BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JULY 31, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Saga of a Song STRANGE FRUIT Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights By David Margolick Running Press -- 160pp -- $16.95 Some months ago, at a conference in Key West, Fla., I had a pleasant talk with a young professor about matters both economic and literary. Only later did I find out that his last name was Meeropol, and that he was one of the sons of executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And from reading Strange Fruit, David Margolick's engrossing history of the anti-lynching song identified with singer Billie Holiday, I learned that Meeropol's adoptive father, Abel, penned the song Strange Fruit. From Meeropol's pen to Holiday's lips to the world: That is the territory staked out in this paean to a powerful American political song. This spring, when Bruce Springsteen began singing American Skin (41 Shots), which deals with the police killing of an unarmed immigrant in New York, local cops were furious. Think of that response magnified by a hundred, and you'll have some idea of the impact of the song. To come into a 1939 nightclub and hear an entertainer sing ''Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees'' was, depending on one's politics, profoundly moving or weirdly inscrutable. Margolick quotes from a 1939 review in Time: ''Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice.... She does not care enough to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.... Billie liked [Strange Fruit's] dirge-like blues melody, [but] was not so much interested in the song's social content.'' The idea that she would be indifferent, Margolick shows through interviews with people who knew Holiday, was ''quite inconceivable.'' But it was what many whites chose to believe. At first, the author notes, the song was not even much admired by blacks, who wanted entertainment, not grim reminders. And Paul Robeson, for one, felt it smacked of black victimization. But the song would eventually find its place in history. The substance of the book's subtitle, Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, is explored through oral histories, interviews, and writings of people who worked with and knew Holiday. They included Milt Gabler of Commodore Records, who first recorded Strange Fruit; singer Lena Horne; Chicago's Homes Daylie, a radio deejay who fought to get the song airplay; and, of course, Barney Josephson. He was proprietor of New York's Cafe Society, the racially mixed nightclub that was one of Holiday's prime venues. The song's power has never waned. When Abel Meeropol tried to have it translated into the French in 1955, the publisher said it was impossible because of ''all the troubles the French are currently having with the colored people in Indochina and North Africa.'' And some contemporary singers, such as Eartha Kitt and Cassandra Wilson, have tried to perform the song in concert but found it too intense. That's a tribute to the power of art and Holiday's legacy. Margolick's history is no less a tribute. By ROBERT MCNATT _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Saga of a Song PHOTO: Cover, ``Strange Fruit'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

Copyright 2000-2008, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Use   Privacy Notice