Billie holiday
"Holiday's
voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as
rain.
David Ritz
The government has failed us; you can't deny that. Anytime
you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you're walking around here singing
We Shall Overcome, the government has failed us. This is part of what's wrong
with you — you do too much singing. Today, it's time to stop singing and start
swinging. You can't sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom.
Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn't help him become the heavyweight
champion of the world; swinging helped him achieve that title.
Malcom X[1]
"If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough
in the South, it now has its Marseillaise."
Samuel Grafton[2]
On the song Strange Fruit
Lady Sings the Blues is a brutally honest warts-and-all autobiography
of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer. Holiday died on July 17, 1959, at
the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem, New York City, due to complications
of chronic drug abuse. Holiday had an unbelievably difficult childhood. Born on
April 17, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 years old,
and her father, Clarence “Pop” Holiday, was just 15. Her birth name was Eleonora,
which she later changed to Billie.
Holiday grew up fast, surviving an abusive childhood; her
mother did loads of different jobs, including prostitution. She grew up in
Baltimore and Harlem brothels. It has been said that she had a limited vocal
range but went on to be a unique singer with an “unsettling emotional wallop”. While
it is tempting to see Holiday as a victim, that is not how she saw things. Her
memoir was written with help from William Dufty, and according to David Ritz,
"Holiday's voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process
went, is as real as rain. She is open about her sexual abuse, her forced
imprisonment, her heroin addiction, and in a minimal way, her struggles of
being African American before the development of the Civil Rights Movement.
Some facts in the book have been disputed.[3]
John Szwed argues in his 2015 study, Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and
the Myth, that most of the book is accurate; however, Holiday's co-writer,
William Dufty, was allegedly pressured to suppress material due to the threat
of legal action. Writing in the New Yorker Richard Brody said "In
particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are
missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with
Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s
sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of
Citizen Kane."[4]
Her untimely death at the age of just 44 ended the career of
one of the most important jazz vocalists of the 20th century. While the
re-release of her autobiography by Penguin in 2018 went some way in
reestablishing her importance. However, the release of the 2015 film by Lee
Daniels, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, was a significant
misrepresentation of Holiday. According to John Andrews, writing in the World
Socialist Website, the film “dishonoured” her work and was a “seriously
misguided effort”.
He writes, “The film was populated with historical and
entirely fictional characters, blended haphazardly with actual and fabricated
historical events, replete with sloppy mistakes and anachronisms too numerous
to catalogue. One prominent example from the film: methadone was not used to
treat heroin addiction until some years after Holiday died.”[5]
Naturally, Holiday’s autobiography suffers from a
substantial fixation on race; this is not surprising given how much racial
abuse she suffered, but it is largely divorced from the social struggles of
postwar America, as expressed in both the growing civil rights movement and
official, state-sponsored anti-communism. Given Holidays' limited political
understanding, she cannot place her life struggle within the broader aesthetic
developments of that tumultuous period, not only in jazz, but also in film,
literature, and art.
"Strange
Fruit"
One of those broader aesthetic developments is Holiday’s
relationship with the song Strange Fruit. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings
the Blues, Holiday suggests that she worked on the song together with Abel Meeropol.
Holiday’s economy with the truth has circulated for decades, with Holiday even
claiming that the song was written for her and that she had a hand in writing
it herself. Meeropol always denied this claim. David Margolick and Hilton Als,
in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, said that her account “may
set a record for most misinformation per column inch". Even stranger was
Holidays' response when challenged about the song in her ghost-written book; she
said, "I ain't never read that book."
“Strange Fruit” is not an easy song to listen to and
requires several listens to appreciate its complexity. Peter Daniels, in his article “Strange Fruit,
believed it was the original protest song. “It is simple, spare, but effective
poetry. At a time when political protest was not often expressed in musical
form, the song depicted lynching in all of its brutality. The three short
verses are all the more potent for their understated and ironic language. The
juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of
magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms more typically associated
with the Southern climate with the “strange fruit” produced by racial
oppression—this imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in
America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a
more didactic or agitational message.[6]
Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party from
1932 to 1947. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, he
and his wife adopted their two sons; both children took the surname
"Meeropol" In 1937, he published “Bitter Fruit” in the New York
teachers’ union journal. The song was Meeropol’s response to seeing a photo of
a lynching. Like many of his generation, he was radicalised by the Russian
Revolution, the threat of fascism, and the Great Depression.
Holiday cannot be faulted for not undertaking a more
detailed examination of the issues surrounding “Strange Fruit”. Holiday does
not even begin to understand why the poorest section of the white working class
would turn their desperation into racist atrocities. The book does not probe
the class roots of racism as a means of dividing the working class. Any limited
gains made by the black working class were made possible by the militancy of
millions of black workers in the industrial struggles of the 1930s.
Also absent from the book is Holiday’s comprehension of the
role played by the American Communist Party and its Popular Front politics. The
holiday does not mention that socialists and communists were on the front line of
the struggle for racial equality.
As Daniels points out, “There was a tremendous contradiction
inherent in the work of artists, writers and intellectuals who the CP
influenced in the 1930s and ’40s. On the one hand, as part of a leftward-moving
working class and intelligentsia, they were attracted by the promise of the
Russian Revolution. They articulated, to one degree or another, anger at
capitalist exploitation and oppression, as well as hopes for social equality
and socialism. Most of this layer, however, identified the Russian Revolution
with the regime in the Kremlin. Only a minority agreed with the socialist
opposition to Stalinism articulated by Leon Trotsky. Meeropol was one of the
majority on the left who aligned with the CP during this period. The creative
work of these individuals could not help but be influenced by their blind
obedience to the Soviet bureaucracy and its reactionary political stance.[7]
Since the release of the 2018 Penguin version of Lady Sings
the Blues, interest in Holiday seems to have waned a little. It is hoped that,
with the current protests against the fascist Trump administration, interest in
the holiday and the song "Strange Fruit" will begin to take hold.
There has already been a limited revival of interest in the music, as evidenced
by the many more recent recordings. Her autobiography has significant
weaknesses, but it is worth reading, and Holiday, after all, was one of a kind.
[1]
library.gayhomeland.org/0008/EN/malcolmx_speech_1964.htm
[2]
www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/16/protest-songs-billie-holiday-strange-fruit
[3]
www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Billie-Holiday-s-bio-Lady-Sings-the-Blues-may-2469428.php
[4]
The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life-www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life
[5]Great
jazz vocalist dishonoured by The United States vs. Billie Holiday—Can’t we do
better? www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/06/unit-j06.html
[6]
"Strange Fruit": the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html
[7]
"Strange Fruit": the story of a
song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html
