Latest news with #StrangeFruit
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Decades after Billie Holiday's death, ‘Strange Fruit' is still a searing testament to injustice – and of faithful solidarity with suffering
On July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed. Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential musical artists of all time. Time magazine named her 1939 recording of 'Strange Fruit' the song of the 20th century. 'In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South,' Time wrote in 1999, 'history's greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.' Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who used the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote 'Strange Fruit' after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and haunted him: 'Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.' Holiday's rendition of Meeropol's song remains as stunning – and searing – today as when it was first recorded. 'It hits, hard,' syndicated columnist Samuel Grafton wrote soon after the record's release in 1939. 'It is as if a game of let's pretend had ended.' I'm a scholar of American religion, literature, and the arts, and I'm interested in the ways that even powerfully secular works draw energy from religious narratives of justice, injustice, truth-telling and redemption. I find 'Strange Fruit' a resonant example. Like so many composers whose songs Holiday recorded – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern – Meeropol came from a family of Jewish immigrants to America who fled antisemitic violence in Europe. Two Great Migrations defined America in the early 1900s: rural South to industrial North, and Old World to New. Both were driven, in part, by the desire to leave racial terror behind. Together, these migrations enabled some of the most enduring musical collaborations of the 20th century. Thematically, the joint productions of Black and Jewish musical artists – Broadway productions of 'Show Boat' and 'Porgy and Bess,' Holiday's performances with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw – tended to sidestep the brute realities of prejudice, focusing instead on the luxury of ordinary happiness and unhappiness. 'Strange Fruit' was different. The song gazes unflinchingly on the 'strange fruit' of the title: hanged, burned and mangled flesh left to rot on a tree. Well into the 20th century, white vigilante mobs murdered thousands of Black Americans with impunity: lynching then leaving their bodies on display as a terrorist spectacle. Meeropol first jotted the song's words and music on the back of a cabaret program dated Nov. 13, 1938 – four days after Kristallnacht, the night of murderous anti-Jewish rampages throughout Nazi Germany that became a tipping point for the Holocaust. For Meeropol, a labor activist and a secular Jew, Black and Jewish Americans marched shoulder to shoulder in the cause of freedom from injustice. In another poem, he connected anti-Black violence with the persecutions of Jews: I am a Jew. How may I tell? The Negro lynched Reminds me well I am a Jew. As Meeropol linked anti-Black and anti-Jewish prejudice, many Black Christians also connected their suffering with that of the Hebrew slaves in the Bible – and with Jesus' own. According to theologian James Cone, 'Black ministers preached about Jesus' death more than any other theme because they saw in Jesus' suffering and persecution a parallel to their own encounter with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.' In the decade Holiday recorded 'Strange Fruit,' Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes all centered works around the figure of the crucified Black Christ. Most African American Christians belong to Protestant churches, but Holiday did not. As a child she was baptized Catholic at a convent reform school, Baltimore's House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, where she was twice sent by the courts. She remained ambivalently Catholic for the whole of her life. Protestant churches commonly display the 'empty' cross, showing the instrument of Jesus' execution, but not his body. The message of the empty cross is resurrection and new life. According to the Christian story, Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead to redeem humankind from sin. In Catholic settings, one is more likely to find the 'filled' cross: the body of Jesus with arms outstretched, hands and feet nailed to the wood. The crucifix emphasizes the agony of Jesus' death and his solidarity with all who suffer. The filled cross also communicates the message that the crucifixion of Christ – God in human form – is not a once-and-for-all event. 'When [Meeropol] showed me that poem,' Holiday said of 'Strange Fruit,' 'I dug it right off' because it 'seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.' Her father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, died at 39 while touring in Texas. She believed he'd been refused lifesaving care because of his race. Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' evokes the filled cross in its testament to lynching as ongoing reality. 'It still depresses me every time I sing it,' Holiday said in her autobiography. 'But I have to keep singing it … the things that killed him are still happening in the South.' Journalist Vernon Jarrett recalled seeing Holiday perform in 1947. She was 'singing this song as though this was for real, as though she had just witnessed a lynching,' Jarrett said of 'Strange Fruit.' 'There was a sense of resignation, as if 'these people are going to have power for a long time and I can't do a damn thing about it except put it in a song.'' Keeping company with brokenness, rather than transcending or overcoming it, also describes Holiday's way of relating to others in precarious circumstances. Her Harlem apartment, she said, was a 'combination YMCA, boardinghouse for broke musicians, soup kitchen for anyone with a hard-luck story, community center, and after-hours joint.' A 1943 papal encyclical described the church itself similarly, as a place of shared pain, solace and sustenance. Anyone without money 'could go there and eat,' poet and jazz vocalist Babs Gonzales recalled of Holiday's place. 