Strange Fruit: A Song That Reverberates in the American Soul
Most of the lyrics to ''What's Really Going On,'' a cry of pain and a
plea for understanding, come directly from Mr. Wiggins, who was nominated
for a Grammy as a member of Tony, Toni, Tone in 1994. But as his story
unfolds, a chorus chimes in insistently in the background, repeating a
familiar refrain from another songwriter and another singer in another era.
''Southern trees bear strange fruit,'' the chorus chants rhythmically, again
and again and again. ''Blood on the leaves. Blood on the roots.''
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Few songs stir souls or give goose bumps, at least for very long. Those
that do are usually explicitly political, like the ''Marseillaise'' or the
''Horst Wessel Lied'' or the ''Internationale''; others, like ''Blowin' in
the Wind'' or ''This Land Is Your Land'' or ''If I Had a Hammer,'' seem to
capture the spirit of an age. Neither national anthem nor jazz nor pop nor
folk, ''Strange Fruit'' falls into a category all its own. Though others
songs, like ''Black and Blue'' or ''Supper Time,'' might vie for the title,
it can claim to be the first civil rights protest song -- even, as the
record producer Ahmet Ertegun has put it, ''the beginning of the civil
rights movement.'' ''Strange Fruit'' may not have been on the soundtrack as
the Freedom Riders boarded buses or college students registered black
Mississippians or marchers marched from Selma to Montgomery; ''We Shall
Overcome,'' more optimistic and upbeat, better fit the zeitgeist. But it was
the song which, by confronting racial injustice in the starkest possible
terms at a time when it simply hadn't penetrated popular culture, inspired
many to march in the first place.
To this day, many people think that Holiday herself wrote ''Strange
Fruit'' or had it written for her -- a myth fostered by Holiday herself and
exacerbated by the egregiously unreliable film ''Lady Sings the Blues,''
which depicts Holiday happening upon a lynching, then magically hatching the
lyrics for the song. In fact, Meeropol -- known professionally as Lewis
Allan and more famous, perhaps, for adopting the two orphaned sons of Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg -- first published ''Strange Fruit'' as a poem in 1937,
in the magazine of the New York teachers' union. Initially set to music by
Meeropol himself, the song was performed in left-wing circles -- for
instance, at rallies for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War --
before it found its way to Holiday; others, including Holiday, may have
later tinkered with the music.
All of 23 years old when she first sang it, Holiday, who had never
tackled anything remotely political before, quickly made it one of her
signature songs, and her renditions took on additional power and pathos as
her own life spun increasingly out of control. Unlike so many other protest
songs, which have come to sound shrill or quaint or dated over time,
''Strange Fruit'' has survived because of its expansive metaphorical
possibilities. The strange fruit of which Meeropol wrote no longer hangs
from the poplar trees; in fact, lynchings had almost entirely disappeared
from the American landscape by the time he composed the song. But with
visions of James Byrd Jr. (dragged from the back of a pickup truck in
Jasper, Tex.), Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima and other
blacks killed or maimed by whites in a shocking fashion freshly in our minds
-- along with the grisly murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in
Wyoming -- what ''Strange Fruit'' evokes doesn't seem like ''only
yesterday''; it seems like today and, unfortunately, tomorrow.
That surely helps explain the large number of blacks attending ''Without
Sanctuary,'' an exhibition of lynching photographs at the New-York
Historical Society. James Allen of Atlanta, who put the collection together,
points out that everyone who wants to use these photographs, whether in a
documentary or an article or a movie, from Jonathan Demme to the rawest
college freshman, wants to call his project ''Strange Fruit.'' ''It's at the
core of everything when it comes to lynching,'' he said of the song.
It also helps explain why, after many years in which versions of
''Strange Fruit'' by Billie Holiday, Josh White and Nina Simone were the
only ones around, the song has been picked up by a host of performers,
including Siouxsie and the Banshees, UB40, Abbey Lincoln, Dee Dee
Bridgewater and Cassandra Wilson. With few exceptions -- Sting being perhaps
the most notable -- only blacks have tackled the song; they often do so with
reservations, both because of the painfulness of the subject and the lengthy
shadow that Holiday herself still casts over it.
Mr. Wiggins said he knew the phrase ''strange fruit'' -- ''It was always
something we just said in the 'hood,'' he recalled -- but didn't think he
actually knew the song until his run-in with the police. Only then did he
realize that the song, all of it, had somehow worked its way into his
subconscious. ''When it came to a hook, when it came to writing things down,
I just thought, 'This thing is like 'Strange Fruit,' '' he said. ''They're
not hanging us by ropes but they're cutting off everything else around us.''
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh! More than 60 years later, the experience of hearing Billie Holiday sing
''Strange Fruit,'' particularly on the original 1939 Commodore recording
(readily available on CD) remains startling. Meeropol later said that when
he first sang her the song, she appeared unmoved, even uncomprehending: the
only thing she asked him was what the word ''pastoral'' meant. Listening to
her, though, she sounds utterly confident, convinced and convincing. She is
grim and purposeful, yet still with a lovely lightness to her voice, and
with none of the cracks and scratches that were to appear only a few years
later. Her overt editorializing is minimal; there is no weepiness, nor
histrionics. Her elocution is superb, with but a hint of a Southern accent;
her tone is languorous but unflinching, raw yet somehow smooth, youthful yet
somehow worldly. The prevailing sentiment is not grief or defeat but
cockiness and contempt, detectable as she spits out her sarcastic references
to Southern gallantry and the sweetly scented magnolias. Some, like Paul
Robeson, thought ''Strange Fruit'' defeatist, and so it might have seemed in
her later, more poignant performances of it; in its original incarnation,
though, it was a call to arms.
