pbs.org - Strange Fruit is the first documentary exploring the history and legacy of the Billie Holiday classic