'She fed everybody in New York for four years.' Holiday closed sets with 'Strange Fruit' from 1939 until the final months of her life. In making it her trademark song, she offered solidarity and faithful witness to racial violence and injustice, not the remedy for these. But her testament carried extraordinary power. Shortly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, a fellow Catholic with 'misgivings,' made a playlist for America. First on his list was 'Strange Fruit.' Asked whether he was optimistic about the future, Springsteen answered in the spirit of Holiday: witness, not triumph. 'I don't think anybody truly knows where we're going from here,' he told writer David Brooks. But everyone 'can see right now that the status quo is not okay. And that's progress.' This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University Read more: Brain scans of Philly jazz musicians reveal secrets to reaching creative flow Doc Watson at 100: The virtuoso guitarist brought Appalachian music to a worldwide audience and influenced generations of musicians Rock music has had sympathy for God as well as the devil – Kennedy Center honoree Amy Grant is just one big star who's walked the line between 'Christian' and 'secular' music Tracy Fessenden has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
The Citizen
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
New GBV series sheds light on SA femicide
Looking into Darkness, a powerful new true crime series hosted by forensic investigator David Klatzow, premieres on SABC 3 at 20:30 on July 9. Klatzow turns his gaze towards femicide, telling stories bound by one chilling fact – the victim in each case was a woman. Ahead of its national release, an intimate community screening was held at the KOL Cafe in Meadowlands, Soweto, on June 28. ALSO READ: Entities collaborate for GBV awareness campaign in Protea Glen The series focuses on GBVF, with stories told through the voices of survivors' families. Some victims featured, including the late Tshegofatso Pule, are from Meadowlands. Each hour-long episode delves into the brutal realities behind SA's high femicide rate – over 10 women are killed daily, according to the SAPS. The UN Women (2024) identifies Africa as having the highest femicide rate in the world, making this series timely and deeply relevant. Family, friends and residents of Meadowlands came together for the screening of the late Tshegofatso Pule, assassinated by the father of her child when pregnant. Co-producer Enver Samuels said the production team often worked on international true crime content but felt it crucial to bring this story home. 'GBV is prominent not just globally, but in our communities. We work and produce a lot of crime series that happen overseas, and as painful as it is, we wanted to raise awareness by telling these stories here,' he said. The series not only investigates the crimes but also explores their emotional aftermath. Dramatic re-enactments, survivor testimonies and probing analysis offer raw insight into the trauma endured by those left behind. Tumisang Katane, Pule's uncle, shared the family's continued struggle, 'Even after five years, the pain hasn't eased. ALSO READ: Entities unite to bring GBV awareness in Naledi 'We hope this story encourages others to leave when they see the first red flag; it could save their life,' he said. Botlhale Modisane, the spokesperson for the Tshegofatso Pule Foundation, noted the significance of the screening location. 'This is where Tshego used to spend time. The episode, titled Strange Fruit, will be emotional. It's detailed, with re-enactments that portray what really happened,' he said. 'A lot of research went into this, and we hope the community walks away with lessons that can protect others.' Looking into Darkness explores the heart of darkness but also calls for empathy, courage and change. Be moved, held and haunted by stories looking deep into the heart of darkness. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Impossible dream' of death row inmate and Catalan jazz artist collab
A US prisoner on death row and a Catalan jazz star who formed an unusual musical collaboration have released a second album together that rallies against capital punishment. Catalan musician Albert Marques and Keith LaMar, who performs over the phone from a maximum security prison in Ohio, debuted their new work "Live from Death Row" at a gathering in New York last Friday. On death row since 1995 after he was convicted of a crime he insists he did not commit, LaMar's execution is scheduled for January 13, 2027. The album, which coincides with LaMar's 56th birthday, chronicles the civil rights struggle of Black people like himself. It features compositions by Marques with lyrics by LaMar, alongside classics such as Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and "Alabama" by John Coltrane. LaMar said that music "saved his life" during solitary confinement, particularly jazz tracks like those on Coltrane's 1964 album "A Love Supreme." "Music is the vehicle through which I've been able to resurrect my bid for freedom," he told AFP. "I love it when a plan comes together, when the stars align to bring to fruition a dream that didn't seem possible. That's what this live album is -- an impossible dream." It follows 2022's "Freedom First," which turned into a clarion call for a fair retrial that could ultimately lead to LaMar's release. "This music is about trust and faith (and) about stepping out even when you can't see the stairs and believing that your foot will find something solid to stand on," LaMar