Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society And An Early Cry For Civil Rights - David Margolick

Скачать книгу

very idea that Billie Holiday knew less than us because she reveled in what some would consider lowbrow entertainment, just as jazz was, in its time, considered lowbrow entertainment. That Holiday's preferred reading matter should be considered a reflection of her “true” self—have we not had enough of Holiday as the crude romantic primitive, a prisoner of bad lyrics, too fat or too slovenly or just too stupid to clear all those teary technicolor Modern Romance tomes off her dressing table? It's cruel, and often racist or sexist or both, to measure this definer and re-shaper of American jazz and popular singing by the mediocre standards we set for ourselves. But there we are. The Western keepers of the canon—our models of intelligence—still know so little about what makes up a Billie Holiday, let alone what makes her an authentic American female genius, a Titan in her output, that the question of her native intelligence is picked at like a scab by her detractors because she irritates them and their collective mind. Holiday makes no sense. She did not compromise her work. And she helped to create a world, a world where her voice would be at home, which is to say the world that David Margolick evokes in his seminal text about the end of NewYork's literal and figurative café society.

      Café Society: The true home of the birth of cool, twenty years before Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker donned their berets and wind instruments. It was a place that contributed greatly to the idea and reality of a New York that was, and is no longer: a city—the romantic view—that did not demand so much compromise of its artists, a city that encouraged its inhabitants to search out the substance that could be found in the stylish affect of its artists, singing and playing, some of them, in the bars and clubs of Greenwich Village, home of Holiday's voice at Café Society during a certain period in a city that is no longer.

      Billie Holiday's style: It has a kind of dopey optimism, doesn't it, a kind of twisted Puritanism, the way most Negro sounds—spoken or sung or written—do, since Negroes are America, a mixture of all that we consider American: a little black, a little white, a little Native American. Her slow drawn-out sound was the sound of her time: People then took time to listen to a story, and she could tell one. I'm not sure, but I think that the first time I heard Billie Holiday's singing was the first time I realized that a singer could approximate all the bullshit and beauty that goes into a love affair. When Billie Holiday sang, she was simultaneously the embodiment of the egotism of a love affair (“Look at me! Look at me!”) and a cool commentator on love's folly. And that is remarkable.

      Remarkable, too, is the preservation of her myth, which Billie Holiday more than contributed to, and which David Margolick describes in his (at times) humorous and concise study. Certain questions Margolick puts to rest forever. Billie Holiday did not write “Strange Fruit,” as she claimed in her unreliable but immensely readable memoir, Lady Sings the Blues. But she made it her own. She had so few words she could call her own, you see. And since the song became her, and she became the song, who, technically, could be called the truer auteurof “Strange Fruit”? We remember her singing the song, and we don't remember the writer, Mr. Meeropol. What does that say about the way popularity eclipses the more private environs inhabited by the writer? Would “Strange Fruit” matter to us if Billie Holiday had not sung it at a particular time, in New York, and placed all those black bodies in our minds as a way of conveying something about herself, undoubtedly, this most impersonal of biographical artists? David Margolick is interested in such philosophical questioning, and so am I.

      Billie Holiday helped write the words to a number of remarkable songs, such as “Fine and Mellow” and “God Bless the Child.” If you listen to them in a certain way, you'll see that they are the condensed, distinctly Negro and distinctly American version of those True Romance comics she read and re-read, looking for truth in something as deep and shallow as American pop, American language.

      HILTON ALS

      NEWYORK, NOVEMBER 1999

      Strange Fruit

      Billie Holiday, Cafe Society,

      and an Early Cry for Civil Rights

      Southern Trees

      Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

      Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

      Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

      Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

      Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

      The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

      Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

      And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

      Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

      For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

      For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

      Here is a strange and bitter crop.

      AS BILLIE HOLIDAY later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at a New York nightclub called Café Society changed the history of American music that night in early 1939, the night that she first sang “Strange Fruit.”

      Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there, she was afraid to sing this new song, a song that tackled racial hatred head-on at a time when protest music was all but unknown, and regretted it—at least momentarily—when she first did. “There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished,” she later wrote in her autobiography. “Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.”

      The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as “Strange Fruit” became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform. For throughout Holiday's short life—she died in 1959 at the age of forty-four—the song existed in a kind of artistic quarantine: it could travel, but only to selected places. And in the forty years since her death, audiences have continued to applaud, respect, and be moved by this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the repertoire of American music, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and other listeners, both black and white, in America and throughout the world.

      An “historic document,” the famed songwriter E. Y. “Yip” Harburg called “Strange Fruit.” The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called “Strange Fruit” “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” To Bobby Short, the song was “very, very pivotal,” a way of moving the tragedy of lynching out of the black press and into the white consciousness. “When you think of the South and Jim Crow, you naturally think of the song, not of ‘We Shall Overcome,’” said Studs Terkel. Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary record producer, called “Strange Fruit,” which Holiday first sang sixteen years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, “a declaration of war... the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

      Holiday performed the song countless times in her last two decades. So much about her—her appearance, her physical well-being, her personal fortunes, the sound of her voice—seemed to fluctuate wildly during that time. Though heroin and alcohol were killing her, she also experienced great moments of triumph. But whether they heard her on record or on the radio (where it was played occasionally and hesitantly by black or “nigger-loving” white disc jockeys) or got to see it performed by Holiday or someone else, those who've encountered “Strange Fruit” have found the song engraved into their consciousness. Though they may not have heard it for years, many can still recite the lyrics by heart. “Outside of knowing all of the words to ‘America the Beautiful,’” a retired English professor and writer named Feenie Ziner remembered, “I don't know that there has been another song, or another singer, I could recall so completely—what is it?—sixty years later.” Why? Because, as Ziner put it, “Billie Holiday tore your heart out” when she sang it. Fans of the song do not say they like it—how can one actually like a song on such a subject?—but they acknowledge its lasting impact. They credit it with helping awaken them to the realities of racial prejudice and the redemptive, ameliorative

Скачать книгу