For people like Steven Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in
Atlanta, who plays ''Strange Fruit'' to his law students each year at Emory,
Harvard and Yale, it still is. For Mr. Bright, who litigates capital cases
throughout the South, the death penalty is, in its arbitrariness and terror
and disproportionate impact on poor, uneducated blacks, ''the first cousin
of lynching.'' And ''Strange Fruit'' is not just some historic curiosity.
''It just hits like a sledgehammer,'' he said of the song. Leon Litwack, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of African-American life after the Civil
War at the University of California at Berkeley, also plays it in his
classes. ''The song unnerves us because it depicts unspeakable atrocities
meted out by people very much like ourselves, and justified in the name of
Christianity and a belief system that defines one group of human beings as
less human than another,'' he said. ''I should say defines, because it's
really not past tense. The whole notion that being black by itself incurs
risks in our society -- that's not a matter of the past.''
Collecting information for my book, I spoke to dozens of people who heard
Billie Holiday sing the song, either in person or on record, and were
forever changed by the experience. Lena Horne, who as a young girl touring
with her mother in a tent show was spirited away from a Florida town where a
lynching had just occurred, was one such witness. ''Nobody could say the
words even as Miss Holiday did,'' she recently told Sara Fishko of WNYC in
New York. ''It wasn't about singing. It was about feeling things artfully in
your soul. I sang it for many days in my life until I was able to understand
it was part of our country's problem as well as it was mine. I don't mean I
sang it out loud. I just sang it in myself, in my heart.'' For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. So unusual, so potent, so threatening was ''Strange Fruit'' that for
years it existed in a kind of artistic quarantine: rarely played on the
radio, hard to find in record stores, difficult to perform in all but the
most politically congenial locales. Holiday's normal label, Columbia,
refused to record it, forcing her to go to the far more obscure Commodore
(owned by Milt Gabler, Billy Crystal's uncle); even progressive disk jockeys
were reluctant to put it on their play lists. Rarely would Holiday perform
it down South. In the 1950's, a Miami nightclub owner ordered her to desist
after it prompted a walkout by indignant white patrons; Holiday herself said
she was once run out of Mobile, Ala., for performing it.
Now, it can be sung anywhere with disconcerting, and perhaps misleading,
ease. Francine Reed, who sings regularly with Lyle Lovett, offered up her
own rendition of ''Strange Fruit'' when I signed books in Atlanta in May, to
an entirely appreciative audience. When Cassandra Wilson, who recorded
''Strange Fruit'' on her Grammy Award-winning album ''New Moon Daughter'' in
1996, performed in Atlanta around the same time, she was surprised by how
many people shouted out requests for the song. Its popularity, she
theorized, reflected a growing willingness among both blacks and whites to
face their respective pasts. ''We know deep inside that it's an issue we
have to confront,'' she said. (Still, the song is not to everyone's taste:
when United Airlines selected ''New Moon Daughter'' for its in-flight
entertainment, it excised ''Strange Fruit'' from the album.)
That ''Strange Fruit'' still packs an extraordinary punch became apparent
at my book party in New York, held at the site of the original Cafe Society
in Greenwich Village. (The space is now used by the Axis Theater Company.)
We tried to stage the song just as Barney Josephson, the left-wing former
shoe salesman who owned Cafe Society, had originally decreed -- the better,
he said, to make people ''get their insides burned with it.'' Now as then,
everything stopped and all the lights went down, save for a pinpoint on the
performer, a young black woman named Melissa Walker. An eerie silence had
followed Holiday's first performance of ''Strange Fruit'' in this very
place, she later recalled; no one had known quite how to react. Now, for the
first time in 60 years, the sounds of ''Strange Fruit'' once again filled
the room, and when Ms. Walker completed her task, singing of that ''strange
and bitter crop,'' another awkward interval uncannily ensued.
How many songs have silenced so many rooms for so long?
Mr. Wiggins's theme -- the police practice of racial profiling, or
focusing on suspects strictly because they are black -- could not be more
topical; President Clinton decried the policy only a few months ago. But to
punctuate his story, to give it some historic context and bite, Mr. Wiggins
reaches back to words written more than 60 years ago by a Jewish
schoolteacher in the Bronx named Abel Meeropol, words prompted by a ghastly
photograph of a lynching. These same words electrified audiences when Billie
Holiday introduced them at Cafe Society, New York's first integrated
nightclub, in 1939, then sang them three times nightly, then put them out on
a record. They have reverberated ever since; and for all the changes in
American racial attitudes since those bleak days, the days before Jackie
Robinson, Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., they have never
lost their power. ''Strange Fruit'' is not only one of our first protest
songs, but perhaps our most potent and most durable.
Southern trees
bear a strange fruit,
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
Here is a
fruit for the crows to pluck,
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