told AFP by email. - 'This crazy thing' - Marques, who is convinced of LaMar's innocence, said "we have done this crazy thing at the highest possible level." After staging concerts worldwide in recent years and "showcasing that we have done everything we could, we need help" to take the fight "to another level," said Marques, a Brooklyn high school music teacher. "We may be tired, exhausted, but we cannot throw in the towel." In 1995, an all-white jury found LaMar guilty of the deaths of five out of nine inmates and one guard killed during one of the worst prison riots in US history. During the incident, which happened in 1993, LaMar was already serving a sentence for the murder of a former friend during a drug dispute in his native Cleveland. LaMar, as well as recent journalistic investigations, claimed that exculpatory evidence was hidden at trial and destroyed, and other prisoners were rewarded with sentence reductions for implicating him. Ohio's governor had postponed LaMar's execution, originally scheduled for November 2023, due to the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply the components needed for lethal injection. However, the situation could change following President Donald Trump's January 20 executive order directing the US attorney general to ensure states can access the necessary ingredients. Nineteen inmates have been executed so far this year, compared to 25 in all of 2024. af-gw/jgc
France 24
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
'Impossible dream' of death row inmate and Catalan jazz artist collab
Catalan musician Albert Marques and Keith LaMar, who performs over the phone from a maximum security prison in Ohio, debuted their new work "Live from Death Row" at a gathering in New York last Friday. On death row since 1995 after he was convicted of a crime he insists he did not commit, LaMar's execution is scheduled for January 13, 2027. The album, which coincides with LaMar's 56th birthday, chronicles the civil rights struggle of Black people like himself. It features compositions by Marques with lyrics by LaMar, alongside classics such as Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and "Alabama" by John Coltrane. LaMar said that music "saved his life" during solitary confinement, particularly jazz tracks like those on Coltrane's 1964 album "A Love Supreme." "Music is the vehicle through which I've been able to resurrect my bid for freedom," he told AFP. "I love it when a plan comes together, when the stars align to bring to fruition a dream that didn't seem possible. That's what this live album is -- an impossible dream." It follows 2022's "Freedom First," which turned into a clarion call for a fair retrial that could ultimately lead to LaMar's release. "This music is about trust and faith (and) about stepping out even when you can't see the stairs and believing that your foot will find something solid to stand on," LaMar told AFP by email. 'This crazy thing' Marques, who is convinced of LaMar's innocence, said "we have done this crazy thing at the highest possible level." After staging concerts worldwide in recent years and "showcasing that we have done everything we could, we need help" to take the fight "to another level," said Marques, a Brooklyn high school music teacher. "We may be tired, exhausted, but we cannot throw in the towel." In 1995, an all-white jury found LaMar guilty of the deaths of five out of nine inmates and one guard killed during one of the worst prison riots in US history. During the incident, which happened in 1993, LaMar was already serving a sentence for the murder of a former friend during a drug dispute in his native Cleveland. LaMar, as well as recent journalistic investigations, claimed that exculpatory evidence was hidden at trial and destroyed, and other prisoners were rewarded with sentence reductions for implicating him. Ohio's governor had postponed LaMar's execution, originally scheduled for November 2023, due to the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply the components needed for lethal injection. However, the situation could change following President Donald Trump's January 20 executive order directing the US attorney general to ensure states can access the necessary ingredients. Nineteen inmates have been executed so far this year, compared to 25 in all of 2024. © 2025 AFP
Irish Examiner
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: The New York neighbourhood that changed the music world
How does an artistic 'scene' come about? What factors need to coalesce? What turns a spark into a long-lasting flame? When it came to the legendary Greenwich Village music scene in 1960s New York, a lot seemed to hinge on a singular, magnetising place and event: the outdoor jams held every Sunday in summer in Washington Square Park. These happenings drew towards them, from far and wide, from the various crannies where they had been hiding, all those with a secret and unusual passion for folk music. The sessions formed what someone called 'the incubation ground for the revival of folk singing'. It was a case of come one, come all: Arlo Guthrie, who would have been around 10 years old, was dropped off by his mother Marjorie to wander around with his guitar until he found a group he could join in with. From here sprang friendships, encouragement, collaborations, and perhaps the most precious commodity of all: momentum. All would be tested — though ultimately strengthened — by run-ins with the police and the city authorities about timings, crowd size, and the proper filling out of permit applications. Indeed, the freedom to make music in the park would become the subject of a famously chaotic riot in 1961. David Browne thoroughly examines those early outdoor sessions as well all that happened indoors in countless coffee houses, music stores, apartments and sundry dives over the course of close to five decades — from 1957 to 2004 — with a