It’s an uncomfortable song about an unimaginable act, sung by a woman with a voice that can make you cry. Recorded in 1939 as a protest to injustice, hatred and prejudice, it is the second most famous song in Billie Holiday’s repertoire and today it is the least heard. Called the beginning of the civil rights movement, "Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meeropol, a young Jewish schoolteacher who frequented a club where Billie sang.
Billie Holiday did not live in the deep south, but she was accustomed to the horror of the day. In the 1930s lynching was in the news as an everyday part of life. The act of lynching was so prevalent that Fritz Lang, the director of the classic movie Metropolis, directed a movie called Fury in 1936 on the subject. In it, a young Spencer Tracy was the catalyst for several revengeful mob actions. They didn’t use any black people in the movie, because it was something that could happen to anyone. However, it is speculated that of the 4720 recorded lynchings between 1882 and 1951, there were three times as many unreported ones, of mostly black people. Historians cite World War II and the migrations of populations to urban areas as the cause for the decline of such acts, but until the mid 1950s they still happened.
In my opinion, this song was a contributing factor to the harsh treatment of Billie by the legal system and the music industry in the 1940’s. Her death, in sickness and poverty in 1959, can be traced back to her inability to obtain a cabaret license from New York City authorities because of drug arrests. As she grew older, all she wanted was to live in the city and sing, not travel the country and be subjected to poor treatment.
Today, the song is still powerful, hauntingly beautiful and one of the saddest things you can ever hear.
On April 7th, 1915, in Philadelphia General Hospital, Eleanor Fagan or Harris or Gough or Holiday (depending on which biography you read) was born. She died 44 years later as the incomparable Billie Holiday. Stretching from the late 1930s to the end of the 1950s, Lady Day as she was known, left a legacy of more than two decades of memorable music.
Not only did she sing, but she also arranged and wrote songs. Of the dozen or more songs she wrote and recorded, her most celebrated and popular is "God Bless the Child," written with pianist Arthur Herzog in 1939.
In her biography, LadySingstheBlues, she explains that the title line was a direct quote from her mother. After giving her mother the money to open a restaurant called Mom’s Holiday and frequently adding more money to support it, she needed a loan herself. She recalls going there “like a stockholder." She was turned down flat, which makes the line, "Crust of bread and such, but don’t take too much" very understandable. Billie says, in the argument that ensued, her mother paraphrased a Bible passage (which many people have speculated is either Matthew 25:29 or Luke 8:18). Billie translated it into the lyric "Yes, the strong gets more, while the weak ones fade, empty pockets don’t ever make the grade." Storming out of the restaurant with the phrase that became the song’s title burned into her mind, several napkins and paper scraps later, the song was born.
I suspect Billie was also reacting to the time she’d spent traveling with the Count Basie Orchestra and the Artie Shaw Band from 1937 to 1939. With Count Basie’s Orchestra, she talks about club owners demanding she use dark makeup so that when the lights hit her, she wouldn’t look like a white woman in the middle of black musicians.
As the first black singer performing with an all-white band traveling the country during the Jim Crow era, she writes that she found that racial tensions ran high all across America. Billie said, “Almost every day there was an incident.” She even resorted to using the side of the road for a bathroom instead of going through the hassle of trying to find basic accommodations in segregated towns, restaurants or gas stations.
She quit Artie Shaw’s Band because she was tired of being denied rooms in many of the hotels they performed in. Finally, when asked to ride the freight elevator to get to the night club of a New York hotel, she had had enough.
Then the song "Strange Fruit" was presented to her. The song is about lynching, which she called "my personal protest." It has been cited as one of the beginnings of the civil rights movement, and Billie performed it many times in many places. She said it affected her deeply each time.
Billie didn’t record "God Bless the Child" until May of 1941. When “God Bless the Child” was released in 1942, it reached number 25 on the charts, selling over a million copies that year. It has lived on ever since, being covered by multiple artists in every decade.
The song has crossed over from jazz to blues to pop to rock and back again. Wikipedia points out fifty covers, calling them the most notable. One can only guess how many that aren’t notable.
Billie died on July 17th in 1959 of liver failure and was buried in a Bronx cemetery.
To this day, Billie is still winning awards, being given accolades posthumously and having her music recorded by other artists. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2011.
Billie’s original version of "God Bless the Child" is on the Recording Industry Association of America’s Songs of the Century list and was given a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1976.
Check out the smooth jazz version recorded by George Benson, Al Jarreau and Jill Scott from Jill’s 2005 album called Collaborations, right after you listen to the groovy version of Happy Birthday done by another Centennial who was born in December of 1915, the late great Chairman of the Board – Frank Sinatra.
