Lula Fotis
Block 3 AMH
SRP
March 2007
A Jazz Legend: Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday is one of the 20th century’s best and most recognized jazz
vocalists. In her career she made over 350 recordings. She changed the history
of musical protest, primarily with her anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit.” Many
people know of her reckless experience with drugs, but her legacy includes much
more than that. Frank Sinatra once said, “With few exceptions, every major pop
singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her
genius. It is Billie Holiday who was and still remains the greatest single musical
influence on me.”
(Felder 318)
Billie Holiday was unique among her
contemporaries; she left a legacy of controversial recordings, a brash lifestyle,
and in her own right used music as a form of civil rights protest.
In Baltimore, Maryland on April 7, 1915 Eleanora Fagan was born to two
teenage parents, Clarence Holiday and Sadie Fagan. She later changed her
name to Billie Holiday, after Billie Dove (her favorite Christian actress) and using
her father’s last name. Clarence Holiday was a small time musician who was
never around.
Living in poverty, Billie was sent to the House of Good
Shepherds, a Catholic home and school for black girls at the age of ten. Her
mother had gone to Harlem in search of a better life. Back in Baltimore, after
getting out of the House of Good Shepherds, Holiday stayed with some relatives.
She got a job as a maid for a wealthy elderly woman. In her house, she had an
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old wind up Victrela record player. This was the “defining moment in her life, it
was here, she says, that she was bitten by the jazz bug.” (Rood 76) For extra
money, she worked as a prostitute. On May 2, 1929 she was arrested along with
a few other women. They were held in jail for a night but released to no further
ado.
She finished the 5th grade in Baltimore and left for Harlem to join her
mother working as a maid. That was the extent of her education. Desperate to
avoid eviction Holiday auditioned to dance at night clubs, but was rejected.
Willing to take anything, she started to sing at Harlem speakeasies’ like Pod’s
and Jerry’s.
Soon enough she would become the “hottest singer in Harlem
before she was twenty.” (Hine 67)
In 1933 Holiday’s music potential was discovered by John Hammond at a
Harlem nightclub. He organized her first recording and launched her career.
She started to tour with Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Artie Shaw as a
backup singer.
On tour she would meet one of her only lifelong friends,
saxophonist Lester Young, who gave her the name Lady Day. Being in Artie
Shaw’s all-white band she faced a lot of racial discrimination. Sometimes the
band would eat at a restaurant and Holiday wouldn’t be allowed to go in because
they refused to serve blacks. She was asked to exit out of the kitchen doors. In
New York someone went so far as to say Shaw could not have a black woman in
his band. Once, at a show with Artie Shaw, Holiday was forced to use the freight
elevator. It made her so angry that she quit the band. Meanwhile, she was also
waitressing, where she made contacts and friends who brought her singing
opportunities. Her solo career really started to expand in 1936.
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One of Holiday’s regular haunts was the Café Society in Greenwich
Village, New York.
It was here that she really became a star.
Guests like
Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson attended. If Eleanor Roosevelt ever set
foot in a nightclub it was at Café Society. The club’s slogan was, “the wrong
place for the right people.” It mocked celebrity worship, right winged politics,
snootiness and racism.
It was at Café Society where Holiday and Abel
Meeropol, the author of “Strange Fruit” first met. Meeropol was a Bronx school
teacher and Communist activist. After seeing an atrocious picture of a Southern
lynching Meeropol wrote the poem. “Strange Fruit” first appeared in a Union
Publication called the NY Teacher. The lyrics:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop. (PBS.org)
These lyrics are haunting, realistic and harsh. However, if one did not know what
they were about it may be difficult to uncover the meaning. It was first performed
by Meeropol’s wife at Communist rallies.
John Hammond introduced Abel
Meeropol and Billie Holiday. After figuring out music to the words Holiday agreed
to sing it. It is said that Holiday did not understand the meaning of the song at
first. When first seeing the lyrics all she asked was “what does pastoral mean?”
(Margolick 20)
It is clear however, that at some point in her career Holiday
understood the meaning. Lester Young said, “She would cry every time she
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would do it.” (Zophy 79) Holiday was reluctant to sing “Strange Fruit” at first for
fear of the audience’s reaction. The first time she ever performed it nobody
clapped, then one person bravely started and the whole audience erupted into
applause. After this, Holiday used it as her anthem. If the crowd was being
disrespectful she would punish them with it and make them listen to her. If they
were enjoying her performance and being a good audience she would reward
them with it.
The place would go completely silent when she was about to
perform this song, waiters were ordered to stop waiting, cooks to stop cooking.
