Why strange fruit

Just look. Released three months later, it became not just a hit but a cause celebre. Campaigners for an anti-lynching law posted copies to congressmen. The New York Post's Samuel Grafton called it "a fantastically perfect work of art, one which reversed the usual relationship between a black entertainer and her white audience: 'I have been entertaining you,' she seems to say, 'now you just listen to me.

Holiday quit Cafe Society in August , but she took Strange Fruit with her and carried it like an unexploded bomb.

In Washington DC, a local newspaper wondered whether it might actually provoke a new wave of lynchings. At New York's Birdland, the promoter confiscated customers' cigarettes, lest their firefly glow distract from the spotlight's intensity. When some promoters ordered her not to sing it, Holiday added a clause to her contract guaranteeing her the option.

Not that she always exercised that right. Yet Holiday could no more detach herself from it than if the lyrics had been tattooed on her skin. Strange Fruit would haunt Holiday for the rest of her life. Some fans, including her former producer John Hammond, blamed it for robbing her of her lightness.

Others pointed out that her burgeoning heroin habit did that job. So did the persistent racism which poisoned her life just as it poisoned the life of every black American.

In , a naval officer called her a nigger and, her eyes hot with tears, she smashed a beer bottle against a table and lunged at him with the serrated glass.

A little while later, a friend spotted her wandering down 52nd Street and called out, "How are you doing, Lady Day? Holiday discovered heroin in the early 40s, an addiction that eventually earned her a year-long prison term in Ten days after her release, she performed a comeback show at New York's Carnegie Hall. According to Lady Sings the Blues, she accidentally pierced her scalp with a hatpin and sang with blood trickling down her face.

There could be only one contender for the closing number. During the 50s, she performed it less often and, when she did, it could be agonising to watch. Her relationship with it became almost masochistic. The worse her mood, the more likely she was to add it to the set, yet it pained her every time, especially when it prompted walkouts by racist audience members. By the latter half of the decade, her body was wasted, her voice weathered down to a hoarse rasp, and Strange Fruit was the only song that seemed to dignify her suffering, wrapping her own decline in a wider American tragedy.

Writing about her final years in his definitive book Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song, David Margolick says: "she had grown oddly, sadly suited to capture the full grotesqueness of the song. Now, she not only sang of bulging eyes and twisted mouths. She embodied them. Strange Fruit: the first great protest song. Billie Holiday's song about racist lynchings stunned audiences and redefined popular music.

In an extract from 33 Revolutions Per Minute, his history of protest songs, Dorian Lynskey explores the chilling power of Strange Fruit. Billie Holiday in concert in Britain, Her later performances of Strange Fruit could be agonising to watch. On 20 April , the jazz singer Billie Holiday born Eleanora Fagan in stepped into a studio with an eight-piece band to record Strange Fruit. Originally a poem called Bitter Fruit, it was written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in response to lynching in US southern states.

Soon after publication, Meeropol set the song to music. It was performed at union meetings and even at Madison Square Garden by the jazz singer Laura Duncan. To ensure that it was indeed savoured, Holiday and Josephson created specific conditions for the performances. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. As the song became a feature of her sets, Holiday witnessed a range of reactions, from tears to walkouts and racist hecklers.

When she toured the song, some proprietors tried discouraging her from singing it for fear of alienating or angering their patrons. Holiday combined rage and sadness in her rendition of the song Credit: Alamy. What is so remarkable about Strange Fruit is how indelible a mark it made on American society so soon after its release.

Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. The response was swift, especially once the racist Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger decided to make it his mission to destroy the singer and shut down her message about segregation and racism. Holiday continued to perform at concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, but haunted by her violent childhood, eventually succumbed once again to drug use. She was hospitalized in with heart, lung and liver problems developed from years of alcohol and drugs consumption.

Determined to carry out his retribution to the end, Anslinger sent his agents to the hospital in New York to handcuff Holiday to the gurney and forbade doctors to provide her with further treatment.