Notes

The following first appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

To some, pop music is anathema, that annoying, cloying and inconsequential aural symptom of a novelty-obsessed society fixated more on Britney Spears’ bare midriff than musical prowess and lyrical substance.  But, at least in its original sense of “popular music,” the genre can sometime serve as a powerful witness to the tidal forces of history.  Submitted for your consideration today is a song that for nearly 70 years has reminded us of the darkest moments in America’s past — and in doing so, has helped brighten the world for our children.  That song is “Strange Fruit.”

Although literally dozens of artists have recorded “Strange Fruit” over the years, the singer with whom it is most closely identified is the celebrated jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday.  Holiday elicited near-riots in the nightclubs of New York when she added the number to her repertoire in 1939.  With its stark, poetic description of the hanging of a black man, “Strange Fruit” resonated somberly for both black and white audiences, who were utterly unprepared to hear a subject like lynching addressed in song.

Many myths and misconceptions regarding “Strange Fruit” — as well as the racial violence that inspired it — have accrued over the decades.  Although Holiday claimed in her 1964 autobiography LADY SINGS THE BLUES that she and accompanist Sonny White wrote the song, it was actually penned in 1937 by a Jewish schoolteacher and activist named Abel Meeropol (writing under the nom de plume of Lewis Allan).  And while lynching is often considered a southern phenomenon (and the song’s lyrics relocate the events it describes to “the gallant South”), it was inspired by a horrible incident that happened one night north of the Mason-Dixon line.

On August 7, 1930, a white mob stormed the Grant County Jail in downtown Marion, Indiana and murdered young black men Abe Smith and Tom Shipp.  Local photographer Lawrence Beitler snapped a photograph of Smith’s and Shipp’s mutilated bodies hanging only a few feet above the sickly grinning faces of their killers.  Beitler’s intent was to sell the photo locally in postcard form — a common occurrence in the nearly 4,000 lynchings that took place in the U.S. between 1889 and 1940. 

But Beitler’s photo went on to be reprinted in northern newspapers.  And it was its appearance in the pages of THE CRISIS, an early civil rights magazine published by the N.A.A.C.P., that inspired Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit.” 

Find out more about the tangled history of “Strange Fruit” in David Margolick’s 2000 volume, STRANGE FRUIT: BILLIE HOLIDAY, CAFE SOCIETY AN AN EARLY CRY FOR CIVIL RIGHTS (Running Press).  And if you would like to learn more about the terrible 1930 double lynching that inspired the song, pick up James H. Madison’s harrowing 2001 account, A LYNCHING IN THE HEARTLAND (Palgrave MacMillan).