Holiday herself said in regards to performing “Strange Fruit,” “The whole joint
would quiet down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a
bomb.” (Margolick 97) It was always played at the end of her set. “When the
lights went out, she was to walk off the stage and no matter how thunderous the
ovation, she was never to return for a bow.” (Salem 50)
When Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit” it was sixteen years before
Rosa Parks would protest on the bus. Lynchings were everywhere, a common
part of Southern life. In 1955 headlines such as, “Nation Shocked, Vow Action in
Lynching of Chicago Youth” regarding the lynching of a young boy, Emmett Till
(pbs.org) were rampant. Emmett Till of fourteen had done the crime of talking to
a white woman in a grocery store, while visiting relatives in the South. Between
1889 and 1940 3,833 humans were lynched, 90% of them occurred in the South
and 70% of the people lynched were black. H.L. Mencken described them as
taking the place “of the merry go round, the theatre, the symphony, [and the]
orchestra.”
(PBS.com) “Strange Fruit” was the first and last song to protest
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lynching. Leonard Feather called it “the first significant protest in words and
music, the first unmated cry against racism.” (Margolick 120) An anti-lynching
bill had been passed in 1935 but the Senate buried it, never letting it go into
effect. In 1940 shortly after “Strange Fruit” was released another bill came out,
but again nothing was really done. British Q Magazine named it “one of 10
songs that actually changed the world.” When it came time to record “Strange
Fruit” Billie’s label, Columbia refused to record it because it was too controversial
a song. She went to Commodore Records instead and recorded a classic. The
B-side was a contrasting track called, “Fine and Mellow.” It is a possibility that
“Strange Fruit” made it to #16 on the charts in July of 1939; however, records
from that time are unreliable.
Not only was Holiday’s record label skeptical of her doing this song but so
were her mother and discoverer, John Hammond. John Hammond called this
song the worst thing that ever happened to her career, her response “Aw John’s
a square, John’s just rich, John wants to run my life, tries to tell me and
everybody else what to do.”
(Sicherman 349)Her mother also questioned
Holiday’s association with this song. Her mother asked why she sang it. Holiday
replied, “Because it could make things better.” Her mother said, “But you’ll be
dead.” Holiday said, “Yeah. But I’ll feel it. I’ll know it in my grave.” (Margolick
49) There was truth in her mother’s statement. Once she tried to sing “Strange
Fruit” at a club in Mobile, Alabama and she was chased out. Another time, a
man from Georgia summoned Holiday over to his table and showed her a
graphic picture he had drawn on his napkin and said, “I’ll show you some strange
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fruit!” Being the strong-willed person she was, she took a chair and smashed it
over his head. The club owners asked her to leave and took care of the man.
Another instance was at the Café Society when, after singing “Strange Fruit,” a
woman ripped Holiday’s dress because she was so upset.
She had been
reminded of what the woman thought was forgotten, the witnessing of a lynching.
Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” with so much emotion; it shook her listener’s souls.
Holiday frequently smoked marijuana and drank for fun.
She did not
become involved with narcotics until late 1940. During that time, fifty to seventyfive% of bop players had used heroin. One-fourth to one-third of that percentage
was addicted.
Twenty percent of those users died from it.
Over the years
Holiday’s mother had become more dependent and protective of her. When her
mother died in October of 1945 her narcotic use increased. A combination of
tumultuous marriages and the death of her mother sent Holiday spiraling in the
wrong direction. Her voice started to deteriorate along with her career. John
Hammond had left her in 1939 because she was high so often and difficult to
work with. Holiday had been arrested a few times and for the last years of her
life she spent a lot of time in and out of court. She self-entered rehab in 1947 but
a few weeks later she was arrested for narcotics possession. She was sentenced
to spend nine and a half months in jail; she was released early for good behavior.
Along with being jailed the courts took away her cabaret license. The concert
she was meant to perform at Carnegie Hall was canceled. Before she really went
downhill she won the Esquire Critics Poll in 1944 and received Metronome
Vocalist of the Year award in 1946. She continued to record and tour in the
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1950s all though she had already peaked in her career and her voice had started
to deteriorate due to heavy drug use. In 1954 she gave her final tour in Europe.
Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at forty-four years old, from long term
drug affects or “congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure.” She was
under house arrest at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. Although, Holiday had
made a very successful life for her self, she did not have the money to prove it.
She died with $848.54 in cash, she owed loans and taxes, her home was valued
at a mere $1345.36, she had no assets and she racked up $12,000 in hospital
bills. 3,000 people came to her funeral at St. Paul the Apostle Roman Catholic
Church. She was buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, NY. Although
she was gone, her fame did not die with her.
Holiday was an activist in her own right and certainly has enough
controversy around the recording “Strange Fruit” to prove it. Her contemporaries,
such as Ella Fitzgerald, Maxine Sullivan and Lena Horne were not quite as
influential on America as her. Today Holiday is still recognized and discussed.
However, her civil rights activism is hardly acknowledged. In 1972 her life story
was turned into a movie, starring Diana Ross entitled, Lady Sings the Blues. The
movie won two Oscars and was nominated in three other categories.
Time
Magazine selected “Strange Fruit” as Song of the Century in 1999 saying,
“History’s greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.” Billie Holiday
was one of the first black women in America to protest against corrupt society
while having a notable career.
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