(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #234 - Listen: Strange fruit (fr, pt)

1939, fifteen years before the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan was at 
its peak in the southern United States. Lynchings, suffered by the Afro-American 
community, are commonplace since the principle of segregation "separate but equal". It is 
in this context that Billie Holiday sang for the first time in New York Strange Fruit. 
This strange fruit evokes the body of a Black who was hanged from a tree, South swaying in 
the wind, the twisted mouth, feeding the crows. This song is written and composed by Abel 
Meeropol, a schoolteacher from the Bronx, a member of the CPUSA (Communist Party of the 
United States of America). The latter remained horrified by seeing the photo of two men 
lynched and wrote Strange Fruit drawing poems The Ballad of the Hanged Villon and Le 
Verger King Louis Th?odore de Banville, later set to music by Brassens.

Discovered in 1933, after having been employed brothel, Billie Holiday string of 
successes, including What a Little Moonlight Can Do in 1935. She will be accompanied by 
Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Artie Shaw. It is in the orchestra of the latter, 
all-white, it will be refused entry to restaurants and hotels during a tour that will stop 
in 1938. Dragging its style and discreet doubled in a hoarse voice, make her an 
interpreter in your intimate love ballads. Strange Fruit marked a turning point in his 
career and remained in his repertoire until the end of his life, in 1959. After recording 
the song for the B side of the 78s Fine and Mellow , song about domestic violence, 
Columbia and radio, CBS, refused to go out and spread the title.

The song came at Commodore, a small independent jazz label. Reportedly, when interpreted 
Billie Holiday Strange Fruit , his audience remained ice and concluded by applause timid 
at first and finally encouraging. The Society caf?, where Billie Holiday was happening, 
one of the first clubs in New York held by African Americans, asked that the service be 
stopped during the song and the singer does not make a return to give the public the time 
to reflect on the meaning of words.

Strange Fruit marked his time. A critic of the New York Post described the song as 
"Marseillaise operated South. "More humbly, Billie Holiday summed up his will: " This song 
allowed to sort out the good people and idiots. " These same morons who drove a city in 
Alabama where she wanted to sing Strange Fruit. For many, this song was one of the 
beginnings of the protest song and remains until today the symbol of the African American 
struggle.

Martial (AL Saint-Denis)