1939, fifteen years before the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan was at
its peak in the southern United States. Lynchings, suffered by the Afro-American
community, are commonplace since the principle of segregation "separate but equal". It is
in this context that Billie Holiday sang for the first time in New York Strange Fruit.
This strange fruit evokes the body of a Black who was hanged from a tree, South swaying in
the wind, the twisted mouth, feeding the crows. This song is written and composed by Abel
Meeropol, a schoolteacher from the Bronx, a member of the CPUSA (Communist Party of the
United States of America). The latter remained horrified by seeing the photo of two men
lynched and wrote Strange Fruit drawing poems The Ballad of the Hanged Villon and Le
Verger King Louis Th?odore de Banville, later set to music by Brassens.
Discovered in 1933, after having been employed brothel, Billie Holiday string of
successes, including What a Little Moonlight Can Do in 1935. She will be accompanied by
Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Artie Shaw. It is in the orchestra of the latter,
all-white, it will be refused entry to restaurants and hotels during a tour that will stop
in 1938. Dragging its style and discreet doubled in a hoarse voice, make her an
interpreter in your intimate love ballads. Strange Fruit marked a turning point in his
career and remained in his repertoire until the end of his life, in 1959. After recording
the song for the B side of the 78s Fine and Mellow , song about domestic violence,
Columbia and radio, CBS, refused to go out and spread the title.
The song came at Commodore, a small independent jazz label. Reportedly, when interpreted
Billie Holiday Strange Fruit , his audience remained ice and concluded by applause timid
at first and finally encouraging. The Society caf?, where Billie Holiday was happening,
one of the first clubs in New York held by African Americans, asked that the service be
stopped during the song and the singer does not make a return to give the public the time
to reflect on the meaning of words.
Strange Fruit marked his time. A critic of the New York Post described the song as
"Marseillaise operated South. "More humbly, Billie Holiday summed up his will: " This song
allowed to sort out the good people and idiots. " These same morons who drove a city in
Alabama where she wanted to sing Strange Fruit. For many, this song was one of the
beginnings of the protest song and remains until today the symbol of the African American
struggle.
Martial (AL Saint-Denis)
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