BILLIE HOLIDAY: 'STRANGE FRUIT' AGAINST RACISM

Eleanora Fagan aka Billie Holiday

Today, The Grandma has revised some grammar with his Intermediate Language Practice manual (Chapters 20 & 21).

More information: Purpose

The Grandma loves Black music and American Black History and she wants to remember one of her favourite singers, Billie Holiday, who sang one of the  saddest songs of the history, an anthem against racism: Strange Fruit.

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915-July 17, 1959), better known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz singer with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed Lady Day by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills, which made up for her limited range and lack of formal music education.

She was born in Philadelphia and after a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by the producer John Hammond, who commended her voice. She signed a recording contract with Brunswick Records in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson yielded the hit What a Little Moonlight Can Do, which became a jazz standard. 

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia Records and Decca Records. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, but her reputation deteriorated because of her drug and alcohol problems.

Billie Holiday

Though she was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, Holiday's bad health, coupled with a string of abusive relationships and ongoing drug and alcohol abuse, caused her voice to wither. 

Her final recordings were met with mixed reaction to her damaged voice but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died on July 17, 1959. A posthumous album, Last Recording, was released following her death.

Much of Holiday's material has been rereleased since her death. She is considered a legendary performer with an ongoing influence on American music. She is the recipient of four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumous awards for Best Historical Album. 

More information: Billie Holiday

Holiday was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1973. Lady Sings the Blues, a film about her life, starring Diana Ross, was released in 1972. She is the primary character in the play and later the film Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill; the role was originated by Reenie Upchurch in 1986 and was played by Audra McDonald on Broadway and in the film.

Holiday's delivery made her performances recognizable throughout her career. Her improvisation compensated for lack of musical education. Her contralto voice lacked range and was thin, and years of drug use altered its texture and gave it a fragile, raspy sound.

Billie Holiday

Holiday said that she always wanted her voice to sound like an instrument and some of her influences were Louis Armstrong and the singer Bessie Smith. Her last major recording, a 1958 album entitled Lady in Satin, features the backing of a 40-piece orchestra conducted and arranged by Ray Ellis.

On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of liver disease and heart disease. On July 15, she received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church and died two days later, at the age of 44, on July 17. Her funeral Mass was on July 21, 1959, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.

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Strange Fruit is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. Written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem and published in 1937, it protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the South at the turn of the century, but continued there and in other regions of the United States. 

According to the Tuskegee Institute, 1,953 Americans were murdered by lynching, about three quarters of them black. The lyrics are an extended metaphor linking a tree’s fruit with lynching victims. Meeropol set it to music and, with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden.

Billie Holiday

The song continues to be covered by numerous artists and has inspired novels, other poems, and other creative works. In 1978, Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Lyricist E. Y. Harburg referred to the song as a historical document. It was also dubbed, a declaration of war, the beginning of the civil rights movement by record producer Ahmet Ertegun.

In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynchings, inspired by Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title Bitter Fruit in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol had asked others, notably Earl Robinson, to set his poems to music, he set Strange Fruit to music himself. His protest song gained a certain success in and around New York.

In October 1939, Samuel Grafton of the New York Post described Strange Fruit: If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise.

More information: Strange Fruit-The story behind The Song of the Century

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. 

I started working when I was six years old. 

Billie Holiday