Billie Holiday: Negatively Affected By Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday was a famous Harlem Renaissance jazz and blues singer. Her voice took on the emotion of the song, which was a quality not many singers had. Those strong emotions might have come from her cruel and misfortunate past. Holiday recorded many songs, but there was one song that made a huge impact. That song was Strange Fruit, a poem by Abel Meeropol that was set to music. The title came from the analogy that compared the lynched bodies of two men to fruit that hung on trees. Though Holiday was negatively affected by the song, Strange Fruit mostly impacted people’s lives positively. Even today, people are still being affected by Strange Fruit. Billie Holiday’s performances of Strange Fruit sparked a revolution that would later result

Holiday happened to perform at Cafe Society, where she first heard and performed the song, “Strange Fruit” (Josephson, Trilling-Josephson). Barney Josephson, the owner of Cafe Society, suggested “Strange Fruit” as one of Holiday’s performances after Abel Meeropol asked Josephson if one of Josephson’s performers could sing Meeropol’s song. After hearing Josephson’s suggestion, Holiday shrugged and told Josephson that she would sing whatever he wanted her to sing. The first time Holiday sang Strange Fruit, the audience was very reluctant about clapping (Kliment). They were obviously shocked. After a moment of awkwardness, the club burst into loud clapping and cheering. That moment of awkwardness seemed to disappear in her next performances of Strange Fruit. Every time Holiday would sing Strange Fruit, the owner would have it be as dramatic as possible (Josephson, Trilling-Josephson). Holiday would be the last performer of the night and Strange Fruit would be her last song. The whole club would go still, silent, and dark, with the light only illuminating Holiday to make her the absolute focus of the room. Josephson wanted to have the song drilled into his customer’s minds for the rest of their

Because of that single song, Holiday lived in comfort, although that comfort only lasted for a few years. Strange Fruit made Billie Holiday and Cafe Society famous (Josephson, Trilling-Josephson). Columnists and magazines wrote about her often, which boosted her popularity even more. Times magazine featured a photograph of Holiday in their music column. “With that picture of Billie, it seemed to me that Times magazine had broken down the color barrier.” Barney Josephson wrote in his book, “Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People”. “Photographs of black artists started to appear in all the fine publications. There was no longer a restriction. That’s what the song did in that regard.” (49) Though, Strange Fruit may have also been the cause of Holiday’s career coming to an end so quickly (Kliment). After all, Strange Fruit was a song that spoke of the elephant in the room, racism. The ideas of the brutality of racism were being spread through that song and that could have angered the federal government. Perhaps they tried to stop it from spreading. Perhaps the reason Holiday had been jailed so many times was because the federal government wanted to stop, or at least stall, the spread of those ideas. “I’ve made a lot of enemies, too,” Holiday said in 1947 to Down Beat, an American magazine. “Singing that [Strange Fruit] hasn’t helped me