Jazz Greats
The gorgeous and sincere voice of Billie Holiday dances with a piano as she poetically mourns over Southern history in a song called “Strange Fruit”. She represents how beauty, politics, art, and humanity are sisters of emotion. Her powerful song written about the lynching of African Americans in the 1930’s touches the soul of anyone willing to listen. The first line of her song “Southern trees bear strange fruit” introduces her topic with intrigue. She is seen preforming live in 1959 in front of a piano. Her eyes were distant, and her expression disgusted as she stood still, center stage, and described the bloody history.
Going on in the song, she sings “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”. In this line she is not only referring literally to the brutally beaten and bloody bodies of African Americans. She is exclaiming how African Americans have a historically bloody history in their “roots” and black Americans, even as she sings (in the 1950’s), are being treated brutally. As powerful as that is alone, many stand in awe wondering how she sang such a protest in the 1950’s before the 1968’s when the major protesting of the world took place. One can imagine that Billie Holiday had little to no support and much backlash surrounding such a long, but the fact that she still chose to sing it in a time where she already didn’t have the upper hand in her own career is striking. It shows just how much the movement affected her, just like it affected the poet who originally wrote it.
“Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” brings the song to the commonality of lynching. She is comparing the hanged African Americans to fruit, a normal thing to see on trees in the south. “In the southern breeze” refers to the flow and way things are commonly done in the south. Poetically, Billie Holiday is bringing attention to the problem by making people think about their own ideologies in using something Southerners take pride in and forcing people to look at it in a different light. The next line in the song, “pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth”, takes a prideful piece of the traditional South and exposes its ugliness. The same idea is behind the next line: “scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh”.
The poem the song is based on was written by a Jewish man who was haunted by a photograph of lynching. The poem itself seems like something that would come out of the 1960’s, a time when public protest and outcries were happening. The fact that this poem was turned into jazz music far before the 60’s is why the jazz age is so important and beautiful. In 1940, the writer of the poem, Abel Meeropol, was investigated. He was thought to have been paid by Communists to write the now popular song. Sacrifices by everyone involved were made in order for this powerful song to come about. It is for this reason that Billie Holiday is considered one of the jazz greats.
