by John Szwed
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.
There is no question that the Commodore recording of “Strange Fruit” predictably stunned listeners, in part because it fell outside the standard pop paradigm. But some also argued that, whatever the emotional and political edge of the words, it was not a jazz song, maybe not even a song sung in a black American style. Yet throughout the record there are downward arcs of notes and slight bendings of pitch characteristic of the blues, especially on the words “Southern,” “South,” “sweet and fresh,” “of burning flesh,” and others. The recording begins with a certain formality that confirms that considerable thought and preparation with her pianist and arranger had been involved, but that same formality might also suggest that the song was not intended to be either jazz or pop. The vocal is withheld for seventy seconds, a fourth of the song’s length, while Frankie Newton’s quietly floating trumpet introduces Sonny White’s stark outline of the melody on piano, accompanied by muted drumrolls much like those heard at New Orleans funerals. When Holiday comes in, she seems to be bearing witness to what she is describing, her vocal a near recitative, flattening the melody, approximating speech. The melody slowly rises through the second and third verses and widens, reaching an abrupt leap near the end. This kind of dramatic structure is not unknown in jazz improvisations; Coleman Hawkins’s “Body and Soul” follows a similar pattern, but somehow it seems more surprising when employed by a vocalist, especially this vocalist. The melody she creates is quite different from the original composition, different enough that she might well have claimed composition of the music; her continuous variation makes the melody seem through composed, not repeating and recycling like most pop songs.
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It is not unusual for a singer to become strongly identified with a song. But the identification of Billie Holiday with this particular song made it especially difficult for many to believe that it had been written by a white man. If anything, this identity with her continued to grow, and by the time the movie Lady Sings the Blues appeared, Billie was portrayed as witnessing a lynching while she was on tour with a band in the South.
Once she had realized how important the song was to audiences and to her career, she became angry when she heard that the folksinger Josh White was singing it at Café Society after she left, and she demanded he stop performing it. A strong claim on a song made famous by a certain singer is common among those who make a living from songs written for them or given to them. Billie had learned this early on, when Ethel Waters came onstage to forbid her from singing “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” which Waters considered her own. White had never met Billie, however, and when they both turned up at photographer Gjon Mili’s loft for a “Life Goes to a Party” session for Life magazine, he backed her on guitar while she sang some blues, a rarity for her. He managed to convince her, he said, that more people needed to hear “Strange Fruit” because it was more than just a song. The Washington Afro-American called it a sermon of democracy.
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Holiday’s recording initially sold some twenty thousand copies, but it has been reissued again and again and shows no sign of slackening. It’s been recorded by dozens of singers over the years, though usually in far more dramatic form than Holiday’s (Nina Simone’s highly cinematic version, for example), and sometimes with some of the stronger words omitted. On the other hand, there were those who disliked the song—Paul Robeson, Albert Murray, and Billie’s mother; others, like Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, for many years found it too painful to sing. The song was formally and informally banned from airplay in several countries. Though few reviews of the record were openly hostile, some were perverse. An article titled “Strange Song” in Time led with: “Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice. . . . She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.” The song, Time said, “provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a prime piece of musical propaganda,” and “Billie liked its dirge-like blues melody, was not so much interested in the song’s social content.” The African American press was far more sympathetic to the song’s content, but a headline from the Atlanta Daily World could still read like something from Variety: “Billie Holiday Records First Song About Lynching Evils: Buxom Singer Chirps It Nightly at Café Society.”
When Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, a novel about Southern intolerance of racial and sexual difference, appeared in 1944, she acknowledged that her first title, Jordan Is So Chilly, was not acceptable to her publisher. It was suggested she change it to the title of Holiday’s song. Writer Harvey Breit tried to bring Billie and Lillian together to talk, and though he made two appointments for them, Billie failed to show. Breit later wrote in a review of Billie’s autobiography that at the time he was annoyed, but after reading her book he knew why she hadn’t appeared: “Miss Holiday was in a whole lot of trouble.”
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At the “Strange Fruit” session, Gabler made two 78-rpm records with four songs. “Strange Fruit” was shrewdly coupled with “Fine and Mellow,” a blues that became Commodore Records’ first hit, which Billie had written in the folk tradition of linking together small portions of other blues with some lines of her own (and if Milt Gabler is to be believed, also one of his own: “He’s got high-draped pants . . . ,” etc.). The last line of the song, the clincher, “Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on,” most likely came from Ethel Waters’s 1923 recording “Ethel Sings ’Em,” as did the stop-time chorus of the song. “It was one of the first modern blues,” said Gabler. “It wasn’t with an old-time piano player and a muted trumpet. We had an arrangement.” When Meeropol heard about the planned recording of “his” song, he insisted on being paid in advance, which was not the practice in the record business. Lawyers were consulted and warnings issued, but Gabler went ahead with the recording and Meeropol received royalties in the usual manner.
These songs plus the two others she recorded at that session, “Yesterdays” and “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” became part of her core repertoire for the rest of her life. She had earlier asked Hammond if she could be backed by a string section, something only a very few top singers had been granted, none of them jazz artists. Strings meant extra expense and added a touch of class that ran against the grain of jazz orthodoxy. But Billie’s request made sense to Gabler, who viewed her as a ballad singer, and maybe even a torch singer, who could become widely popular in that genre. That was the music she told him she wanted to sing and the career she wanted to have.
Apparently they were both correct, for some of her best and certainly most popular work was later recorded with Gabler after he became a producer at Decca Records, where he set her against violins and in elaborate arrangements by Toots Camarata, Gordon Jenkins, and others. With these recordings she found new audiences, who most likely had never heard “Strange Fruit.” At the same time, she lost favor with
some jazz fans who thought that such Euro-trappings were a betrayal. A decade later, Charlie Parker’s recording with strings would likewise not find much acceptance with hard-core jazz fans. The esteemed jazz producer George Avakian was still bothered by that Parker session when he chose to pass on a chance to produce Holiday’s 1958 Columbia LP Lady in Satin album, which also featured strings, in spite of his love for classical music.
There had also been complaints about a few very slow-tempo records she had made between 1939 and 1942, and now such recordings by her were growing in number. (Her March 25, 1944, recording of “How Am I to Know?” on Commodore Records is a good example of state-of-the-art slow.) One night in 1941 Teddy Wilson visited Café Society to see Billie, and when they talked between sets she told him that she had finally found her voice. This was the way she wanted to sing.
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“Gloomy Sunday,” a Holiday recording that gained notoriety to the point of becoming a world-wide legend, is often passed over by Holiday’s chroniclers. Yet she said that this song, a grim and painfully slow account of a lost lover and the rituals involved in preparation for suicide, was one of her best recordings. The second of her “storytelling songs,” recorded for Columbia-affiliated OKeh Records on August 7, 1941, it followed “God Bless the Child” and preceded “Strange Fruit.” The song rapidly became internationally known and was alleged to have been banned on a few radio stations when claims spread about listeners becoming so depressed by it that they killed themselves. Scant evidence exists to prove such assertions, and even though it may not have been widely banned, the legend persists as strongly as ever. (This song along with “Strange Fruit,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” and “Love for Sale” were the four Holiday songs banned by some radio stations.)