heavy focus on the tumultuous '60s. As a result, Talkin' Greenwich Village is the kind of book you hope to walk away from with illuminating anecdotes and factoids to entertain and illuminate your friends. It doesn't disappoint. For instance, I hadn't known that Strange Fruit, which was debuted by Billie Holiday in a Greenwich Village club in 1939, was written by a Jewish teacher from the Bronx called Abel Meeropel. (A whole book could be written about the enormous Jewish contribution to the Village scene, whether in the form of artists, enthusiasts, or impresarios.) Later, we read about a duo called Kane and Carr, opening for Tom Ashley and the Irish Ramblers at Folk City in 1963. They had previously had a hit called Hey, Schoolgirl, using the moniker Tom and Jerry, but eventually found fame under their true names: Simon and Garfunkel. In a book like this, one also hopes to meet some memorable characters. They turn up in their droves. There is Israel Young, for example, a pre-med student who ended up ditching that career after he was introduced to square dancing by a friend at his college astronomy club. 'Izzy' went on to set up the Folklore Center, an eccentric Village institution selling books and sheet music. About square dancing, he once said: 'It would be like, you know, masturbation. After you do it, you say you'll never do it again, and then another'. David Browne, a senior writer at 'Rolling Stone' and the author of several music biographies. The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, meanwhile, make an entrance on page 42. And, again, I learn things I should have known but didn't; that Paddy and Tom both served in the RAF during the Second World War, for instance, or that music was originally intended as a means of raising money to pursue their first passion, acting. Hearing them sing became a rite of passage for American 'folkniks' who occupied the Village alongside the beatniks (and the 'stareniks' who came to gawp at the beatniks). Jazz, though, was still the dominant Village musical genre in the late '50s and remained a big part of the delights on offer. In the summer of 1965 alone, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others were all to be heard live somewhere in the area between, roughly speaking, Fourth Avenue and the Hudson (going east to west) and between Fourteenth Street and Houston (going north to south). Bob Dylan edges his way into the story at the beginning of chapter three and Judy Collins' reaction to hearing him for the first time is priceless: 'He was singing old Woody songs, and I thought, 'Badly chosen and badly sung'. I was so bored.' Tom Paxton said: 'We were very friendly, but we didn't get to know him. He was not to be known.' From the outset, some of Dylan's songs didn't quite fit the established, beloved paradigms, whether hillbilly laments, or noble protest songs, or something bluesy. Bob Dylan performs at The Bitter End folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961 in New York City. File picture: Sigmund Goode/MichaelIndeed, the early covers of Blowin' in the Wind seem to show other Village musicians trying to drag Dylan's classic back into more familiar shapes. And whereas experiments when they came — the transition to electric instruments, for instance — were usually the production of conscious deliberation under the influence of external pressures — 'The Beatles scuttled all of us,' said Sylvia Tyson — Dylan was perhaps always running off internal, invisible, idiosyncratic forces, entirely his own. It was a scene riven with contradictions. The folkies themselves were swarming over someone else's neighbourhood: in the case of Greenwich Village, Italian Americans. 'It was an Italian neighbourhood,' said Terri Thal. 'People lived there. And we came in, and we destroyed it, and they hated us.' By the mid-60s, when folk was taking its strong pop and rock turn, there were crowds, crime, drugs, knives, guns. No wonder the locals were upset. The people's music didn't always turn out good for, well, the people. Paradoxes multiplied. Rootless urban drifters singing roots music. Artists who couldn't hold down a job, sticking up for the working man. Sizeable egos singing about self-sacrifice and humility. Experimenters messing with tradition, decrying capitalism while chasing record contracts, singing of austerity, penury, and starvation and hard times, but with cash to blow on drugs and booze. These tensions largely remain between the lines of Talkin' Greenwich Village, with the author preferring to tell a fascinating story in a fairly celebratory fashion, rather than detour too far into analysis. By 1967, the original Village folk scene was running out of steam and talent with many of the best-known names heading for other parts of Manhattan — 'loft jazz' in The Bowery, anyone? — bigger venues, the West coast, or even Europe — as well as heading, musically speaking, for the more lucrative and fashionable fields of rock and pop. As a larger-than-life Village legend who stayed at his post right to the end — he died in 2002 — Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougall Street himself, acts as a kind of fulcrum for the whole story Browne is attempting to tell. Van Ronk's durability meant that, though not homosexual himself, he was around to get caught up in, and arrested during, the 1969 Stonewall Riots. On the story wends, from the likes of Loudon Wainwright III (Van Ronk tells him Plane Too was either the best song he'd ever heard or the worst) through to Suzanne Vega. By the end, the Village is more of a 'musical ghost town', its spirits fled to a thousand different places and the same number of different fates. David Browne is a genial storyteller who wears his immense knowledge lightly. If he were a folk singer, he'd be the type who performs in the service of the song, not himself, which helps to make Talkin' Greenwich Village a very fine read indeed.
