Schoolteacher’s poetic outrage bears fruit in music world

UNDATED : Early undated copy photo of jazz singer Billy Holliday. Holliday/Singer

The baying mob was thousands strong. They were angry and seeking biblical revenge for a local factory worker who had been murdered the previous night. The man’s girlfriend had been raped.

“Turn them damn niggers over to us,” men in the crowd yelled. Soon they overwhelmed the local police, smashing their way with sledgehammers into the cells to grab the three accused teen­agers. Gang leaders marched them to nearby trees where they bashed and hanged Thomas Shipp, 18, and Abram Smith, 19.

Still conscious, Abram reached to undo the noose; they lowered him to the ground, broke his arms and hoisted him back up. In 1930, Marion, Indiana, like many places in the US in the early decades of the 20th century, was a dangerous place to be if you were black.

When they were placing the noose around the neck of the third boy, James Cameron, a woman’s voice rose above the rowdy mob — “the voice of an angel”, Cameron would later recall — insisting the teenager was innocent.

The survivor, then 16, was later charged with being an accessory to murder and jailed for four years. He spent the rest of his life campaigning for civil rights, forming several chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, and died in 2006, aged 92, having been pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1991.

None of the 15,000 who looked on as Shipp and Smith were murdered was ever convicted.

Local photographer Lawrence Beitler captured the scene and sold thousands of prints. That also was common; such pictures were often turned into postcards.

It would have been just another lynching, of perhaps 5000 during that era, but for Cameron surviving and Beitler’s picture being spotted by a teacher from The Bronx whose family had recently suffered its own tragedy.

He would write a famous song of rage and resignation about the scene, but almost nothing about Strange Fruit is as it seems.

The confronting anthem about southerners murdering blacks by hanging them in trees was written by a white man, a Jewish New Yorker unfamiliar with the south.

He was also a communist whose unpredictable life brought together strands from the two great American dramas of the 20th century — the Cold War and the fight for civil rights. According to the copyright lodged for Strange Fruit in 1939, its words and lyrics are by Lewis Allan.

But there was no Lewis Allan. That was a pseudonym for an east coast English teacher who dabbled in poetry and song writing.

There almost was a Lewis and there almost was an Allan: those were names chosen for boys fated to be the stillborn only children of Anne and Abel Meeropol.

Abel Meeropol memorialised his lost sons as the authors of a poem he wrote in 1937 and that evolved into one of the best known songs of the 20th century. His family’s losses were a fresh burden when Meeropol spotted the appalling image of Shipp and Smith hanging dead above a celebrating crowd — unforgettable words expressing his horror came quickly:

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 in the

poplar trees.

It was first published as a poem under the title Bitter Fruit in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union newspaper.

It is perhaps not all Meeropol’s work. As an English teacher, he might have studied European literature and encountered a poem by Frenchman Theodore de Banville, a version of which appeared in a London play in 1871.

Describing the scenes of a mass execution by French king Louis XI, de Banville — a friend of Victor Hugo — wrote, in words that were adapted and translated to English:

There, where wakens the

flowering year,

The forest bears on its boughs

a score,

Of dead folk hanged by the neck,

Gold of the dawn on them

doth pour,

Strangest fruits ever forest bore.

Meeropol sometimes asked friends to arrange music for his words, but he turned Bitter Fruit into a song himself, knowing he had written something special.

Everyone who heard what was to become Strange Fruit felt the same, including the troubled jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Her father Clarence, a guitarist, had died in 1937, never having recovered from inhaling mustard gas during World War I. Falling ill in Texas on tour, he was refused hospital treatment on account of his colour, developed pneumonia and died.

Meeropol met Holiday at an interracial nightclub — Cafe Society — run by a Jewish friend in Greenwich Village in April 1939. He had written down a copy of the words and he sang it to her, accompanying himself on piano. Holiday liked it, but also understood the risks it posed to her that we today might struggle to imagine. She had been signed to Columbia Records by the legendary John Hammond who, in a long career, would also sign Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

Even Hammond, who famously, and against the trends of the day, fearlessly promoted black artists and multiracial bands, and was a shareholder in Cafe Society, reportedly baulked at Strange Fruit. Columbia gave permission for Holiday to do a single session with another label — Commodore — so that she could record and release Strange Fruit without upsetting Columbia’s southern distributors. It was soon the centrepiece of Holiday’s nightly performances jolting patrons out of their complacency. The song, as it was originally recorded, starts with a mournful, muted trumpet, before a piano picks up the slim melody that stays almost hidden among the provocative words of pain and injustice.

Holiday defies the time signature to deliver what had been a poem anyway, almost speaking the words as they creep towards a potent, unapologetic climax. It isn’t jazz. It isn’t blues. It is a phenomenon.

It reached No 16 on the charts on July 22, 1939, despite minimal airplay. And that is as high as any artist — and they include Diana Ross, UB40, Lou Rawls, Sting, Tori Amos, Jeff Buckley, Kanye West and Annie Lennox — has taken the song. But it nevertheless quickly became a standard and its influence is unchallengeable.

Hammond might soon have thought he was right to avoid the controversial song. Time Magazine reviewed it, publishing the first verse, and denounced Strange Fruit as “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the NAACP, by a singer “who does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet”.

Almost 70 years later, on New Year’s Eve 1999, Time chose it as the song of the century.

Strange Fruit has been festooned with honours: In 2002, the American Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution positioned it at No 1 in its list of “100 Songs of the South”, it made New Statesman’s list of “Top 20 Political Songs”, Mojo magazine rated it fifth in its 2004 list of “100 Greatest Protest Songs”, it was included in Q Magazine’s “10 Songs that Actually Changed the World”, it is one of the Recording Industry of America’s Songs of the Century, and in 1978 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Meeropol wasn’t finished with history: at a Christmas party in 1953 he was introduced to a couple of orphaned boys to whom he and wife Anne took a shine. Soon after, the Meeropols adopted them.

They were Michael and Robert, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, communists who were found guilty of passing atomic bomb secrets to Moscow and who, in 1953, were executed side by side in electric chairs at Sing Sing prison.

Read Alan Howe’s history of the 20th century’s greatest songs in The Australian’s Summer Living pages over the next two weeks.