VINTAGE ARTICLE: Time Magazine's Review of Billie Holiday's Anti-Lynching Song, "Strange Fruit"
“STRANGE RECORD” (Time Magazine- June 12, 1939)
Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice. Dance-hall crowds have heard her with Count Basie’s Orchestra, radio audiences with Artie Shaw. She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing. She also likes to listen to records of her singing.
Last spring Billie Holiday went to the Manhattan studios of the Vocalion Company, which has her under exclusive contract, to make a batch of records. One number, which she had been singing at a new downtown hotspot called Café Society, she particularly wanted on wax. Called Strange Fruit, it had been written by a libertarian New York public school teacher named Lewis Allan and its lyric was a poetic description of a lynching’s terrible finale. Billie liked its dirgelike blues melody, was not so much interested in the song’s social content. But Vocalion was. The record was never made.
Last week Manhattan’s Commodore Music Shop—which not only makes and sells records but provides loafing room for most of the city’s hot musicians—gave Billie and others a chance to hear her sing Strange Fruit, and also provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a prime piece of musical propaganda. Unsqueamish, the Commodore had not balked at recording Teacher Allan’s grim and gripping lyrics, which begin:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees …
It is obvious that this article only reflects the venom of racism; it is far from an accurate record review. Instead of reviewing the record with truth, they critiqued Holiday’s character and physical appearance with intent to destroy Holiday’s spirit.
Check out this 1959 video of Billie delivering a haunting interpretation of her 1939 classic:
