Forrest Cole - Billie Holiday: Singer

Copyright 2014 by Infobase Learning

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:

Chelsea House
An imprint of Infobase Learning
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001

ISBN 978-1-4381-4513-6

You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web
at http://www.infobaselearning.com

Smoke hovers in the air. The notes of the last song still linger, when the club is overcome by a rare silence. The clinking of glass and ice falls silent as, by orders of the owner, the waiters stop delivering drinks to the tables and the bartenders discontinue serving them. The lights darken, leaving only a spotlight on the soft-featured face of Billie Holiday. The gardenias always pinned into her hair glisten in the light, and she begins "Strange Fruit," the final song of her set:

The imagery of the lyrics resonates with the audience, and the growing silence becomes more profound. In her soft, emotion-filled voice, Holiday continues:

It has been a few weeks since Billie Holiday began to sing "Strange Fruit" at Caf Society, in New York City, but until this moment, the power of the song had yet to translate into her delivery. Suddenly the power of the song envelops her as she finishes, tears streaking down her face:

When the song is done, the lights go out completely, leaving the audience in total darkness just long enough to allow the impact of the song and the performance to set in. After an awkward moment, they burst into applause that is at once ecstatic, sentimental, and overwhelmed with emotion. It is this performance that sets the precedent for how Billie Holiday would continue to perform this songalways at the end of each set, beginning in silence, with only the singer bathed in a spotlight. Without fail, each time tears streak her face. For the remainder of her life, and afterward, this song belonged to her.

When Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" in 1939, racism was rampant throughout the country. Lynchings like the one described in the song were still practiced with frightening regularity in the South. In the decades before the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, Holiday was no stranger to the wrath of racism. During her young life she experienced many difficulties due to the color of her skin. While the poignancy of this song scared her at first, it soon became the most important part of her repertoire. Today, it is considered one of the first songs to protest racial injustice.

Caf Society, opened by Barney Josephson the previous year, was the first club in New York that integrated musicians as well as audience members, black and white. Everyone mingled freely, which was a rare occasion in those days. One day, soon after the opening, a poet and schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol (who wrote under the pen name Lewis Allan), approached Josephson and floor manager Robert Gordon with a poem that he wanted to see turned into a song. They immediately recommended that he show it to Holiday.

Allan sat down with her that night and went over the lines of the poem, carefully explaining the imagery. When she completely understood the power and meaning of the poem, she was frightened by it. A savvy singer who knew how to please a crowd, she did not believe that an audience would want to hear about such tragic events, so she told Allan that she would have to consider it. Before the end of the evening, however, she told fellow musician Frankie Newton, "Some guy's brought me a hell of a damn song that I'm going to do."

With music written by Arthur Herzog, Holiday and the club band played the song, but the first performances did not have much of an impact on the audience. As he told Linda Kuehl, who before her death amassed a large catalog of interviews with people who knew Billie Holiday, Barney Josephson could not pinpoint the exact night, but it all changed when she finally allowed the context of the song to take hold of her. (Much of Donald Clarke's biography Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon relies on Kuehl's interviews.) When it happened, though, it caused a stir of emotions that affected the audience like never before. Sadness was not the only emotion the song invoked, and there are stories about people walking out, breaking down in anger, begging her to never sing the song again, or in one case at the Apollo, the "collective sigh of 2,000 people."

The American vocalist Billie Holiday was an enormous influence on jazz and pop singing. Greatly inspired by jazz instrumentalists like trumpeter Louis Armstrong, her distinct vocal style pioneered a new way of controlling tempo and phrasing.

Source: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

"Strange Fruit" Becomes Immortal

From that point on, the song never failed to bring Billie Holiday to tears and take the audience for a painful visual journey through the injustices of racism. Just as the imagery had scared the singer, it scared others. Some of those frightened by the potential reaction to "Strange Fruit" were the executives at her record label, Columbia, who refused to record the song. They were not, however, opposed to it being recorded in general, so they gave their star permission to go elsewhere. She found a sympathetic ear in Milt Gabler, who owned the small label Commodore Records.

Gabler and Holiday were granted permission to record three other tunes as well, bringing the total to four songs, enough for A-sides and B-sides for two singles. In 1939, backed by her band from Caf SocietyFreddie Newton on trumpet, Kenneth Hollon and Stanley Payne on tenor saxophone, Tab Smith on alto saxophone, Sonny White on piano, Jimmy McLin on guitar, John Williams on bass, and Eddie Dougherty on drumsthey completed the first single with a blues song "Fine and Mellow" written by Holiday, and on the flipside "Strange Fruit." The second single was "Yesterdays" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues." The first single became a hit, which some accredit to the jukebox popularity of "Fine and Mellow," but the impact of "Strange Fruit" was undeniable, and soon other record companies were contacting Gabler in hopes of obtaining the rights to the song. Gabler intuitively copyrighted the words and music in Holiday's name, thus securing her ownership of the song. Though she did not write "Strange Fruit," she claimed it as her song throughout her life, and though she would have denied it, it established her as one of the early civil rights pioneers.

Birth and Childhood

As a pregnant teenager, Billie Holiday's mother, Sadie Fagan, left Baltimore for Philadelphia, where she had accepted a "transportation job"a term used for when wealthy white employers contracted African-American and other minority domestics from other, most often southern, regions. Though it was a racist method of employment, the relationship could be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, as the pay was better than the servants would receive in their hometowns and the employers were able to pay cheaper wages than if they hired someone from the city. The reasons Sadie left Baltimore are unclear, but it is known that the Fagans, her father's side of the family, were a major factor in her departure. Their critical eye and disapproval of her were no secret, and it only got worse when she announced her pregnancy, especially since the father of the child, Clarence Holiday, was also a teenager.