The song that defined Billie Holiday’s career utterly destroyed her.
A photograph of the gruesome spectacle lynchings of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith at the hands of a 1930 Indiana mob inspired the words to “Strange Fruit.” Though Billie didn’t write the song, the heartbreaking emotion with which she sang came from the sorrow of her real life experiences. As an African-American woman, she’d learned firsthand that lynching didn’t always entail a hanging. Sometimes, it was more covert and insidious, like refusing hospital treatment to a 39-year-old man, allowing him to die simply because he was black.
That man was Billie’s father, and she thought of him every single time she sang “Strange Fruit.” “But I have to keep singing it,” she explained, “not only because people ask for it, but because 20 years after Pop died, the things that killed him are still happening in the South.” From 1939 until her death in 1959, Billie dutifully performed “Strange Fruit.” Early on, she sang every note defying fear for her own life as death threats and vandalism to her property weren’t uncommon after some audiences heard the song. But in the end, those tactics backfired. Billie audaciously singing of lynchings to a white audience, and the poignant, evocative lyrics she filled with such despair pushed the song into greater demand.
Such an outcome was hardly a win. With listeners suddenly clamoring for “Strange Fruit,” Billie was suddenly forced to reconcile the act of putting her black pain on display for the entertainment of white audiences with that of making a living. She and her manager soon built provisions into her contracts which guaranteed that her public sacrifice on stage would be met with reverence and respect: all wait service would cease; every house light would be darkened except the one on her pained face; and above all, there would be absolutely, positively no encores.
Over 80 years later, “Strange Fruit” still burns to the touch. Perhaps because the magnificent woman who built this quintessential American song’s legacy so fiercely protected it. Or perhaps because even within the last few weeks, reports of black bodies hanging from trees won’t let some of us heal.